2nd Regional Symposium on Open Educational Resources: Beyond Advocacy, Research and Policy 24 – 27 June 2014 Sub-theme 2: Impact Keynote: The impact of OER in the education and training sector in India: from content to an inclusive learning ecosystem Professor M. M. Pant

1. "The impact of OER in the
education and training sector in
India: from content to an inclusive
learning ecosystem"
Hindsight, insights and foresight!

2. Flow:mmpant.net/flipMOOC
• Drivers of the OER movement
• The Sharing Economy
• The OER Community
• The Indian OER initiative
• Expectations from OER
• Creating an OER ecosystem
• Capability Maturity Model
• Questions for research and exploration
• A big challenge

3. Drivers of the OER
movement:
• The story of OERs is the drive for liberation from
stringent punitive copyright regime to a Creative
Commons licensing system for easily sharing
increasingly more educational content.
• The 3Vs of Big Data, that is variety, volume and
velocity make this a very vibrant movement.

4. The 2nd Strand:
• But running alongside during the same timeline is a
track of technological developments
• of lighter, portable, low power consuming, access
devices such as Tablets, SmartPhones, wearable
devices and mobile Internet
• Crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding

5. Thingiverse for example:
• Thingiverse is a website dedicated to the sharing of
user-created digital design files. Providing primarily
open source hardware designs licensed under the
GNU General Public License or Creative Commons
licenses, users choose the type of user license they
wish to attach to the designs they share.
• 3D printers, laser cutters, milling machines and
many other technologies can be used to physically
create the files shared by the users on Thingiverse.

6. The 3rd one:
• The 3rd track is adoption of innovative pedagogies of
• MOOCs,
• Flipped Classroom,
• Learning Analytics,
• Open Badges,
• Gamification and Storification

7. The impact of OERs:
• Is to deliver a far superior education and training
model
• One that develops, thinkers, tinkerers and makers
• Innovators, entrepreneurs and idea generators and
not passive job-seekers

8. Future of the OER Asia
movement:
• Has the potential to impact 4 billion people to
leapfrog to the new creative economy that works
with hands, heart and minds.
• Large scale manufacturing giving way to co-
operative sharing of ideas, knowledge and products
• Ever thought of a Chemistry of ideas: how ideas
combine to form new ideas ? All of Chemistry is
about electrons hungry for sharing.

9. Origins of 'the shared
economy'
• The term "sharing economy" appeared in the mid-2000s,
inspired by enabling social technologies.
• One inspiration was the 'tragedy of the commons', that
when we all act solely in our self-interest, we deplete the
shared resources we need for our own quality of life.
• The Harvard law professor, Yochai Benkler, one of the
earliest proponents of open source software, posited that
network technology could mitigate this issue through what
he called 'commons-based peer production', a concept
first articulated in 2002

10. The Sharing Economy:
• The evolution of the social web, first enabled
programmers to share code (Linux), then allowed
people to share their lives (Facebook), and most
recently encouraged creators to share their content
(YouTube).
• Now many products and product services are part of
the sharing economy: Uber, Lyft, Airbnb
• Crowdfunding: Kickstarter ; indiegogo

11. The OER Community:
• Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay ' The Tragedy of the Commons'
delivered a near death blow to any hope from communities
working together, until the importance of the community was
resurrected by the Nobel Prize (2009) winning work of Elinor
Ostrom,
• Elinor Ostrom identified 10 factors that predict the success of
self-management arrangements: size, predictability, productivity,
resource unit mobility, collective-choice rules, number of users,
leadership/entrepreneurship, knowledge of mental models of the
system, importance of resource and norms/social capital.

12. The Indian OER initiative:
• A national e-content and curriculum initiative was launched in 2008
to stimulate the creation, adaptation and utilisation of OER by Indian
Institutions, in addition to leveraging globally produced OER (
http://knowledgecommission.gov.in).
• The National Repository of Open Educational Resources
(http://nroer.gov.in), came into being in August, 2013. A repository of
digital media content (audio, video, interactive objects, images and
documents) mapped to key concepts spanning of the school
curriculum, as of May 2014 has more than 10,000 registered users.
The software platform hosting the NROER is based on MetaStudio
(http://www.metastudio.org) an initiative of the Gnowledge Labs,
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai. Its beta
version is to be rolled out in July, 2014 and developments will
continue over a period of three years.

13. The Presidential address:
• The Indian President Pranab Mukherjee addressed
a joint sitting of the newly elected Parliament on 9th
June 2014 wherein at para 12 he refers to MOOCs
and virtual classrooms ; the address also refers to a
national e-library to empower teachers in the
following words" In order to empower school
teachers and students, a national e-library will be
established. " This is expected to become the new
incarnation of the 'National Repository of Open
Education Resources' launched about a year ago

14. The OER MOOC
• As a non-government initiative, and by seeking co-
operation of like-minded evangelists, the LMP
Education Trust in August 2013 ran a 4 week
MOOC to bring about awareness of OERs. This
OER MOOC, anchored in India had experts pitching
in from several countries with about 1500
participants from about 90 countries and explored
not only Flipped Teaching but also Twitter for class
collaboration.

15. Popularity of MOOCs:
• Indian students of all ages have enthusiastically
joined the well known MOOCs from Coursera,
Futurelearn and other providers, demonstrating a
great appetite for such learning, but are a
phenomenon that I label as ' education for the
educated'.

16. Expectations from OER:
• These three driving forces mentioned earlier are
enhancing the impact of the OER movement leading
to an unprecedented disruptive transformation of
education that can deliver massive personalised
learning on the move.

17. Creating an OER ecosystem:
• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) for
autonomous self-directed life-long learners, with
coaching and mentoring support.
• Open Teacher Development Forum (OTDF) for
accredited OER based Independent Educators.
Open Education can support teacher development
so that teachers do get better with time. Teaching is
a performance profession.

18. Learning resources:
• OERs,
• MOOCs, SOOCs, nano-MOOCs, micro-MOOCs and
mini-MOOCs,
• Educational Apps,
• and other nano-learning objects created, curated
and adapted by educators. Localised in language
and context.

19. Teaching Learning Models:
• Flipped Learning,
• Adaptive Learning,
• Personalised Learning,
• Heutagogy

20. New assessment methods:
• Assessment: Open Badges and Backpacks,
Learning Locker an open source Learning Record
Store (LRS) for tracking learning data, de-
materialised degrees/certificates
• Minerva model:

21. 3 more components:
• Physical learning Spaces: connected classrooms,
learning lounges, OER Cafes
• Content access devices: Tablets, Smartphones,
other handhelds
• Mobile Internet access : wiMax, wi-fi, 3G,4G, LTE
etc.

22. The final 4:
• EdTech Support HelpDesk
• Cloud-based software, search engines, meta-data for
OER resources and database systems support,
including use of Big Data technologies
• Non-formal and life-long learning, including a school for
the 40+ for the second half of life.
• Social Media tools such as blogs and Twitter to support
collaborative and co-operative learning ( jigsaw learning)

23. The Capability Maturity Model:
Capability Maturity Model is a framework for progression to the
discipline needed to engage in continuous improvement.
The model identifies five levels of process maturity:
Level 1: Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, heroic) the starting point for use
of OERs
Level 2: Repeatable: OERs have been used several times
Level 3: Defined (institutionalized): OERs are part of Institutional
academic policy
Level 4: Managed (quantified): OERs are incorporated into
rewards, promotion nd part of HR systems
Level 5: Optimizing (process improvement) process
management includes deliberate process
optimization/improvement.

24. A few questions for research
and exploration:
• What would be the right size of the learning cohort?
Very small numbers such as 20 would be
meaningless, as would be millions. Is a class of
1000 or 10,000 more viable. Maybe the Dunbar
number (150) is worth exploring?
• What is the best way to cope with linguistic
diversity?
• What skill sets must learners have to benefit most
from OERs?

25. Research questions...?
• What additional skill sets must experienced
educators acquire to teach effectively with OERs?
What must be done by way of capacity building to
assure quality in the OERs created, curated or
adapted by them?
• Are there programs that can be delivered entirely
with OERs? An MBA, and IT qualification or new
emerging domains such as ' Data Scientist'

26. Questions?
• Can OERs be sustainable for long without a mechanism for
financial contribution by the 'users'. What would be the right
price( if any) for OERs?
• What should be the most appropriate technology platform (
including media formats and other standards) for mass
education with OERs? We have a natural inclination to
support Android on the handhelds rather than the others.
But many specific features to support Open Learning are
perhaps needed.
• Effective models to measure progress and evaluating the
success of these methods and processes.

27. the Challenge of Reading
Proficiency:
• While pursuing the reasons for the relatively low
adoption of online learning in India, a country where
almost everyone has a mobile phone and online
commerce is flourishing, I realised that it is the lack
of reading proficiency that is the fundamental barrier
to the adoption of online learning.
• Though OERs are not only about online learning, in
practice they go best with online learning.

28. The ASER Study
• At Std. III, children able to read at least a Std. I level paragraph
has risen slightly from 38.8% in 2012 to 40.2% in 2013.
• Among Std. III children able to read Std. I level text remains
unchanged from 2012 at around 32%
• The ASER reading assessment tool consists of 4 levels: letters,
words, a short paragraph (Std 1 level text), and a longer "story"
(Std 2 level text). The child is marked at the highest level which
she can do comfortably.
• Nationally, children in Std. V who can read a Std. II level text
remains virtually the same since 2012, at 47%.

30. And in the US......
• "The report also found that many young children are
struggling with literacy. Only about one-third of
fourth grade students are 'proficient' in reading and
another one-third scored below 'basic' reading
skills."
• - Huffington Post, Reading Report Shows American
Children Lack Proficiency, Interest

32. From providing access to
building capacity...
• There is a surge in STEM-focused curricula,
activities, programs and material for students of all
ages.
• Emergence of a generation who do not, or cannot,
read what is required in the classroom,will create a
compounded deficit once out of high school.

33. Future Focus Areas:
• to make every learner a better and motivated self-
directed learner, who can access need based
learning, with very few constraints or restrictions.
• to make every teacher a more effective teacher, who
is accessible to learners at remote geographies.
• to provide opportunities for life-long learners,
especially to have an opportunity for 'the school for
the second half of life'

34. A motivational quote:
• Never doubt that a small group
of thoughtful, committed
citizens can change the world;
indeed, it's the only thing that
ever has.
• Margaret Mead

35. Thank You !!
• mmpant@gmail.com
• www.mmpant.net
• Mobile: +919810073724
• flipMOOC.wordpress.com
• Twitter: @mmpant