Sunday, July 26, 2015

A DIGITAL EXPLORATION

School teachers adopt open educational resources to improve teaching and learning, under an international project

It was the usual drill.

School teacher Deo Sudan Singh, 45, used to deliver monologues in class at Purv Madhyamik Vidyalaya, Surajpur Garha village, about 32km from Lucknow. As the students looked at him in silence, he thought they were learning. The children would write term exams which did not reveal much about what they actually learnt. One day, the drill was disrupted.

About a year and a half ago, someone introduced Singh to open educational resources (OER) at DIET Lucknow, where he worked part time after school. A coordinator of an international project gave him hard copies of two sets of OERs on maths and science. The material included experiments, such as measuring the length of the shadow of a stick in a garden through the day. It was developed under TESS (Teacher Education through School Support)India, a project funded by UK aid and started by the UK's Open University (OU) in 2012 at the behest of the Indian government, initially for a first phase of four years till 2016.

The project focuses on the professional development of teacher educators and teachers in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Karnataka, Assam and West Bengal. It has involved Indian experts at the an experts at the national and state levels to develop a multilingual OER toolkit. The project covers elementary science, English, maths, language and literacy as well as secondary maths, English and sci ence. In addition, “A complementary set of OER for head teachers addresses skills for the leadership of learning at both the elementary and secondary school levels,“ says Freda Wolfenden, academic director, TESS-India.

“I was searching for some special activity which could involve all students in a class. I wanted learning to be constructive, not theoretical,“ says Singh, who teaches classes VI-VIII.

He downloaded the free OER for science and maths -15 each -from the project website to use in class. The OER is aimed not only at providing academic material but also resources on how to organise a class, plan courses (by talking to colleagues, for example), peer working, group working, etc.

“The practice has changed my mind. Earlier I used to think I am the best teacher,“ he says adding that the new pedagogy made him think he was the opposite.

Singh recounts a change in the students as well. “First of all, I saw the joy on students' faces; they were keen to learn.“

After using the material for 15 days, he says he introduced TESS OER in class on a regular basis in August 2014. Even the headmaster and another colleague took to the resources, says Singh.(The school has a teaching staff of only these three). It has adopted the resources for English and Hindi as well.

According to Singh, he switched to continuous assessment as opposed to the term-end evaluation used previously. He put down different topics, students' names and their performance on a board in the classroom to assess them while they learnt. He categorised learners as: need help, satisfactory and excellent. “I would write how students were grasping the lessons,“ says Singh.

“I am assessing every period. Earlier I gave lecture-type classes, and homework. Now I am evaluating every day.Now I can give you monthly data of students' performance in black and white,“ says Singh, adding that previously he would not know whether students answered exam questions by rotelearning or copying.

According to him, the students had no fear when they took the exam in April.

And the work continues.To begin with, project partic ipants have prepared seven versions (six languages) of OER, which can be translated and adapted for further contexts, says Wolfenden.“To date, the project has met its aims of producing a large multilingual text and video resource bank (125 text OERs and four hours of video in six languages) together with a MOOC for teacher educators to help them develop their use of the TESS-India OER and OER in general.“

It is now likely to be extended as a TESS-India state resource group (SRG) of experts from teacher and school education has been formed in every state.The group is supposed to work towards adoption of OER in each state.

“I was searching for some special activity which could involve all students in a class.  I wanted learning to be constructive, not theoretical”

Source | Times of India | 27 July 2015

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