The firs pilot project on creation of open educational resources in Tajikistan has been successfully completed.
The project was launched a year ago by the Center for Information and Communications Technologies public association under financial support of the Tajik Branch of Open Society Institute/Assistance Foundation (OSI/AF-Tajikistan) and under technical support of TCell/
The project aiming at improving educational outcomes through using Internet was implemented in several stages.
The project has targeted four higher educational institutions in Dushanbe and Kulob. Twenty teachers from these institutions have reportedly taken a series of trainings on creation of open educational resource. More than 200 from these institutions have attended open lectures.
An online platform for creation of open educational resources has been established on local server and any person may be registered with this server and create his/her own educational resource on the basis of the Creative Commons license.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work.
Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. It is the leading trend in distance education/open and distance learning domain as a consequence of the openness movement. There is no universal usage of open file formats in OER. The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm.
The idea of open educational resources (OER) has numerous working definitions. The term was firstly coined at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work."
Often cited is the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation term which defines OER as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines OER as digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licenses.
