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. The marginal costs of sharing digital content is negligible. 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. Teachers also need a common space where they can access resources for their classroom teaching, and also for TPD. 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.

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