Open Course Creation by Learners: A Way Forward in Agriculture Education

Abstract

Reaching out to the potential learners in agriculture with quality content is a great challenge and thereby requires innovations and technology in content development, management, and delivery. Use of innovations and technologies in generating and delivering the learning resources and creating the learning environment is increasing to enhance the reach and effectiveness of education. This development is leading towards Technology mediated learning. A consortium of Indira Gandhi National Open University, Tamilnadu Agricultural University, Maharashtra Open University and ICRISAT has implemented a project on “Innovations in Technology Mediated Learning: An Institutional Capacity Building in Using Re-usable Learning Objects in Agro- Horticulture”. This was supported by the National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP) of India. The focus was learners’ centric e-learning in agriculture in the form of Reusable Learning Objects (RLO) on the philosophy of Open Educational Resources (OER). A Content Management System called “AgriLORE” was created which allows for collaborative creation and unrestricted use of learning materials in agriculture. AgriLORE (www.agrilore.org) is a place for creating, sharing, searching and easy accessing of learning objects /courses related to agro-horticulture crops which can be of great use to the learning community. The tagging standards based on IEEE Learning Object Metadata have been implemented for ease search and retrieval of information. // About 500 RLOs were developed and are available at AgriLORE on six crops with five major themes. Each RLO has a profile that determines its relationship with other RLO. The relationship between concepts and RLOs are based on a granularised structure and constrained vocabulary that are used in Crop Knowledge Models. An aggregation tool which allows the learners to group the RLOs into courses based on their requirement was implemented in to build a larger curriculum. Development of courses through meaningful grouping of RLOs to provide the educational resources needed to fulfill credit requirements in a certification process is an important innovation attempted. Full paper will provide details on the OER-RLO repository design and RLO authoring and validation processes. // Paper ID: 68