CEMCA, COL’s regional centre for Asia, organised a three-day capacity building workshop for the academic and administrative staff of the Uttar Pradesh Rajarshi Tandon Open University, India on ‘Content Development Using OER’ last month. A total of 44 faculty members from different schools/departments of the university participated in the workshop.

Professor Omji Gupta, Director, School of Management Studies, in his inaugural address, highlighted the role of OER in distance education and the need for implementing the university’s OER policy. Dr R. J. Maurya, Programme Coordinator, detailed areas of the programme, and explained how the training aimed to fulfill the university’s institutional goal.

The workshop included hands-on training to create OER. Each participant prepared a unit of their respective courses/subjects using a template for OER course design. There were discussions on the modalities of using open-source tools and open licenses for the material that was developed. There was also a demonstration of notable OER repositories.

Dr Basheerhamad Shadrach, Director: CEMCA said: “This activity contributes further to generating outcomes for the corporate strategic plan through building faculty capacity in OER that can contribute to an increase in the quality of course offerings by ODL institutions.”