Open Educational Resources: An Aid to Faculty Development. Presented at the 4th International Conference Confluence 2013: The Next Generation Information Technology Summit. Plenary Session: “Open Educational Resources as a Catalyst for Faculty Development” 26-27 September, 2013. Amity University Uttar Pradesh, India.

1. Open Educational Resources:
An Aid to Faculty Development
Anup Kumar Das
CSSP, SSS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
http://anupkumardas.blogspot.in
http://slideshare.net/anupkd
Presented at the 4th International Conference Confluence
2013: The Next Generation Information Technology Summit.
26-27 September, 2013. Amity University Uttar Pradesh, India.
Plenary Session: “Open Educational Resources as a Catalyst for
Faculty Development”

3. International Open Access Policy Frameworks
 Global OER movement for more than a decade.
 MIT OpenCourseWare : MIT announced on April 4, 2001,
that it would share the core material from its entire
curriculum freely and openly on the web. On Sept. 30,
2002, MIT OCW published its first set of materials.
 UNESCO recognizes roles of open educational resources in
achieving global objectives of Education for All (EFA)
programme and United Nations’ Millennium Development
Goals (UN-MDGs).
 The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Plan
of Actions suggest integration of e-learning and ICT in
lifelong learning, distance education and formal education.

4.  UNESCO-COL Survey on Governments’ Open Educational
Resources (OER) Policies, presented in 2012 World OER
Congress. in June 2012, Paris.
 UNESCO-COL Guidelines for Open Educational Resources
(OER) in Higher Education (2011)
 COL-UNESCO A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources
(OER) (September 2011)
 UNESCO’s International Institute of Educational Planning
(IIEP) and UNESCO/COL Chairs in OER organized a number
of online discussion forums for awareness raising and
mapping of global OER initiatives
 WSIS OER Knowledge Community
 2012 Paris OER Declaration, World OER Congress in June
2012, Paris

5. 2012 Paris OER Declaration
The Declaration recommends UNESCO member States, within their
capacities and authority:
 Foster awareness and use of OER.
 Facilitate enabling environments for use of Information and
Communications Technologies (ICT).
 Reinforce the development of strategies and policies on OER.
 Promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks.
 Support capacity building for the sustainable development of quality
learning materials.
 Foster strategic alliances for OER.
 Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of
languages and cultural contexts.
 Encourage research on OER.
 Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER.
 Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with
public funds.

6. Global OER Communities and Aggregators
 Open Training Platform (OTP)
 Curriki
 MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for
Learning and Online Teaching
 OER Commons
 OpenCourseWare Consortium
 Community College Consortium for OER
 OPAL – Open Educational Quality Initiative
 Connexions

9. Indian Initiatives
 National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning
(NPTEL), MHRD, 2003 National Mission on Education through Information and
Communication Technologies (NME-ICT), MHRD, 2008 Economic Survey 2012–13, Chapter 13: Human Development,
p. 283-284.
 NME-ICT which aims at providing high speed broadband
connectivity to universities and colleges and development of econtent in various disciplines is under implementation. Nearly
404 universities have been provided 1gbps connectivity or have
been configured under the scheme and 19,851 colleges have
also been provided VPN (virtual private network) connectivity.
Over 250 courses have been completed and made available in
NPTEL Phase-I and another 996 courses in various disciplines in
engineering and science are being generated in Phase-II of
NPTEL by IIT Madras. The low cost access-cum-computing
device Aakash 2 was launched on 11 November 2012. Using the
A-View software developed under the NMEICT, several
programmes for teachers' empowerment have been conducted
for batches of 1,000 teachers at a time by IIT Mumbai..

10. NME-ICT integrates
•
•
•
National Knowledge Network
• Virtual classrooms
• Virtual libraries
• Virtual laboratories
EDUSAT–Countrywide Classroom Programme
• Virtual classrooms with VSAT connectivity
EDUSAT 24X7 broadcasting television channels
• Gyan Darshan
• UGC-CEC Vyas higher education channel

11. Important OER Initiatives
 NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning)
 e-PG Pathshala of Inflibnet Centre
 e-Gyankosh
 Project OSCAR (Open Source Courseware Animations Repository)
 e-Yantra: teaching robotics in engineering education
 Virtual Labs, of IITs
 VASAT – Virtual Academy for the Semi-Arid Tropics
 Vigyan Prasar Digital Library
 Techpedia.in
 National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
 National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER)
[http://nroer.in]
 NCERT Online Textbooks

14. Upcoming Project of OER for Faculty Development
 CEMCA-UNESCO Project “Development of Curriculum and
Self-directed Learning Tool for Open Access”
 Modules for Researchers
 Module 1: Scholarly Communications
 Module 2: Concepts of Openness and Open Access
 Module 3: Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
 Module 4: Research Evaluation Metrics
 Module 5: How to publish in Open Access
 Modules for Library and Information Professionals

15. Issues and Challenges
 Sustainability of OER initiatives
 We lost earlier produced e-learning modules supported by
DEITY , MCIT and some other ministries
 Lack of contents, video lectures or web-based structured
contents
 Quality assurance
 MOOC: Massive Open Online Courses – enrolment with
or without certification
 Creative Commons Licenses – current projects are now
opting for CC licenses for helping educators in sharing,
mixing, reusing, re-writing and greater utilization.

16. Thank you for your kind attention.