Collaborative Oer Adoption by a Professional Learning Community, a Model of Teacher Professional Development

Abstract

The authors, as members of IT for Change, an NGO working in the area of digital technologies and social change, participated in the ‘Subject Teacher Forum program (STF), an in-service Teacher Professional Development (TPD) program for government high school teachers across Karnataka, between 2011 and 2016. The primary purpose of the Subject Teacher Forum was to demonstrate a technology mediated model of continuing teacher professional development, introducing teachers to different digital tools for creating resources and and for connecting with one another through a state-wide mailing list based Professional Learning Community (PLC). As a part of the Subject Teacher Forum program, the DSERT began a related initiative called the ‘Karnataka Open Educational Resources’ (KOER) to publish the resources shared in the state-wide mailing lists. A core group of mathematics, science and social science teachers, members of the state-wide PLC, were selected to lead this development of Open Educational Resources (OER). This core group learnt to access, create, revise, remix and publish OER on the KOER repository. The aim of the paper is to understand how an OER creation process embedded within a PLC can support the adoption of OER in a government school system as well as provide a method of TPD.