Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices

The Open University of Sri Lanka
and did not motivate or support us at the beginning. As we teach in rural schools
we were unable to get necessary facilities and resources including computers, electricity,
internet connection etc. Even after long searches, we were unable to find
OER relevant to our subject matter. Some sites were not available. Because of this
we wasted most of our time in searching. We felt frustrated and discouraged due
to all these challenges. Our colleague Amirthanathan expressed his feelings in the
reflective journal as follows:
07.08.2015
“The site was not working for two weeks. Anyway, the mid intervention workshop
was rewarding and we were able to update the knowledge rather than before.
Dr.Kugamoorthy and Miss Rajini conducted the workshop very well. It was interesting
to complete the work. We were encouraged by both of them and i thought of
working on OER rather than logging in to Face book, unfortunately, I was discouraged
for two weeks by the Moodle site not responding…”
All these experiences resulted in many frustrated situations. But, we managed all
these barriers and tried alternative ways to overcome them. Finally, we achieved
our goals and conducted OER integrated lessons.
Achievements
We are proud to say that, we were the pioneers in OER integrated teaching. As we
integrated OER in our lessons teaching and learning became interesting. We successfully
used OER materials for teaching, learning and evaluation. We were able
to adopt different teaching methods and approaches in our teaching. We used OER
in different forms such as animations, images and activities which motivated and
inspired the students to a great level. Further, we shared the resources with our
colleagues and felt confident. We realized that after the integration of OER teaching
became more meaningful.
Our best practices
Earlier we didn’t intend to use much teaching-learning materials, but mostly we
used the lecture method. After following the PGDE programme we started to use
teaching aids. We spent a lot of time for the preparation of teaching aids. But OER
helped us to spend less time to make our teaching interesting. We were able to
identify and use varieties of teaching learning materials from OER which made our
teaching productive and effective. We also shared these materials with our colleagues
and encouraged them to use OER for their teaching too.
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