Due to the pandemic Open Educational Resources have gained increased attention for continuing educational practices. The rapid growth of using OERs provides new opportunities for students as well as at the same time challenges for teachers. This challenge is more amplified in those countries where not only teachers but also students are not tech-savvy. During the epidemic, education was going through different problems and unprecedented concerns related to teaching and learning. It has made us feel that our teachers require the knowledge and specific skills to maintain online teaching in such drastic situations so that they can contribute and participate in local as well as global educational space. Therefore, a need was felt that efforts should be made to train teachers who do not have much knowledge about the effective use, creation and revision of OERs in teaching. Fortunately, the wealth of open resources is already available, but it is crucial for school teachers to know how OERs can facilitate classroom instruction to meet the needs of their students. Teachers are the chief fabricators of educational resources, but many do not share these with others. Teachers can upload their resources at various platforms and their educational resources can pave the way to promote open education practices with the global teachers’ community. Therefore, it is a must for teachers to understand the OERs and the power of sharing resources to enhance learning outcomes. But adequate knowledge of creation and curation of OERs is also important.
With this purpose, NCERT and SCERT (Haryana) trained some teachers as master trainers to train others teachers from various districts of Haryana State in India. Different authoring tools were taught to them so that they can create resources and publish them as OERs. Various educational resources such as videos, presentations, mind-maps, podcasts and animations were created by teachers. And teachers were encouraged for knowledge creation by making them aware of the open availability of resources. Furthermore, creating open educational resources is not solely enough to encourage open education practices. Appropriate and effective use of these resources is also crucial. During the training, it was also taught how teachers can integrate these resources during teaching (either online teaching or blended learning). Along with this teachers’ digital competence was also studied before and after the training.
This paper reflects upon the effectiveness of teachers’ training programmes under professional development for creating OER with the aim to implement these OERs in the classroom. Further, it describes how teachers were trained to create, revise and reuse OERs in teaching. The paper concludes by outlining success of training for the implementing adequate OERs according to the local needs of the students and improved techno-pedagogical skills and digital competence of school teachers.
By attending this session, attendees will be able to:- Reflect on need and significance of open educational resources in developing countries particularly in India
- Reflect on ways for promoting open education practices in India
- Reflect on various authoring tools for creating educational resources
- Reflect on effectiveness of training programme for teachers’ professional development
- Outline the success of training for improving improved techno-pedagogical skills and digital competence.
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