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Professor Uma Kanjilal was a visitor to the University of Canberra today (12 May 2009). She will be at the University for two days and is making a number of presentations. Her first presentation, the subject of this blog post, was a discussion of the Open Educational Resource Movement in India.
Additional information about Professor Kanjilal can be found in the blog post by Tom Worthington and this Digital Learning article.
Her Powerpoint presentation provided some demographic information about education in India as the foundation for her discussion of open education initiatives. The presentation covered:
- Democratisation of knowledge issues
- National programs
- Open Access, Open Source and Open Resources
- Examples of work in progress
- Issues and challenges
During her presentation Professor Kanjilal drew attention to:
Sarva Siksha Abhiyan
The National Knowledge Commission
The National Mission on Education through ICT
Brihaspati and VMutki
Sakshat
The National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)
eGyanKosh
Vidyanidhi
NCERT Online Textbooks
Ekalavya
In the conclusion to her talk, Profesor Kanjilal discussed some of the issues and challenges of such a large scale undertaking. She noted that:
- The programs are in a nascent stage of development.
- Much of the work is based on Web 1.0 tools and there is a need to migrate to Web 2.0
- Resources are not available under Creative Commons’ licences at present.
- There is considerable discussion about how to enhance and relate the resources to teaching-learning process.
- There is great interest in how to cater for heterogeneous group needs and the role that the customisation of resources will play in OER evelopment.
I left the presentation with a sense of awe about what had been achieved and wit a real sense of the opportunities we have to develop our reach at the University of Canberra.
