Workshop on Open Educational Resources for the Faculty Members of School of Open Learning, University of Delhi
New Delhi; 14/05/2013: The oldest distance learning institution in India, the School of Open Learning (SOL) at the University of Delhi is open to embrace the advantages of Open Educational Resources (OER) for its 350,000 distance learners. Teachers of the SOL were engaged over three days to understand and develop skills of using OER from 8-10 May 2013. Thirty teacher participants from diverse disciplines such as English, Hindi, Political Science, Sanskrit, Commerce, Urdu, Mathematics, Economics, History, Tamil and Urdu debated why OER and open license should be used for learning materials, and used the online platform WikiEducator to develop skills of creating Self-Learning Materials using OER. Realizing the potentials of OER for improving the quality of teaching-learning materials and also provide rich student experiences through additional resources, the workshop was organized by Dr. H.C. Pokhriyal, Executive Director, SOL, and supported by the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA). In the introductory remarks Dr. Pokhriyal emphasized that learning material is the most important element in distance education that can really help in improving the achievement of learners. “SOL has its own rich history and heritage about open learning, and by adopting OER and availability of free learning material will further add to the quality of distance education” he said.
Dr. Sanjaya Mishra, Director, CEMCA recalling the history and heritage of SOL said that “this pioneering centre of distance learning should always strive to lead” While demonstrating the use of tablet device for delivery of learning materials in multiple media formats, he stated that the emerging technologies provide us the scope for improving the overall learning experiences.
The workshop included hands-on training of creation of user page and account, basic text editing, designing wiki content using templates & working on SLM template on WikiEducator. Dr. Pankaj Khare and Dr. Ramesh Sharma guided the participants to use wiki for OER development. Discussions on open licensing and development of basic skills to find and share OER were the highlights of the workshop.
