Science teachers are creating open educational resources on the periodic table in the Bengaluru Rural District Institute of Education and Training ICT lab. Copyright: GURUMURTHY/IT FOR CHANGE
International Development Research Centre (IDRC) supports the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project, which aims to improve educational policy, practice, and research in developing countries through a better understanding of the use and impact of open educational resources. It provides evidence-based research from a number of countries in Asia and Africa, to show how OER creation and use are influencing educational practices and policy across the developing world.
Under the project, IDRC grantee IT for Change (ITfC), is implementing action research on a professional learning communities (PLCs) model for collaborative creation of open educational resources through the Subject Teacher Forum program (STF) in India's Karnataka state.
STF is an in-service teacher education program for high school teachers in Karnataka that was started in 2010-2011 by the Rashtriya Madhamika Shikshana Abhiyana, Karnataka, a program for the universalization of elementary education, in collaboration with ITfC.
Using the PLCs model, high school teachers of the STF are collaborating to access, create, curate, and publish open educational resources. Teachers across 34 districts have learned to use digital tools and resources in their classroom teaching. The STF now virtually connects 14,000 teachers and teacher educators across the state. Network participants have created and published more than 5,000 Web resources on the Karnataka Open Educational Resources portal.
Based on these project outcomes, the PLC model is being replicated in Telengana and proposed in Assam, on behest of the respective state governments.
