Authoring Open Education Resources

The Lucknow community will also be authoring new discipline content for their teacher preparation program and could publish it on their own website opens in a new window or the Lucknow Teaching Commons.

There are 2 sets of open source authoring tools that India’s institutions will be made aware of and can choose to use.

  1. Pachyderm opens in a new window is an easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. Designed for people who have little or no multimedia authoring experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which include built-in functionality for playing video and audio, linking to other templates, and other features. Descriptive text can be copied and pasted in, or authored directly in Pachyderm. Once screens have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author's website, on a CD, or elsewhere. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.
  2. The second set up tools is provided by the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning opens in a new window. COSL provides a set of small tools designed specifically to advance the state of the art in supporting end users’ abilities to find educational resources, reuse educational resources, and close the feedback loop between end users and content authors. Making Open Content Support Learning or MOCSL http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/mocsl/ can be used India’s faculty and staff to author OER as well.

The authored material can then be freely cataloged within MERLOT’s collection and all the open digital library services available to current collection would now be able to newly authored Lucknow’s materials – at no cost.

Authoring Pedagogical Content: We expect the discipline content identified for the Lucknow-CSULB collaborative project to have a relatively high proportion of OER that can be reused and/or augmented. Pedagogical content which refers to the instructional methods or “lesson plans” for engaging students learning the discipline content will require more authoring by the Lucknow team. The CSULB team can provide their theoretical framework for pedagogy as well as the administrative strategies for implementing the new pedagogies but it will be the responsibility of the Lucknow team to translate and transfer these pedagogies into India’s institutional practices. The implementation strategy will be using another of MERLOT’s open digital library services. MERLOT provides guided or scaffolded authoring of lesson plans/learning assignments which become part of the metadata of the OER. An example of the same discipline content (DNA) having multiple pedagogical strategies can be found at MERLOT opens in a new window. Both CSULB and Lucknow faculty can publish lesson plans for using the same discipline content but applying different pedagogies. These US and India lesson plans would be simultaneously available for any user to review, reuse, augment, or inspire to author a new lesson plans.

Pedagogical content and administrative support strategies will be produced within the train-the-trainer, and four-year integrated program and the international online classroom projects of the grant proposal. Digitally capturing the products of the collaborative and archiving them within the Lucknow Teaching Commons will provide timely and important resources. The Pachyderm and MOCSL authoring tools can also be used to develop pedagogical content. These resources will be licensed under the Creative Commons framework and published within the Lucknow Teaching Commons as well as cataloged within MERLOT.

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