Open Education in India: Resources, Benefits, E-Learning, and Top Open Educational Resources in India

Education is crucial to any advancing society. It’s how we skip down the wealth of human knowledge and equip the subsequent generation of leaders, innovators, and citizens. Expanding academic possibilities is more feasible now than it has ever been before. Through the Internet, learners can locate information right away on clearly any topic, teachers can share their knowledge with students on another continent almost as effortlessly as in their own classroom, and educational materials can be disseminated to a worldwide audience at certainly no marginal cost.

However, our structures for sharing information in education have now no longer caught up with the capacity of 21st century technology. Instead, the academic materials marketplace is held captive by legacy publishing models that actively restrict the dissemination and progressive use of sources in an international market that craves educational opportunities. Textbook costs have persisted to rise rapidly, leaving too many students without access to their required materials. Digital services from conventional publishers come laced with access restrictions and expiration dates with little savings in return, and print editions are too frequently obsolete by the time they hit the shelves.

Our educational systems have operated with an essential disconnect between practises left over from the analogue world, and the widespread potential of technology and the Internet to assist more affordable, effective coaching and learning. The movement for Open Education seeks to shut this gap.

Open education is a philosophy about the way humans should produce, share, and construct on knowledge.

Proponents of open education consider everyone in the international community should have access to exquisite academic experiences and resources, and that they work to cast off barriers to this goal. Such obstacles may consist of excessive financial costs, old or out of date materials, and felony mechanisms that save you collaboration amongst students and educators.

As the Open Education Consortium says: "sharing might be the maximum simple feature of schooling: schooling is sharing knowledge, insights and statistics with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, thoughts and know-how may be built.

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, coaching and studies materials in any format and medium that reside in the public area or are under copyright which have been launched under an open license, that allow no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.

The Recommendation on OER, followed by UNESCO’s General Conference at its 40th consultation on 25 November 2019, is the primary worldwide normative tool to embody the field of openly certified academic materials and technology in education.

To aid Member States implementation of the 2019 Recommendation on OER, UNESCO set up the OER Dynamic Coalition. The OER Dynamic Coalition objectives to assist networking and sharing of information to create synergies across the five areas of action of the recommendation:

(i) Constructing ability of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER

(ii) Growing supportive policy

(iii) Encouraging inclusive and equitable exceptional OER

(iv) Nurturing the advent of sustainability models for OER

(v) Facilitating worldwide cooperation.

Why and how are Open Educational Resources Beneficial?

Applying open licenses to academic materials permits educators to collaborate while constructing materials particularly differentiated for their students. For example, a mathematics teacher may accumulate openly-certified word problems for his or her students, however re-write the exercises to encompass language that is more geographically specific or demographically relevant. In turn, they share their modified problems with others who may also wish to use them.

Some educators advise that OERs might assist lessening costs associated with producing and distributing course materials in primary and secondary educational institutions. Teachers can download these materials—frequently at low costs—to be used in their classrooms, however they also can update these materials and share their contributions with others, retaining content material timely, relevant, and accurate. In this way, they need not wait for textbook agencies to issue completely new editions of their (traditionally copyrighted) learning materials.

Students also benefit from open academic resources once they access these materials to supplement the education they could acquire in a classroom. Some students do not have access to a top notch education, but using OERs offers them possibilities to enhance their understanding independently—regardless of the limitations preventing them from acquiring the knowledge and skills they seek.

Open educational resources are most beneficial when educators distribute them in open formats, so teachers and students can use those sources irrespective of the precise technical systems their schools have adopted. Projects like the OER Commons act as repositories for excellent open educational resources.

How do open education ideas work in practice for academic studies?

They recommend that educational peer review—the technique by which professional knowledge producers examine one another's work, frequently anonymously—turn out to be more transparent, so readers can better apprehend how and why, for example, scientists have deemed a certain study suitable for publication in an educational journal, or spot flaws in their techniques or conclusions. Transparency in academic peer review also guarantees that reviewers' motives while comparing research are laid bare.

Open education standards are also impacting the educational publishing industry through "open access" movements. Often, researchers ought to relinquish the copyrights they maintain their work when they agree to allow journals to publish it. Journal publishers then charge individual readers and libraries expenses for access to these scholarly materials. These fees are generally very high; many researchers and librarians claim they restrict access to crucial research to people capable of procuring it. Consequently, scientists and different university researchers cannot access the materials they need—to learn about new traits in their fields, or to read, replicate, and affirm others' findings.

Dissatisfaction with barriers on access to research has spurred various "open access" movements in higher education. Some institutions have followed open access regulations to furnish the general public access to research materials. The Public Knowledge Project continues an open source publishing platform called Open Journal Systems, which editorial teams can use to referee and publish (largely open access) educational journals outside the conventional publishing system. In the United States, states like California have proposed legislation requiring peer-reviewed research funded by taxpayer money to be made reachable to anyone who desires to read it. The White House has also indicated that it supports open access to academic research.

Open Educational Resources and E-Learning in India

The Indian education system has been continuously evolving over a while. Online studying has delivered greater benefits to the contemporary education system. During the launch of the 2020-21 financial year budget, the government introduced the brand new education policy, which showed the critical role performed by on-line education.

According to reports, the Indian e-learning marketplace will develop by 15.64% and exceed $48 billion by the cease of 2020; the primary reason mentioned for this is the extended use of the internet for learning.

Online Educational Resources frequently have a close connection with e-learning. E-learning isn't only a technology but also a collection of diverse pedagogies to learn and teach. It also can contain OER as a pedagogy which can facilitate high-satisfactory learning. The most important advantage of the OER is that it's far more freely available for each student and teacher. Apart from attending the lessons online, students can use these OERs to gain more insights into a specific topic.

With changing times and technology, distance education is gaining more popularity. The National Knowledge Commission has counselled an increase in the quantity of OERs to address this changing trend.

Top Open Educational Resources in India

India followed the OER movement in the year 2007 after gaining guidance from the government and other agencies. The Indian OER movement is an attempt to digitize the contemporary academic system and enhance students with exceptional learning procedures. Following are a number of the open-access initiatives which have contributed substantially to the development of OERs in India.

i) Digital Library of India- This is a collaborative venture by 21 institutions in India and presently handled by IISc, Bangalore. Its goal is to offer access to a digitised collection of numerous rare non-copyrighted books through multiple authors amassed from libraries across India.

ii) NPTEL- This is a joint initiative by 7 IITs in India supported by the MHRD. Its goal is to enhance the engineering sector in the country by engaging in free courses and certified exams. The publications are in video formats taught by IIT professors in diverse fields of engineering and science.

iii) Agropedia- This is the much needed PER of recent times. It has all of the understanding resources about agriculture and its associated topics. This OER is directly approved and run under the steering of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. It includes the materials in text, audio, and video formats for easy viewing.

iv) Project OSCAR- This is an enterprise of IIT-Bombay which incorporates a large repository of animations and simulations primarily based totally on science and technology. It targets to educate various science concepts to undergraduate and post-graduate students, thereby shaping their careers.

v) NCERT- This is an open resource available on the web, intended for school students and institutions. This is an attempt made by the CBSE body of India. Resources in this website come in 3 languages; Hindi, English, and Urdu.

Listed above are a number of the Open Educational Resources in India subsidised by numerous institutes throughout the country. Students can look for more OERs on the net to examine more and gain additional knowledge about a subject.

✒Hritika Bhatnagar