Report of capacity building workshop on Open Educational Resources(OERs) Held on 28/03/2017

 

With the increase in the access of the Internet, the availability of Educational Resources have also increase and with the emergence of open courseware movement, UNESCO coined the term Open Educational Resources in 2002 in a forum on Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in developing countries. OERs were originally conceived to support education and now it is seen as one of the alternative to textbooks in some countries. Realizing the importance of OERs in academics, Prof. Nageshwar Rao – VC initiated the idea of conducting a capacity building workshop on OERs for UOU faculty members to introduce the concept OERs.  Workshop coordinator - Dr. Jeetendra Pande introduced the concept of OER and presented the outline of the workshop to the particepents. Prof. Durgesh Pant welcomed all the experts and the participants of the workshop gave a introduced to the benefits of OERs. Prof. Nageshwar Rao spoke the importance of OER and highlighted the fact that how important are OERs for the development of SLM and supporting teaching material. He further stated that OERs are build on the concept of sharing and reuse, which is  made possible by the permissions applied by the creator of the resource. It also increases the chances of communication to the peers throughout the world and may provide an opportunity to the faculty members for international collaborations. The chief guest of the workshop, Prof. Uma Kanjilal- Professor, School of Library and Information Science, IGNOU spoke about various initiative of Government of India for creating educational resources. The guest of Honor Prof. P.K. Biswas - Director, Staff Training and Research Institute of Distance Education (STRIDE), IGNOU spoke about SWAYAM PRABHA - DTH project for educational excellence. Dr. Manas Ranjan from Commonwealth of Educational Commonwealth Educational Media Centre For Asia (CEMCA) spoke about 6 standard creative open licenses. In the last session, Dr. Mythili- Deputy Director, STRIDE, IGNOU gave a hands-on training on creating contents using OER in Moodle Learning Management System (LMS). The workshop was attended by 30 UOU faculty members. The workshop ended with the vote of thanks by Prof. R.C. Mishra- Registrar.