Presentation by Prof. V. Venkaiah for ICT Leadership in Higher Education Workshop on 24-26 February 2013 at Hyderabad, India.

1. CREATING ENVIRONMENT FOR
SHARING EDUCATIONAL AND
RESEARCH RESOURCES
PROF. V.VENKAIAH
VICE-CHANCELLOR
KRISHNA UNIVERSITY
venkaiah.v@gmail.com

2. Presentation Focus
 Changing university’s research and
teaching roles
 Emerging trends in OERs and OA
 Role of International Development
Agencies
 Addressing the issue of creating an
enabling environment and policies for
development and sharing of quality
educational and research resources.

3. Components of Scholarliness
 Discovery (Research in specific discipline)
 Integration (Making connections across
disciplines)
 Application (Service activities)
 Teaching (Highest level of scholarly
activity)
Boyer : 1990

4. Why policies are important?
 Policies are important as they serve as guide, and
assist the senior management to adopt fair and
logical procedures to administer and distribute
funds.
 Policies define general perspective - when the policy
is applicable, who are covered by the policy, what
actions are encouraged within the policy, how the
policy is administered, etc.

5. Why policies are important?
 Policies are predetermined course of action
established to guide the organizational actions
towards achievement of its short-term and long-term
objectives
 They have a direct link to the vision and mission of
the organization

6. OER and OA
 Open Educational Resources (OER) and
Open Access (OA) to scientific
information.
 OER and OA are two sides of the same
higher education ecosystem, and are
essential to improve the quality of
teaching and research.

7. OER - OpenCourseWare
“The term Open Educational Resources (OER) refer to
the open provision of educational resources, enabled by
information and communication technologies, for
consultation, use and adaptation by a community of
users for non-commercial purposes”.
UNESCO meeting in 2002
“The Open Courseware concept is based on the
philosophical view of knowledge as a collective social
product and so it is also desirable to make it a social
property” V. S. Prasad (2002)

8. OERs – Some Views
 OERs are teaching, learning and research
resources that reside in public domain that
permits their free use or customization by
others (Bissell, A: 2007).
 OERs are sharable assets. (Smith and
Casserly: 2006)
 They represent the efforts of a worldwide
community, empowered by the internet, to
help equalize the access to knowledge and
educational opportunities.

9. OpenCourseWare Movement
Worldwide
MIT OCW
UNESCO’s
Other
Initiative
Institutional
Initiatives
OER Users
COL’s UKOU
Initiatives Experience
of OER

10. UNESCO Recommendations to Govts.
 Promote awareness and use of OER
 Bridge digital divide by developing infrastructure
 Develop national policy for OER
 Promote use of Open licensing frameworks
 Support capacity building initiatives on OER
 Encourage and support research on OER
 Adopt open standards and technologies for
interoperability
 Encourage open licence for materials produced
using public funds

11. UNESCO Recommendations to Institutions
 Promote awareness and use of OER
 Improve media and information literacy
 Develop institutional policies for OER
 Educate stakeholders on open licenses and
copyright
 Promote quality assurance and peer review of
OER
 Develop strategic partnerships to avoid
duplication of work as well as technologies
 Encourage and support research on OER
 Develop tools to facilitate access to OER

12. UNESCO Recommendations to Teachers
 Promote awareness and use of OER
 Develop and use OER
 Engage in peer review of OER
 Promote quality of OER
 Develop OER in local languages
 Contextualize OER
 Conduct research on OER
 Share learning materials prepared

13. OER Africa recommends institutional policy
for OER
 Does institutional policy provide clarity on IPR and
copyright on works created during the course of
employment?
 Does HR policy provide guidance regarding whether or
not the creation of certain kinds of work – e. g. learning
resources – constitutes part of the job description of
staff?

14. OER Africa recommends institutional policy
for OER
 Does the institution have ICT policy regarding access to
and use of appropriate software, hardware, the internet
and technical support?
 Does the institution have materials development and
Quality Assurance (QA) policy guidelines to ensure
appropriate selection, development, QA and copyright
clearance of works that may be shared?

15. Research Publications
 ISSN registered a total of 15,55,307 titles till 2010, and the
corresponding number for 2002 was 10,72,023
 Price (1963) estimated the growth rate as 4.7% with a
doubling time of 15 years.
 Larsen and von Ins (2010) after analysing the growth of
scientific publications from 1907 to 2007 concluded that the
growth rate of science is lower than 4.7% in established
disciplines

16. Research Publications
 There are about 24,000 peer-reviewed journals.
 There are 1,14,866 journals recorded in Ulrich’s International
Periodical Directory (UIPD - 2012), of which 27,432 are peer-
reviewed, scholarly, active and primary journals. The
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) reports over 7459
open access journals in January 2012
 About 13,50,000 articles were published in peer-reviewed
journals in 2006; Jinha (2010) estimated that nearly 50 million
articles were published by 2008.
Björk et al (2008)

17. Open Access Movement
OA as a movement started at a meeting in
2001 organized by the Open Society
Institute in Budapest, which later came to
be known as Budapest Open Access
Initiative (BOAI).

18. Open Access
“free availability on the public internet, permitting
any users to read, download, copy, distribute,
print, search, or link to the full texts of these
articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as
data to software, or use them for any other lawful
purpose, without financial, legal, or technical
barriers other than those inseparable from gaining
access to the internet itself. The only constraint on
reproduction and distribution, and the only role for
copyright in this domain, should be to give authors
control over the integrity of their work and the right
to be properly acknowledged and cited”
(BOAI, 2002).

19. Freedoms of Educational Resources
 Freedom to use for any purpose
 Freedom to use and expand
 Freedom to build on and extend
 Freedom to educators to use and modify
learning materials to ensure personalized and
effective use.

20. Benefits of OA
 Increased access to current scientific research
for researchers and scientists
 Global dissemination of research and
scholarship of individual researchers and
Institutions
 Improvement in the impact of research
 Institutions and scholars to be cited more
 Higher Return on Investment (ROI) of research
grants as research results are publicly and
freely accessible

21. Considerations for OA Policies
 Policies should mandate deposit of research papers by
scholars in institutional repositories
 All types of research content should be considered such as
published paper, conference proceedings, project reports,
theses and dissertations
 While free access is necessary, institutions also promote
open license (as in OER)

22. Considerations for OA Policies
 While the policy may recommend publication in OA journals,
immediate deposit in institutional and/or subject repository of
online access be mandated;
 Institutions may consider Article Processing Charged (APC)
in OA journals as legitimate research cost, and may also
create central fund as part of the policy;
 The policy should also cover compliance issue as deposit is
the responsibility of the researchers.
Swan (2012)

23. Need for and Viability of Educational Resource
Sharing
 Increasing social demands on quality
educational resources
 Inadequate available educators and
conventional libraries.
 Advances in information technology
 Creation and conversion of many learning
materials and academic journals into digital
objects

24. Need for and Viability of Educational Resource
Sharing
 Rapid growth of Internet infrastructure
 Transformation of conventional libraries and
learning to the digital libraries and e-learning
 Accessing information and learning from
anywhere at any time.
 Emergence of educational resource sharing
as a viable means to improve the quality of
and access to education.

25. Benefits of Educational Resources
 Reduced costs
 Personalized learning
 Interoperability
 Customization
 Localization
 Creation of a vibrant forum similar to the
Internet as a means of sharing and accessing
the resources of other educators.

26. Why should we share our educational
Resources?
 An alternative approach is necessary since
the current environment is moving to tighter
copyright restriction
 Digital resource sharing doesn't add costs
 An alternative to copyrighted, for-profit
education.
 Need to preserve and promote public
education

27. Why should we share our educational
Resources? …..
 Promoting the digital resource economy
 One person/institution cannot do alone;
Team approach required
 Communities of practice (communities can
foster improved excellence and quality)

28. What can we do?
 Organize awareness programs regarding
the potential and utility of Open Educational
Resources
 Join the movement of creating and sharing
the educational resources
 Involve in work groups, post news, discuss
and exchange
 Form a community of practice based on
open content creation and sharing.

29. What can we do?
 Release our educational resources under a
creative commons license
 Encourage our institutions to adopt the
creative commons license
 Advocate for formation of a Consortium for
Open Educational Resources at National
level and become active members.

30. To Conclude ….
“you can dream, create,
design and make the most
wonderful things
in the world.
But you need people
to make
your dream a reality”
Walt Disney

31. THANK YOU
venkaiah.v@gmail.com