OER1168 Oral Presentation ppt

Thursday 12 May 16.50 Breakout Room 4/4a

Designing culture specific and portable RLO-based OERs: an Indian experiment

Bharathi Harishankar, Institute of Distance Education, University of Madras

Conference Theme: Academic practice and digital scholarship

Abstract: The concept of OERs, which optimises the use and re-use of teaching-learning material, has no known exemplars in the Asian region. RLO-based repositories are useful precursors to constructing an OER environment. Granularity, interoperability and reusability are key terms used to define the RLO concept. Along with the idea of shared knowledge resources, the RLO concept also raises questions about the culture/gender codes that can enhance or hamper the reusability. Very often, reusability and portability of a RLO is ensured by making the content culture neutral. This practice is limiting when creating RLOs on subjects, which demand culture specificity in multilingual and multicultural contexts like India.
This study proposes a design structure for a RLO, which when placed in an OER environment, maintains the culture specificity, yet affords easy portability. The study is based on the preliminary research of a project on "Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Reusable Learning Objects (RLO) based Open Educational Resources (OERs) in Enhancing Soft Skills of Students." It is a sub-project of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) funded Pan Asian Network for Digital and Open Resource Access (PANdora) Project on "Openness and Quality in Asian Education" being carried out at the Institute of Distance Education, University of Madras, Chennai, India.
Each RLO is designed in a three-part structure, namely, Concept Definition (CD), Concept Explanation (CE) and Concept Illustration (CI). The underlying assumption is that Concept Definition remains universal and culture neutral. Concept Explanation is highly culture specific. Concept Illustration is cross-cultural in orientation. Therefore, what functions as Concept Explanation in one culture can become an Illustration in another, making the entire repository open-ended. Also, by adopting and modifying the Concept Explanation alone,  any user – teacher or learner – anywhere can re-use the resource.
The viability and portability of this design will be tested in the above project.

Keywords: rlo; oer; culture specificity; reusability; interoperability

References:

IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee www.ieeeltsc.org 

Learning Objects Metadata Working Group www.ltsc.ieee.org

IMS Global Learning Consortium www.imsglobal.org