Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices

Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices
“Today I learnt a new thing- that is Open Educational Resources. It’s very useful to
me for the teaching-learning process. I learnt things such as what are OER, 4Rs
framework, Creative Commons licenses, educational potential of ORE and etc. I am
very thankful to the opportunity given to me”
Starting point of OER in our profession
At first we got to know some basic ideas of OER from the introductory workshop.
Then we gained the knowledge on open licenses and the 4Rs of those resources.
We were also instructed to integrate OER in our teaching learning process. During
the discussion with colleagues we realized the importance of OER in education and
planned to use the OER in our teaching learning process. We wondered how we can
integrate OER in our lessons. We searched for OER relevant to our subject and tried
to use them in different steps of our teaching. Finally, we started to integrate the
OER in our lesson plans.
How we integrated OER in our teaching - learning process
We integrated OER in our teaching-learning process through the regular practice.
We have linked OER at each step of 5E teaching method. We used OER for lesson
development, group activities, and elaboration, discussion and evaluation steps.
When we used some downloaded OER such as task sheets, activities and supplementary
readings, we were able to save our time. Integration of OER helped us to
broaden our knowledge, and it supported us to overcome the disadvantages of traditional
teacher centered teaching. We experienced an innovative teaching method
and an active learning process in our OER-integrated classrooms.
Challenges
When we started to integrate OER in our routine teaching process, we faced many
inconvenient situations and struggled with them. Very few schools have facilities
to access computers and internet. Inadequate computer lab facility with limited
internet connection, poor classroom arrangement, lack of knowledge on computer
operations among teachers, unavailability of resources in mother tongue, limited financial
allocation and poor infrastructure facilities of schools have been the barriers
for adopting OER in learning teaching process. We also faced problems to identify
OER and differentiate them from other online resources.
So we requested our Principals to purchase necessary equipment under the Fiveyear
Plan. According to our request, the purchasing requirements for new computers,
dongles, multimedia projectors and printers are being included in the Five-Year
Plan for school development of 2016. But however the individual resource alloca-
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