http://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/widening-access-educational-resources.htmlBy
launching the National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER)
portal‒a free online repository of National Council of Educational
Research and Training (NCERT) courseware‒the government has taken a
significant step towards widening and improving access to learning
resources and has provided a fillip to the movement for free and open
knowledge in the country.
Imagine a student learning a science experiment at school and
supplementing her knowledge by watching a programme on the subject aired
on Doordarshan many years ago. Or learning a difficult concept in
geometry by using interactive software free of cost. Or a teacher
adapting a useful lesson from a curriculum taught in a different
language elsewhere in the country. All this and more is now possible,
after the
National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER),
a free online repository of National Council of Educational Research
and Training (NCERT) courseware, was launched in August 2013, by the
Ministry of Human Resource Development. The launch of the portal, which
houses open-licensed school textbooks and other educational content
developed and published by the government-funded NCERT, comes as a big
breakthrough for the movement for free and open knowledge in the
country; knowledge that can be accessed, applied, and shared freely.
What Does the Open License Mean?
All the NCERT course books for students from class 1 to 12 for all subjects have been available for
free downloading,
though under copyright restrictions, for many years. However, copyright
meant that students, self learners, or teachers could not legally
modify, reuse, or redistribute the books without written permission from
the NCERT. About 30 textbooks of class 9 and 10 put together are now
accessible on the NROER under a
Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License (CC-BY-SA).
The Creative Commons license is a legal tool which enables copyright
owners to manage their rights over their works. The CC-BY-SA license
enables the creators of educational content to reuse, modify, build
upon, or redistribute with attribution the vast collection of text
files, audio files, videos, images, interactive applications and
documents uploaded to the NROER. In case the content is tweaked, the
same license will apply to the new work, setting up endless
possibilities for NCERT courses to be modified and re-modified till they
become an inextricable part of the expansive digital commons. The
content could be used in classroom presentations, blogs, or books, be
harvested for use on other open education resource (OER) projects such
as WikiEducator and repositories such as
Wikipedia or its sister
projects. Licensing knowledge resources is a way of bringing knowledge
to those who find accessing it either difficult or impossible.
Those who wish to collaboratively create new courses, start their own
courses, or donate the open educational resources they create can
upload them to the repository. Those who remix or adapt the NCERT
content can give back to the community by posting the new work on the
NROER.
Students and self learners can now freely access the courseware,
including some finely scripted and directed audio and video programmes
and appealing interactive content, which would aid their learning. Some
of the videos are distance learning programmes created by the NCERT and
previously aired on Doordarshan.
Initially, the
CC-BY-SA-NC
‒a license with a clause to disallow commercial use of the content‒ was
going to be appended to the NROER. This would have ruled out the use of
the content, in say, a paid app, a paid online tutorial or a paid
course. After much lobbying by the
Wikimedia Chapter (India), a
non-profit organisation that promotes Wikimedia projects, and other
proponents of open knowledge, the CC-BY-SA license was adopted instead.
The move was in keeping with the
2012 Paris Open Educational Resources (OER) Declaration
of the UNESCO, which recommends that governments freely license
educational resources developed with public funds “to maximise the
impact of the investment”. As the NCERT is an autonomous government
body, much of the lobbying was driven by the belief that knowledge,
research and information funded with public money should be freely
accessible to the public.
The Platform
The Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education built the NROER website
over a period of six months on the open source Gnowsys-Studio kernel.
Simply put, the website is powered by a customised semantic network. All
the content has been broken down into small web pages. The user
interface allows the content to be searched, edited, rated, modified,
described and commented on. The website has the potential to build a
community around the content and to rope in more people to contribute to
it.
The Road Ahead
The portal needs to iron out a few creases to fully achieve its
purpose of enabling access to education for all. Open access to
knowledge and information is linked to the use of open source software,
the implementation of open standards and the licensing of open content.
Usually the content on open education portals such as the NROER and
Institute of Distance and Open Learning (IDOL), University of Mumbai is
present in proprietary file formats (for example, docx). To ensure
flexibility across platforms, it is crucial that all content is posted
using open standards.
Only 30 out of the 334 NCERT textbooks have been uploaded to the
NROER, since work on the website started six months ago. The rest are
expected to be uploaded over the next four and half years along with
graphs, maps, photos, graphics, diagrams and audio-visual material.
As of now, the textbooks are available in Hindi, English, and Urdu.
Hopefully over time . textbooks and course materials in different
regional languages would be uploaded. The NROER website should display a
consent form for contributors so that they do not unknowingly upload
copyrighted content. Also, they would be made aware that they are
licensing away the content they put up. Overall, the user interface
needs some improvement for better usability.
Numerous universities and institutions in India are working towards
the creation and diffusion of open education resources ‒from crafting
and digitising content to building quality assurance frameworks. The
NROER is the first open educational resources portal to be launched by
the government under the CC-BY-SA license. The rest are under either the
CC-BY-SA-NC license (Project Oscar, National Program for Technology
Enhanced Learning) or copyright (eGyankosh, IDOL). The NROER may set the
ball rolling for other entities in India to throw open their
repositories of precious knowledge and impart momentum to the country’s
open knowledge movement.