A Professional Learning Community Approach for Teacher Development and OER creation - A toolkit/Developing capabilities for OER creation

After teacher professional development, the area in which ICT can make a significant difference is in the creation, revision and sharing of digital curricular content. Digital content creation and sharing provides the PLC an important rationale for its existence. Digital content becomes an important output (local and contextual learning resources) of the PLC.

Creation, revision, sharing and publishing

Digital tools and methods facilitate the production / development of curricular resources, in different formats. Teachers exposed to a variety of such digital approaches, can become competent in developing curricular resources, for different contexts and purposes. A large number of digital tools are available to create digital resources, in text, image, animation, audio and video formats. Moving beyond the ‘text book’ to include additional formats of resources can create a rich learning environment, in which teachers have a wealth of materials to chose from, based on their needs and priorities.

Since digital resources can be easily replicated, the marginal costs of sharing digital content is negligible. Teachers also need a common space where they can access resources for their classroom teaching, and also for TPD. The PLCs can serve as the forums where teachers can share the digital content accessed or created (or accessedand modified) by them, with their colleagues.

Resources so shared in the PLCs can be vetted and curated and those meeting quality norms can be made available on a on-line space.

Licensing digital content as Open Educational Resources (OER)

The size of the public education system in most states could help to create a sufficient volume of interaction in the professional learning communities. The networking of teachers using digital technologies can make the large size of the system as a strength, as the large number of teachers participating in the network could be a benefit in terms of the volume of resources created and shared by them. Even if only a very small percentage of teachers from the public education system participate, in absolute numbers, it is likely to be large enough to provide a base for OER creation.It is necessary to license all these digital resources as ‘open educational resources’ (OER), since that would enable the resources to be freely re-used, revised and re-distributed. This also needs to be formalized through state curricular policy, by which all materials developed using public funding would be released as OER.

Program for OER creation, revision and publishing

The initial phase of the PLC program can focus on building digital literacy and capacities for integrating ICT for TPD and practice. Subsequently, a program of OER creation can be designed within the PLC program.

1. The steps for the OER program include
2. Establishing an academic review group
3. Designing the processes of OER creation, review, revision and publishing with the academic review group
4. Workshops for capacity building of select teachers in OER access and creation
5. Continuing OER creation by the OER teams post workshops, in virtual mode
6. Review of OER submitted, by the academic review group
7. Rework of the OER and final approval for publishing
8. Publishing of OER on the state OER Portal

Publishing of OER on the state OER Portal

Subsequently, interested and capable teachers can be identified and OER workshops can be organized with these teacher groups, again by subject.

In these OER workshops, teachers can be organized into teams and each team assigned (based on interest and or capacities) one or more topics from the state syllabus. Teachers can access existing resources for that topic, create resources using different digital tools, revise available and relevant OER to make new resources. The teams can also do an internal review of the resources and the plenary of teachers can review the work done by different teams during the workshop.

The processes of resource creation does not have to stop with the workshops. The department could have a program of having teachers create resources, in a collaborative manner, over virtual networks and submit the same to resource review teams.

Creation of OER in local languages

Collaborative OER creation could provide supplementing and complementing resources that are contextual, to teachers.  A second aspect is that of language. Most of the OER developed and available are in the English language, and relatively much lesser in the ‘home’ languages spoke by the learners. For instance the Kannada Wikipedia (Kannada is the official language in the state of Karnataka, and spoken by vast majority of its people) has around 16,000 pages in contrast to the nearly 5 million pages in English. One of the focus areas of the 'participatory resource creation' of teachers in the sub-project 5 of ROER4D research program was the creation of resources in the local language. The study suggested that teachers have been able to create a large volume of resources in Kannada, including by translating and trans-creating materials available in English.

This model can thus enable the creation of contextual OERs in many more Indic languages. What makes this model even more potentially useful for India, is that in each state, the dominant language is different. Most of the 30 state governments in India have their own (distinct) state languages. As per the 2001 census of India, 13 languages are spoken by more than ten million native speakers and 21 languages by more than a million.

State OER portal

The resources created by teachers and shared on the PLCs can be reviewed by expert groups, set-up by subject. The resources that are seen as valuable should be made available to all teachers on an on-line space. The on-line space can be designed using a FOSS Content Management System such as MediaWiki.

For a country like India, with a federal structure, the national level repository NROER should be seen more as a role model (like NCERT text books) and states should set up their own OER portals.

State portals can encourage greater participation of teachers in OER creation, revision and sharing. Over time SCERT should encourage DIETs / district groups to make their own localised resources and publish on state portals, this can help bring to fruit, the 1995 MHRD guidelines for teacher education, which envisioned district level text books.

In theory one portal for India can meet all requirements, in practice, states should have their own spaces for autonomous resource creation, revision, curation and sharing. Hence the resources created by the program should be hosted by the state governments as OER for wide use by teachers, and for adapting, revising and re-distributing. Telangana has developed the state OER portal using the MediaWiki CMS. Andhra Pradesh also has its state OER portal.

Case - Telangana Repository of OER (TROER)

Toolkit for creating OER

For more information on how teachers can use these tools, please refer to the Teachers' toolkit for creating and re-purposing OER using FOSS