User:Drksrk/Temp/Open Educational
Resources - A Panacea for Secondary
Education.doc
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OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES – A PANACEA FOR SECONDARY
EDUCATION IN INDIA
Dr. K.S.Ramakrishnan
Assistant Professor, School of Education
Tamil Nadu Open University, Chennai – India
Contact – drksrk@gmail.com
Abstract: The National Knowledge Commission Report 2008 targets Universalisation of
Secondary Education and 15 % GER at higher education and by 2015. It reiterates education and
knowledge resources should be accessible to a large number of people through various means in
a seamless way so that the gap between demand and supply should be narrowed down. Paucity
of funds is one of the major concerns of Indian secondary education. In such a situation, ICT
combined with other new methods is a good alternative for imparting knowledge in a short time
with less cost.
The emergence of Open Source Initiative (OSI) has created a new era in the field of ICT,
particularly in education. Open Source software, Web 2 and Web 3 tools, social networking,
Open Educational Resources, etc are some of the outcome of OSI. Open education educational
resources (OER) are learning materials and resources that are freely available in the WWW.
Anyone may use and under some licenses re-mix, improve and redistribute. All kinds of learning
contents, tools and implementation resources are available in OER. Learning contents include
full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
Software to support the creation, delivery, use, improvement, searching and collaboration of
open learning content and on-line learning communities come under tools. Implementation
resources include intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, designprinciples, and localization of content.
Wikipedia, MIT Open Courseware, blogs, WikiEducator, etc are some examples. In 2007, ‘The
Open High School of Utah’ an online high school has been established at Utah State University
in USA. It is committed itself to use OER exclusively throughout the entire curriculum and
rejects traditionally copyrighted materials. These educational resources play an important role in
implementing pedagogy in classroom. This paper discusses OERs, their pedagogical concerns,
and the possibilities of using them in Indian secondary education.
Key Words: Open Educational Resources, FLOSS, Wikipedia, National Knowledge Commission
State of Secondary Education in India
Secondary education serves as a bridge between elementary and higher education. The stage is
thus set for Universalization of Secondary Education (USE). The population of children in the
age group (14–18 years) is estimated at 107 million in 2001, 119.7 million in 2006, and 121.1
million in 2011, whereas, the enrolment in secondary and senior secondary education together is
around 37 million only. The enrolment in 1.02 lakh secondary and 0.50 lakh higher secondary
schools is 24.3 million and 12.7 million, respectively (2004–05). The GER for secondary
education (IX and X) is 51.65% and that for higher secondary 27.82%. The combined GER for
both the levels is only 39.91%. This means that the dropout rate at secondary level is as high as
62%. The number of years a person has spent in school is a dismal 4.4 years for India as
compared to global average of 7.4 and 4.6 for South Asia. The mean years of schooling children
are expected to complete is 10.3 years, whereas this is 15.9 years and 12.3 years for the OECD
nations and the world.
The success of SSA in achieving large scale enrolment of children in regular and alternate
schools has thrown open the challenge of expanding access to secondary education. Rapid
changes in technology and the demand for skills also make it necessary that young people
acquire more than eight years of elementary education to acquire the necessary skills to compete
successfully in the labour market.
The ‘India Vision 2020’ envisages the transformation of India into a knowledge superpower.
There are about 350 odd universities and 18,000 colleges providing higher education in the
country to about 12% of the relevant age group. National Knowledge Commission, India-2007
recommends setting up 1500 Universities and 50 National Universities to attain a Gross
Enrollment Ration of at least 15 %. It stresses that education and knowledge resources should be
accessible to a large number of people through various means in a seamless way so that the gap
between demand and supply is alleviated and some standardization of quality takes place across
all institutions.
It has been often found that students who do not perform well in conventional subject
examinations demonstrate high success levels in the use of Information Technology (IT) and ITenabled learning. IT could provide new directions in pedagogical practices and students’
achievement. The idea is not merely making children computer literate but also initiating webbased learning through modern software facilities. In such a In such a situation, Open
Educational Resources and Open Educational Practices play a vital role in the Indian Secondary
Education.
The Open Source Initiative
The Open Source Initiative is considered as the origin of Open Educational Resources. The
OERs provide the following:
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Learning content: Full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects,
collections, and journals.
Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning
content including searching and organization of content, content management systems,
learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning
communities.
Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of
materials, design-principles, and localization of content.
FLOSS Model
FLOSS the abbreviation for Free/Libre Open Educational Licenses was started in 2006. Their
motto is “FREE” and “OPEN”. It is the result of developments in open and distance learning
(ODL) and the emergence of collaborative peer-production communities. Since that there has
been a marked increase in the Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational
Licenses such as Creative Commons. FLOSS model shows how users can become active
resource creators and how those resources can be re-used and freely maintained. In OER the
focus is on the traditional way of resource creation and participant roles. But the fundamental
principle underlying both FLOSS and OER is the freedom to share knowledge - whether this
takes the form of making software code open for collaborative modification and improvement, or
allowing unrestricted access to learning materials.
FLOSS Communities
They are built by volunteers producing good quality software using a different development
approach backed by companies that generate their revenues by providing services related to the
software. In recent years they gain attention for their community production, support models and
their way of knowledge creation and learning. These communities possess many characteristics
that educational communities could benefit by adopting:
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Everyone can participate, no charges, no deadlines, lifelong participation
Up to date content. Everyone can add, edit and update the content
Materials are usually the product of many authors with many contributions from people
other than authors.
Frequent releases and updates where product features and community structures are the
result of a continuous re-negotiation / reflection process within a continuous development
cycle
Prior learning outcomes and processes are systematically available through mailing lists,
forums, commented code and further instructional materials.
A large support network, provided voluntarily by the community member in a
collaborative manner
Free Riders (lurker) welcome paradox – the more the better
New ICT solutions are adapted early by the community
Examples
There are many OER models in the recent past. Some of them are given below:
Wikipedia: It is an online encyclopedia that anyone could edit. It relies upon volunteers for
undertaking editing work. Its rapid growth is phenomenal. By containing more than 10 million
articles, now it is the largest encyclopedia in the world and an immense resource for students and
lecturers.
MIT Open Courseware: In 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched its
OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. It published all of its course materials online, open for others
to use, modify and share free of charge. The initiative reflects MIT's commitment to its teaching
and public service missions, and to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. As of
today, MIT has published 1,900 courses online, which are being accessed by more than one
million users every month.
Flickr: Flickr is a tool developed for sharing photographs which is enormously popular. It has a
Creative Commons option to photograph uploads. Today there are more than 66 million
photographs licensed with a Creative Commons licence. Although it is not a collection of
material designed explicitly to support teaching and learning, it is a treasure trove of openly
licensed photographs, which may be useful in a variety of educational settings.
WikiEducator: It was created as a means of creating, distributing and promoting OER and is
currently supported by the Commonwealth of Learning. For optimal compatibility with other
OER, WikiEducator uses the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license as opposed to
the GNU Free Documentation Licence of Wikipedia. It allows embedding video, using a service
called Kaltura, which allows anyone to contribute to a video in a wiki-like manner.
Present status
Many educational institutions around the world recognize the value of sharing curricula and
content, collaborating on their initial creation and further development, and doing so under the
umbrella of free and open access to information and knowledge. But very few universities from
developing countries have joined this emerging open education movement as active contributors.
This imbalance carries an assumption that knowledge flows from developed to developing
countries. So far, not enough attention has been paid to the special needs and requirements of
institutions in the developing countries.
Application of OER in Secondary Education
Recent OER developments are connected to the broader open education ecosystem. The learning
and teaching practices change in an education environment that is based around social
networking, peer-to-peer learning, and open content that can be shared and modified with few
restrictions. The OER movement has produced a significant amount of content, such as lesson
plans, teaching aids and software tools, etc. There is growing consensus that OERs offer benefits
to educational institutions in developing countries. The secondary school teachers can:
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Identify OERs and share them with other academics and students
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Integrate OERs into teaching and learning practices
Publish their own OERs
The skills necessary for the teachers
To be successful in creating, using and publishing the OERs, the academics should possess or
develop the following skills:
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Finding and using Open Educational Resources: It is with regard to searching and
finding OER, knowledge about local hosting and licensing issues when working with
content created by others.
Creating and sharing OER: This is with regard to the needs of the individual students,
practical steps for creating and sharing materials as OERs, technical formats to use, and
hosting/storing resources.
21st century skills: The use of well-established, traditional instructional practices may
not be effective for developing the new skills that are required. Self-direction, creativity,
critical thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, teamwork and effective communication
become vital. The ability to access and use dynamic knowledge becomes more important
than building up a large stock of static knowledge.
Creating, adapting, evaluating and sharing OER within communities of learners require
practices that embody these new competencies.
Student innovation: ICT have enabled students to develop new ways of collaborating
that surpass traditional education practices in terms of innovation. Students already use
technology to create social networks, share information and collaborate in ways that are
more sophisticated than many traditional e-learning approaches.
Technical standards for hosting and publishing
The present section below outline the technical standards that are more relevant to an
institutional OER project.
Content packaging and exchange formats: This is a relevant issue for projects that publish
whole courses but that want to enable others to download them to their local learning
management systems. The OpenCourseWare Consortium's Technology Working Group has
informally agreed on IMS Content Packaging (CP) as the standard for course materials. Specific
import/export filters must be created for packages from different providers. Some examples of
providers include the proprietary WebCT/Blackboard learning management system, the MIT
OpenCourseWare repository and the eduCommons courseware platform. SCORM is another
content packaging standard, but its complexity means that it has found relatively little support
among open source software projects or open courseware initiatives.
Metadata: Metadata is information that describes something, in this case a course or educational
resource. A number of metadata schemes exist for the description of educational content. There
is as yet no agreed standard taxonomy for OER, but there is some consensus on following the
Dublin Core specifications. As social tagging and bookmarking services become more prevalent,
and specialised search engines more developed, there may be less need for formal taxonomies in
the future. Others disagree and are working on defining metadata standards.
Resource Description Framework (RDF): The RDF defines a method of storing descriptive
information about a resource in a way that computers can understand. In context of OER, the
RDF is used to store metadata about a course, or to embed Creative Commons licensing
information in a resource. End users do not usually have to worry about dealing with the RDF.
Applications for creating and hosting content should have functions for adding metadata and
making it available automatically within HTML pages.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS)/Atom feeds: RSS feeds are used by many OER projects to
publish basic information about their courses. Atom is an alternative format that provides the
same functionality. Most applications that work with feeds can support both. RSS feeds are an
important source of input for aggregation and specialised search engines. Members of the
OpenCourseWare Consortium are encouraged to create RSS feeds with a minimal set of course
information. Some OER repository solutions (e.g. eduCommons) publish RSS feeds
automatically with a basic set of fields.
OER Toolkit
Most of the Toolkit is designed for academics who are interested in finding and using OER in the
courses they teach, or who wish to publish OER that they have developed. The sections have
been kept short and to the point. They aim to provide just enough information to get the reader
started. Each section ends with a list of references and suggestions for further reading. The
decision-makers and academics may up a more formal OER project. These projects may start
with just a few interested academics but, as they grow, institutional policies, funding and legal
constraints become more relevant. Some of the most innovative and successful open education
projects are driven or supported by students.
Establishing institutional OER projects
It covers some of the arguments that can be used to "make the case" for such a project, and
describes some of the strategic choices that have proven effective in existing projects.
Setting up your OER project: This moves from the strategic to the more practical level to list
the things you need to consider when setting up an institutional OER project.
Steps involved in an open source course: Sophisticated support systems enable recruitment and
education of new community members. The following steps are involved in an open source
course:
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
All learning is open and recorded. The creative process, all steps, discussions and
decisions are captured and stored in mailing list archives, wiki pages and other electronic
records. This makes it easier for newcomers to join the community and get up to speed.
The distinction between teachers as creators and students as consumers is blurred in
communities of practice, where everyone creates and consumes at the same time.

There is continuous and ongoing engagement with the subject matter, beyond the
duration of a course or educational programme.
Licensing
The Open Content License is an effort to create a legal tool for content that is similar to GNU
Public License (GPL) for software. It allows others to freely use and modify content to better suit
their needs. The authors of an OER grant anyone the freedom to use and share their materials
with others, modify, translate or improve them and, in turn, share these new versions with others.
Generally Open Educational Resources are made available in digital formats, to make it easier to
share and adapt them.
Benefits of Open Educational Resources
Cost: OER can reduce the cost of developing educational programmes. Academics can adapt
existing materials to their needs, reducing the investment required for the development of
original content. They also reduce the cost of searching and uncertainty over whether a particular
material may be used legally in a particular teaching and learning context.
Access: Lower costs increase access.
Time: OERs eliminate the weeks and months of time it can take to seek permission to use
existing digital materials. Both the developers and educators across the world use the resources
immediately without having to go through a permission seeking process.
Reward and recognition: The course developers and institutions creating and publishing these
resources are rewarded through increased status, recognition and visibility that can be used to
support performance measures and reputation. By having development of OER done via a
collaboration across multiple institutions, faculty develop a network of professional peers who
all collectively are working on a set of common resources over time.
Collaboration: Open collaborative models increase innovation and have the potential to advance
learning for students, and increase knowledge sharing and peer-support among academics. With
limited economic resources, we have more to gain by being an active member in a global
community of open educational resource sharing and development. Sharing and reusing can cut
the costs for content development, thereby making better use of available resources.
Issues associated with OERs
Quality: It is a primary concern for academia and the content developers. Open models, which
broaden participation to individuals other than recognized experts, are developing new
mechanisms to assure quality. Many people have the false assumption that free must equal poor
quality. Quality is a characteristic of an educational resource. Generally peer-reviewed
collections of OER are guaranteed to be of high quality. MERLOT is an example of a collection
that facilitates a peer-review process as an attempt to respond to this demand.
Sustainability: Sustainability models for OER projects are still in flux. Initial pilots relied on
donor funding, but recently governments and private investors have started to support OER related work. There is some hope that with open source software development volunteer
communities will become sustainable producers of OER. However, few of today's well-known
OER projects have the vibrant volunteer communities of contributors and users needed to make
them sustainable. In the secondary education context, it is possible to sustain OER initiative with
the help of central and state Governments, NCERT, NCTE, voluntary organizations, and
philanthropists. There are a number of possible sustainability models for open source software or
open education projects, which are worth summarising here:
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Endowment model - a project raises significant base funding, then uses the interest
earned on those funds to pay the operating costs of the project.
Membership model - interested organisations join a consortium, to which they
contribute seed money, or an annual subscription. In return, those organisations are
granted a set of privileges such as early access to the new products or services, or access
to an enhanced range of services.
Donations model – a project requests donations from its community of users. The funds
received are managed by a non-profit foundation, which may either use them for
operating expenses or establish an endowment. Eg. Wikipedia and MIT
OpenCourseWare.
Conversion model - users are initially given a product or service for free, in the hope
that they will be converted in time into a paying customer. Alternatively, users are given
a free basic product, but pay for advanced services; for example, installation and support
in the case of commercial Linux distributions.
Contributor-pay model - a content contributor covers the cost of maintaining their
contribution in a freely accessible repository.
Sponsorship model - various companies sponsor open education projects, often in
partnership with educational institutions, in return for the positive publicity that
supporting such a project can generate.
Institutional model - an institution chooses to finance an OER initiative through its
regular budget, often justifying the expenditure as contributing to fulfilling its mission.
Governmental model - government agencies fund OER projects directly to fulfill
objectives such as expanding access to education and learning opportunities for their
citizens. Many initiatives are funded in this way, as was Canada's SchoolNet project.
Partnerships and exchanges - both play an important role, or potential role, in the
development of OER networks, and thus in sustaining OER initiatives. Partnerships may
depend less on an exchange of funds as on an exchange of resources, where the output of
the exchange may be an OER.
Assessment and accreditation: In an education environment that breaks down barriers between
teachers and students, new ways of assessing and accrediting students are required. Peer
assessment, reputation-based credit and standardized tests open to anyone are just some of the
solutions that are being tried out.
Global perspective: OER enables the developing countries to take a more active and confident
role. Barriers to access are lower, enabling the participation of smaller and more specialized
institutions. To create such a shift in global perspective, change is needed both in developed and
developing countries where lack of capacity, infrastructure and technical tools and enabling
policy can hold back OER production and use.
Re-use: The ability to adapt OER to local needs is one of the key benefits of open licensing.
However reports indicate that there has been very low re-use of resources.
Area specific problems
There are region specific problems associated with OERs. Most of the OERs are created by
English speaking people in English language. But in countries such as India, there are many
regional languages, dialects, cultures, socio-economic conditions, levels of learning, etc. So, the
content must be modified according to the individual needs. In this aspect, we cannot use OERs
as such. To solve this problem, the following suggestions are put forward:
Need based Wikis: In this Wikis, communities are formed among the content developers and
experts from a particular area, subject, standard, language or dialect, and according to the local
needs, content is created. In this method, as the developers are well known about the needs of the
target audience, the materials can be of much use for the students.
Network of personal blogs: Courses can be taught entirely online using a central course wiki
and a network of personal blogs. Participants are either registered students or individual learners
who are interested in a particular course. Participants come from a homogeneous community.
The teacher provides a weekly set of open content readings and questions. Students post
responses on their personal blogs, using a common tag to differentiate course related posts from
other content. RSS-feed reader software can be used to gather all relevant posts, rather than
having to visit dozens of web sites to follow the class discussion. Discussions takes place within
blogs by posting all comments on one blog or between blogs by posting a response on one's own
blog, that would automatically alert the original blog. The sheer amount of posts created and the
fascinating, insightful conversations that become part of the course create a distinctly innovative
educational experience.
Conclusion: This paper has dealt elaborately about the OERs, the need for them in the Indian
Secondary Education, the methodology of using them, their benefits, and other problems
associated with OERs. The Secondary Education in India can really benefit by using OERs in a
proper way. Already in SSA, efforts are started by creating a Wiki and the results are yet to be
analysed. In future, the Secondary Education institutions also can adopt similar experiments and
models.
References
Atkins, D. E., Seely Brown, J. and Hammond, A. L. 2007. A Review of the Open Educational
Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. Report to the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Creative Commons. 2008. MP3.
Dewis, L. 2007. OER Stories: OpenLearn, The Open University. Flat World Knowledge. 2009.
Downes, S. 2007. Models for sustainable Open Educational Resources. Interdisciplinary
Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, Vol. 3, pp. 29-44, February 27, 2007.
HEFCE. 2008. Opening up resources for learning.
HEFCE News, 14 October 2008. Schmidt, J. P. 2007. OER Stories: Free Courseware Project,
UWC.
OECD. 2007. Paris, OECD Publishing. Chapter 6, Sustainability issues for Open Educational
Resources initiatives, pp. 87-98.
OER Stories: New Zealand OER Project. Wikipedia. 2009
Schuwer, R. 2007. OER Stories: OpenER.
Stacey, P. 2007. OER Stories: BCcampus. The White House Press Office. 2009.
University of the Western Cape. 2008. Rip Mix Learn Wiki. Wyles, R. 2007.
http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_stories:_OpenER
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/MP3
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/sites/all/files/FWK_SeriesA_Final.pdf
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2008/os.htm
http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_stories:_OpenER
http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_stories:_BCcampus
http://free.uwc.ac.za/ripmixlearn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_format
http://oerconsortium.org/2008/10/06/oer-bill-signed-in-ca/
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