ICRISAT Archival Report 2006 - The seedlings of success in the ...

learned by piloting the development of RLOs and it was suggested that all parties moved ahead and developed
experience and insights by turning some existing materials into RLOs.
There was a brief discussion reviewing what we need to take into account now, which may be relevant in the future.
Specific areas highlighted included:
• Ontologies
• Trends in ODL towards greater use of
• Reusable content
• Mobile technologies
• Blogs and wikis
• Greater use of multimedia, and delivery approaches such as podcasting and video casting
A concern highlighted was the likelihood that in the medium term there is likely to be even greater diversity in terms
of what technologies students in developed/developing and rural/urban areas can access. However the overall trend
is increasing scope for an e-learning and m-learning approaches, and as mobile technologies and infrastructure
improve, RLOs may become widely accessible.
Content Management Workshops with NGO/CBO’s:
Two workshops were organized in collaboration with the India Mission 2007 Alliance during September
(Pondicherry) and October (Gujarat) 2006. The participatnts were from large NGO’s and media organizations with
India-wide presence. In each workshop, about 30 participants joined in, representing about 10 organizations. The
focus was on demonstrating a content management platform and the use of RLO’s through such a platform. The
materials developed on the VASAT project were used as substrates in these exercises. Based on the initiatives of the
Mission 2007 Alliance, a significant amount of VASAT material has been translated into Tamil (spoken by about 70
million people) for rendering into learning objects for localization and re-use. Two of these partners subsequently
were invited to the CSO-CGIAR forum during the CGIAR annual general meeting (Washington DC, December
2006) where they presented the outcome of these workshops.
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