Regional Consultation Workshop on Developing Quality Guidelines for Open Educational Resources -13-15 March 2013- MANNU, Hyderabad

Regional Consultation Workshop on Developing Quality Guidelines for Open Educational Resources-13-15 March 2013-at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Gachibowli, Hyderabad - 500 032

New Delhi/05/03/2013: The availability of Open Educational Resources (OER) has increased many folds in the past 10 years, resulting into worldwide recognition of the importance of OER and proclamation of OER Paris Declaration in 2012. When UNESCO convened the Forum on the Impact of OpenCourseWare on Higher Education in the Developing Countries in 2002, it defined OER “as the provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaption by a community of users for no-commercial purposes”. The vision of the Forum was sharing of knowledge worldwide to increase human intellectual capacity, and agreed to develop together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity. Such a vision led to development of over 250 OER initiatives around the world.

Over the years, the issue of quality OER has been raised several times, and different projects have looked into quality of OER from just material view point to overall educational practice view point. Notwithstanding the initiatives, teachers and users of OER do not have a set of criteria and guidelines to consider before using any OER in their own context. While it is argued that the quality indicators should be same for use of learning material in any context, the nature of OER and digital networked environment brings in new dimensions. Considering the complexity, the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) has been engaged in developing quality guidelines for OER. The objective of this activity is to assist users of OER to assess quality from a lens devised by them using the criteria in the guidelines. In order to develop the guidelines, CEMCA has facilitated an international online consultation, which will culminate into a three days regional consultation workshop at the Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.

Experts from the Asian region will discuss and debate the necessity, usefulness, and relevance of the draft criteria and guidelines for OER. The workshop will host a mix of keynote presentation, paper presentation and workshops on quality criteria for OER. Participants from the Commonwealth Asia, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Malaysia will participate in the event from 13-15 March 2013 in the historic city of Hyderabad.