SHARING PEDAGOGY

THROUGH OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Rekha Bhatia, Munshi Yadav, Aashish Bhardwaj
Department of Computer Science & Engineering/Information Technology,
Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, New Delhi.
(r.bhatia71@gmail.com,munshiyadav@gmail.com,aashish.bhardwaj@gmail.com)

Abstract :

The Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiatives, which aim to promote the
sharing of knowledge worldwide, have shown a rapid growth during recent
years & are supported by various foundations & institutions across the world.
OER initiatives are considered as a part of a larger trend towards Open-ness in
Higher Education, including well-established concepts such as Free & Open
Source Software (FOSS) & Open Access (OA). One of the main benefits of
OER initiatives is sharing of high quality learning materials. The objective of
this paper is to spread the awareness of OER initiatives among the masses and
stimulate its use. It provides an overview of the notion of Openness as well as
Open Educational Resources. Besides, this paper also focuses on various OER
initiatives currently being promoted throughout the world as well as in India.
The immediate prospects for continuation and expansion of these initiatives are
also highlighted.

Keywords : OER, FOSS, Open Access, NPTEL, MIT OCW

1. Introduction:
OER initiatives have been inspired not only by the notion that knowledge,
information and education are the keys of the modern society but also by the
growing success of open source software. A very large number of such
initiatives are currently underway around the globe. To understand this growing
trend, first of all, we must understand the term ‘open’. The primary aspect of
open-ness deals with free availability over the Internet with as few restrictions
as possible on the use of the resource.

The term Open Educational Resources was first coined in 2002 at a conference
hosted by UNESCO. By OER initiatives we understand:
 Open Learning Content – including Open Course Ware, Open Content
Modules, Learning Objects and Open Access Journals.
 Open Software Tools to support the development, use & reuse of Learning
Content.
 Intellectual Property Licenses to promote open publishing of materials. [1]

2. Why OER?
OER aims to provide high quality teaching & learning resources to the teachers
and learners everywhere for free. It carries the motive to share knowledge with
others worldwide, which is beneficial to scientific progress. By doing so, it will
also contribute towards advancement of human knowledge, creativity & social
welfare[2]. Some of the benefits of OER are to:
 Increase educational opportunities for those who cannot be in the
classroom.
 Provide Institutions with a logical collection place for sharing the learning
objects they produce.
 Provide access to high quality free learning materials.
 Increase the reputation of academic institutions as world wide academic
leaders.
 Leave an academic legacy that others can build upon.

Here a question arises that when faculty can make money by writing textbooks
then why they would give away their intellectual property for free. The reason
behind this is that the vast majority of faculty do not make significant amount
of money from writing textbooks and moreover the faculty do not write
textbooks for making money only, but also to make an impact. And OER
initiative make their work accessible to more people, thus increasing their
potential impact. So it is a win-win situation for both writers & readers.

3. Various OER initiatives being promoted throughout the world:

OER initiatives are still in their infancy and it is not possible to give an
accurate estimation of the number of on-going OER projects. All we can say is
that the number of such initiatives are growing at a faster pace.These initiatives
are supported by a number of open content initiatives including projects that
offer Open Courseware. Some of the prominent initiatives are briefly described
below :

a) MIT Open Course Ware:

This is a free & open educational resource for educators, students and self-
learners around the world. This site contains a lot of free, high quality
teaching materials for a variety of subjects.

b) The Rice University’s Connexions:

This a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly materials and a powerful
set of free tools to help authors collaboratively developing, freely sharing &
rapidly publishing scholarly contents on the web. It contains educational
materials for children, for college students and also for professionals. It is
different from various other such initiatives because it has contents from all
over the world in a growing variety of languages, not just materials from
one specific school or university. Secondly, everyone is free to join here &
take on a leadership role. The cost to develop connexions is being paid by
generous individuals, institutions & foundations.

c) The Sofia Project:

This project is an open content initiative launched by Foothill-De Anza
Community College California. It has its focus on the college level
education. The ultimate vision of this initiative is to support and advance
education by making high quality content freely available on the web for
learners & faculty across the nation and the world. This initiative
encourages the publication and free exchange of college level course
materials on the World Wide Web. This project is getting funding support
from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
 d) Wikipedia:
This is a great example of an OER as it is freely available & everyone is
welcome to contribute. Anyone who has an Internet connection can edit,
correct or improve information throughout the encyclopedia. It has been
created in 2001 and it has now rapidly grown into the largest reference web
site on the Internet. As people from all around the world write its contents
collaboratively, so assessing its reliability requires examining its ability to
detect and rapidly remove false or misleading information.

4. Various OER initiatives being promoted throughout India:

India is making a noticeable progress in the field of OER. There is a large
opportunity for OER in the country and a few online research repositories are
in various stages of growth and development. Some of the major such
initiatives are :

a) National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning

(NPTEL):
The main objective NPTEL is to promote engineering education to the
masses and to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country
by developing curriculum based video & web courses. This programme
gives free access of world-class engineering education to common man of
India. All the seven IITs, IISc-Bangalore & other premier institutions are
involved in this project.

Currently samples from approximately 70 courses offered by faculty in

various departments are provided freely on the web to students at all levels
including B.Tech., M.Tech., M.S., M.Sc. and Ph.D. Approximately, 140
courses are in various stages of preparation and distribution through the
Internet. The IIT-IIS faculty is designing the courses only after detailed
consultations with engineering colleges & technical universities and will
cover a common syllabus. According to Chairman of NPTEL Dr.
M.S.Ananth, this programme is being seen as a social responsibility and the
purpose of this programme is to device a strategy to tackle the great
disparity that exists in educational standards in Engineering Colleges across
the country today. Every year approximately 4 Lacs engineering graduates
pass out from various engineering colleges of India and only about 60
thousands of them pursue postgraduate education. This skewed ratio
between graduate and postgraduate engineering students leads to faculty
shortage in Engineering colleges, which ultimately leads to poor quality
education to students. According to Dr. Ananth, the NPTEL effort is an
absolute necessity to address this near-emergency situation in engineering
education of India. [3]

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of

India, funds this programme.

b) Open J-Gate:
This is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access
domain. This project was launched in 2006 and it is the contribution of
Informatics (India) Limited to promote OER initiatives. It provides
 seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate
is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 3000+ open access
journals with links to full text at publisher sites. One of the main objectives
of this initiative is to put the widely scattered information available freely
on Internet at a common place so as to provide easier access to the
researchers.

c) Digital Library of India:

The mission of this project is to create a portal for the digital library of India
that will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge.
According to Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam, “Digital Library is where the past
meets the present and creates the future…” Digital technology can make the
works of man permanently accessible to the billions of people all over the
world. Partners of this projects include various academic institutions,
religious & cultural institutions, Government & Research Agencies of our
country, Carnegie Mellon University,USA and many academic institutions
of China. This library has books from Rashtrapati Bhavan, Indian Institute
of Science, Salarjung Museum, Osmania University and various other
libraries. A language independent open access digital library can improve
the global society in ways beyond measurement. The principal benefit will
be to supplement the formal education system by making knowledge
available to anyone – who can read & has Internet access.

Funding for the Digital Library of India is coming from multiple sources.
The Office of Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India is
funding the project in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The Ministry
of Communication & Information Technology (MCIT) is funding the
project at various partner centers of Digital Library of India.

d) Vidya Nidhi:
It is India’s first ‘doctral’ portal, which offers a multilingual database of
research papers. It is an OER initiative based at the University of Mysore
that promotes doctoral thesis and provides higher visibility to Indian
research via an online digital library. It is the first such online initiative in
India which contains bibliographic descriptions and provides full text theses
on the web. Before this project, India was not having a central repository of
Ph.D. theses and Indian research used to face various problems e.g. lack of
visibility of Indian research to outside world and even to rest of India.
Besides, duplication, repetition even plagiarism was also being done in
some cases. The aim of Vidyanidhi was to do away with all these problems.
As more & more individuals, universities and institutions are becoming a
part of this project Vidya Nidhi is becoming closer to achieving its goal and
emerging as a national repository of Indian-e-theses. Vidya Nidhi is funded
by National Information System for Science & Technology (NISSAT),
Government of India and the Ford Foundation

5. Concluding Remarks:
Although there is not much awareness of OER initiatives in India at this
moment, but in future the country expects to see growing use & synergy
between open strategies. In order to promote and enhance these OER initiatives,
the need of the hour is to generate awareness among individuals, various
universities and other academic institutions. Mandatory deposits of research
papers in open institutional repositories can be a step towards enhancement &
expansion of these initiatives. Besides training opportunities among staff should
also be increased by holding workshops and providing education about benefits
of open courseware and other OERs. A key component in stimulating use of
OER is the understanding of the nature of demand for free and high quality
academic content. For this, user evaluation of the already posted content should
be taken into concentration also. Finally, to stimulate use of OER in the country
where a diversity of various cultures is found, some methods must be adopted
for the language translation and localization of OER.

References:
[1] Open Educational Resources: Opportunities & Challenges by Dr. Jan Hylen,
OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, Paris, France.
www.oecd.org/edu/ceri
[2] The Open Educational Resourses Movement: Current Status & Prospects by
Gary W. Matkin, University of California, Irvine
[3] The Telegraph, Calcutta. 6th July, 2005. Article – Succour on the Web,
Reporter – G.S.Mudur