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Website for Karnataka teachers!
The Karnataka Open Educational Resources wiki is a repository of resources to support practising teachers in terms of their professional development as well as classroom processes. The wiki is built by a community of educators who will will be engaged in the creation, review, curation and publishing of digital curricular resources on a continuous basis. This resource repository is embedded in the Subject Teacher Forum that has been built across high school teachers of Karnataka.
Twin objectives of the Open Educational Resources Repository
1. Availability of good quality curricular resources
One of the challenges identified by the National Curricular Framework 2005 (NCF) is lack of good quality relevant curricular resources: This provides a poor learning environment. Most teachers have only the text book as the curricular resource for any subject. Further, the teachers are also treated as consumers of centrally produced resources (textbooks or digital content) and there is little scope and opportunity for them to create resources appropriate for their classroom situations. Often times, the teachers have very little access to resources beyond the classroom.
Creation of contextualized teaching learning resources, that will allow effective transaction of the curriculum and address different skills and abilities of learners is an urgent need for the improvement of educational outcomes. In a society that is becoming more digital and networked, creation of these resources using digital methods is of great importance. Digital resources are easy to create and modify, and can be published for wide sharing. However, to sustain a resource base and improve it requires creating an ecosystem where these resources will be used regularly and improved upon.
This wiki attempts to create an education resource repository where appropriate contextualisation, curation and co-creation are key elements. In all these elements, teachers play a key role. The processes of contextualising and curating will involve using existing educational resources, including OERs, to develop new versions that incorporate local contexts, local needs, aspirations and priorities as well as, to the extent possible, rendering these resources in the local language and idiom.
For a resource to be effective, it has to allow for feedback and continuous improvement from practitioners. The curricular resource creation is thus the process as well as the objective of teacher professional development.
2. Collaborative resource creation by a community of educators as a method of Teacher Professional Development
The resource creation will build on the collaborative peer networks built by the STF and CALC programmes. These networks can both build and be built out of the shared objective of resource creation. One of the challenges of the Indian education system is the geographical isolation faced by the teachers. Collaborative, peer networks built around the context of resource creation will address this challenge. The digital and networked community can also help redefine identities of subject teachers and consequently impact the learning processes of their students. This will also address the need for teachers to relate to one another to discuss and challenge one another's beliefs and dispositions, making explicit folk pedagogies and holding them to reason in the very spirit of scientific method, making explicit hidden curriculum, engage with the school administration and challenges in the school teaching learning processes.
Such a community of educators is in line with the NCF and NCFTE principles of collaborative and constructivist approaches in education. Here, teachers will be trained to create digital resources. This will allow the teachers to build their Technological Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge1 (TPACK) that attempts to identify the nature of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. A teacher should have an idea of the various educational technologies available, the multiple representations, ideas and approaches possible for teaching, besides possessing content knowledge.
Such a community also provides a sustainable model since it is within the education system and different teachers will act as creators, reviewers, curators, editors and publishers, moving across roles across time. Such resources created and published would belong to the public education system.
What does the Resource Repository hope to do
The structure of the resource wiki has been developed taking into account the overall objectives of any subject teaching-learning, the contextual validity and relevance of a syllabus topic, the nature of expected learning outcomes from introducing a topic in class, at any grade and consequently the appropriate structuring across grade levels.
Such a scope means that educational practitioners will need to be closely and continually involved in the development of the resources. The process of development of these resources includes a framework that
1. maps the spiral of understanding and the levels of complexity that an idea will move through from classes 6 – 10 following the age-wise curriculum structure contained in the NCF
2. addresses the conceptual learning to be built, the facts to be learnt and the skills to be introduced
3. provides for the teachers background in terms of pedagogic approaches that will describe multiple approaches of teaching-learning
4. provides for teachers a map of how the knowledge in a particular discipline was built - for example, the history of music or the history of art
5. includes an index of classroom activities, additional resources that need to be used for completing a given lesson and that can be contextualized by the teacher effectively
6. provides teacher material for a comprehensive discussion of the topic being introduced, which can also be introduced as additional material for the students as decided by the teacher
7. contains evaluation related activities
8. provides for reflective self-evaluation by the teachers
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Process of resource creation
The resources have been developed based on a framework that has been developed after discussions with RMSA, RIE and several teachers and teacher educators. Resources have been contributed by teachers, participants in the Subject Teacher Forum. These have been added onto the website after a process of peer review. The review process is getting developed and will soon include expert review by DIET faculty and subject experts.