Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices

The Open University of Sri Lanka
Time became a major constraint as a result of the provincial/zonal requirements
as well as examination-oriented teaching-learning system in schools. Due to the
pressure from provincial/zonal departments, teachers are under stress to cover the
content of the syllabus and therefore they practise conventional teaching-learning
methodologies. Hence teachers face a lot of difficulties to implement these novel
strategies in classrooms.
Other teachers in the school system are not aware of OER and their use. This can
be rectified through implementing various projects in schools. Still, the majority
of teacher and students are not familiar with the internet facility and its use. The
importance of the support of resource persons is immeasurable in this regard. Lack
of proper support and guidance from school administration was one of the hurdles
which always isolated us in implementing this task.
Achievements and successes
Students’ attention towards lessons and their motivation to be engaged in related
activities increased when different OER were used. Their sole engagement in the
discussions of live phenomenon such as predator-prey interactions in the life-cycle,
complex models of blood circulation, served as testimonies to that.
Wasting time in libraries for mere fact finding was remarkably reduced because of
the free good quality resources easily available online. With OER, we were able to
present concepts very easily and in a very short period of time during the implementation
of lessons, without which, a huge effort and a long period of time would have
been required. Teaching natural phenomena that happen during natural disasters
such as Tsunami, and earth slips, modern hydroponic cultivations and greenhouse
effect took only a few minutes to explain with the use of OER, whereas otherwise
it would have taken hours to explain such content. It was seen that teachers who
were teaching technology-related subjects were more motivated to use OER, when
compared with the others.
Students were also self-motivated to share what they have found with others. They
even attempted to develop and upload whatever they had found-videos, audio and
information-to the internet. Whenever possible we translated some OER into Sinhala,
and those were shared with others in addition to the OER created by us in Sinhala
language.
This exercise further paved the way to manipulate students’ interests in modern
technology and their talents in mining whatever they need in the web for an effective
and fruitful task. We, with our students, attempted to always check for the
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