A Professional Learning Community Approach for Teacher Development and OER creation - A toolkit/Designing and developing curriculum and syllabus for school education

Moving from text books to multi-media books The PLC-OER model can support improvements in the current models of development of text books. Traditionally, text book preparation is a time consuming process and the and the final production of the books tends to be time and resource intensive. Consequently, text books are revised at infrequent intervals. Also the processes are usually managed by a small group of expert teachers and teacher educators. The PLC-OER model can support the greater participation of the teachers in the text book design and development processes. Some of the advantages include:

1. Text books can have digital representation, in which image, audio, video resources can be embedded into the text resources to create richer learning materials
2. The processes of refining the material can be continuous by allowing the editing of on-line 'beta' version of the books.
3. Translating the book into other languages can be more easily done on-line (this can enable the quicker creation of materials in the languages in which subjects are transacted in the state)
4. By allowing access to PLC teachers to refine/edit/improve (or make suggestions towards this process), the PLC-OER model can make the text book preparation much more participatory. Participation across space and time enabled by digital networks/forums can enable more teachers to contribute at their convenience and from their base locations. By licensing these materials as OER, the process can move from being point in time, centralized to being continuous, participatory.
5. Using a collaborative material development platform like MediaWiki can enable wider participation, continuous development and refinement/revision of materials. This can lead to a much greater availability of quality resources for diverse contexts, in local languages

Need for robust quality assurance processes to review and revise the contributions of teachers towards material development.