SCERT Joins TISS for OER in Chhattisgarh (04.06.2018 – 09.06.2018)
SCERT, Raipur and TISS Mumbai conducted a 5-day Open Educational Resources (OER) Curation workshop at SCERT, Raipur, from 4 to 8 June 2018. Prof G Nagarjuna of HBCSE, Mumbai, was the key resource person for this event. The agenda of the workshop was to create an exclusive CGOER page for SCERT (www.nroer.gov.in/cg), Government of Chhattisgarh, on NCERT National Repository of Open Educational Resources (https://nroer.gov.in). Approximately 20 teachers from different schools across Raipur and Dhamtari and faculties faculty members from HBCSE and TISS, Mumbai were present during the workshop.
Participants were given orientation on how to determine which of the resources available online were open and could be used to address individual teaching and learning needs. There were sessions on how to search for open resources on the internet that could be used in the classroom. The workshop stressed the need to create a community of learners and educators who can foster an interactive learning culture. Peer feedback and comments are a necessary part of the learning process and need to be encouraged. Participants were oriented to nroer.gov.in and asked to gather open eduware that could be used by all. Sessions on the last day showed teachers how to author activities, lessons and assessment on the platform. Other participants were then invited to view and comment on the resources curated and created by everyone.
Group Photograph of Teachers and Resource Persons from Mumbai after the event. (Source: SCERT)
Key takeaways from the workshop were the 5R – Re-use, Revise, Re-mix, Re-distribute and Retain. Some new representations of content explored in the workshop were audio, image, video, open street maps, phet simulations and animations. Several OER websites were also shared as possible resource spaces for teachers, particularly for mathematics and science. Participants (science and maths teachers) were at first apprehensive about the outcomes of the workshop. There was also the worry that it would be difficult to find materials that directly related to textbook content. As the workshop progressed, however, and with increasing hands-on practice, teachers became less anxious and started taking an active role in sourcing and even creating new materials from existing or raw resources to prepare lesson plans.
On the last day of the workshop, SCERT faculty and the CLIx nodal officer for the state Dipankar Bhowmick announced that the CGOER portal would continue working on OER and the portal would be inaugurated by the state education minister on 30 June 2018. This workshop proved to be a strong collaboration between SCERT, TISS and HBCSE. Through this initiative, not only Chhattisgarh students and teachers but others in the Hindi-speaking states of Bihar, Rajasthan, MP and UP will seek benefits in the near future.
– Saurav Mohanty, Field Action Research Fellow, Centre for Education, Innovation & Action Research, TISS
