The Seamless Education Project is a community of members – University of Lucknow faculty, staff, and administrators – that share a common interest in enhancing the quality of teacher education programs. The mission of this site is to create a "teaching commons," a collaborative space that facilitates and supports the use of innovative and high quality teacher education with opportunities to increase knowledge, productivity, and professional effectiveness through sharing of pedagogical best practices, reports on current campus progress, ongoing research and by building an online community.
A University of Lucknow “Teaching Commons”
The Seamless Education Project exemplifies the The Carnegie Foundation's 
idea of a "teaching commons" in which a community of faculty that are committed to enhancing the scholarship of teaching and learning can exchange ideas, best practices, discuss policy changes, and promote pedagogical innovations for their students.
The idea of a teaching commons is not new to academia. Faculty engaged in scientific research and disciplinary scholarship have long enjoyed collegial interactions and gained professional recognition through their participation in conferences and symposia, but teaching has remained for the most part an isolated and private activity.
OER Strategy for Teacher Preparation In India
The Hewlett Foundation has provided the world with the leadership and the synergistic resources for the Open Educational Resources strategy. There are a number of elements to this strategy that will be applied to the India-California State University project:
- Open educational digital library and services
- Professional development
- Community leadership
- Enabling technology
Open Educational Digital Library and Services: We will begin with Lucknow University and CSULB collaboratively building a collection of course curriculum, professional development curriculum, and organizational development curriculum that have been tested for its value to Lucknow faculty and students. An assumption of the collaboration project is that Lucknow faculty and students will be able to easily reuse and augment the existing CSULB curriculum in their transformation of their teacher preparation program. It is expected that some new curriculum will have to be authored by Lucknow faculty but the proportion of effort for authoring new curriculum would be minimal. For example, A Lucknow faculty teaching physics could reuse a simulation for analyzing trajectories and augment the lesson plan (e.g. pedagogy) for using the simulation in an Indian classroom by writing for lesson plan with different institutional, cultural and language contexts. This strategy for reusing and augmenting available materials will enable Lucknow faculty to customize their transformation of a science education course (for example) in a timely manner.
The development of the open educational digital library and services will require the development of the professional training/train the trainer programs, development of community leadership, and the selection and implementation of enabling technology. These 4 interacting elements will be managed in the implementation strategy that provides both individuals and organizations to embrace the changes are their educational practices.
top of pagePartnership News
September 2007 visit by Lucknow team to CSULB.
University of Lucknow Institute of Advanced Studies in Education
The University of Lucknow Institute of Advanced Studies in Education is a site with resources for the Seamless Education community.