TESS-India OER: Collaborative practices to improve teacher education

As the numbers of children attending school in India rises rapidly ensuring a productive learning experience for every student is a huge challenge. Quality is central to the Government of India’s education policy; major education goals recognise that changes in teachers’ classroom practice are critical to improving students’ learning in elementary and secondary schools across India. This paper describes the rationale and pedagogy of an innovative response to these challenges harnessing contemporary ideas on ‘open’, learning and the increasing availability of network technology in the form of a multilingual Open Educational Resources (OER) teacher education toolkit. The main section of the paper then describes the processes for multi-stakeholder participation in the development of the elements of the OER toolkit and the paper concludes with a discussion of the ‘open’ dimension of the project and how this enables ‘local’ authentication and mediation of use of the OER in each of the project states