"MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development) is coming up with a Open Licensing Policy and there is also a plan to come up with a OER consortium at a national level where all universities and all distance education institutions can come together with all the repository of the content that they have and a culture of sharing can develop," Uma Kanjilal of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), told IANS here.
Kanjilal, professor and chair, Faculty of Library and Information Science in IGNOU's School of Social Sciences, said a draft policy has been prepared and the university is one of the partners.
Kanjilal was speaking on the sidelines of the 'Open Access: Road to Freedom', the 33rd annual convention of the Society for Information Science organised in partnership with CSIR's Indian Institute of Chemical Biology.
"The content will be made available so you need to sign up to this consortium so you will become a partner in sharing the content among the partners. So it will reduce the duplication of efforts. For example, if IGNOU has created a content, then the partner university need not do it again. The can use it and customise it," she said.
On India's own internet platform SWAYAM, Kanjilal said the courses are now available to international students as well.
"There are around 300 courses available and in the next three years, we will have around 30 million students and 2,000 MOOCs (massive open online course) courses," she said.
About the challenges in preparing MOOCs, she said there is still a tendency among faculty to emulate the teaching pattern in a classroom.
"There is a need to condense one-hour classroom lectures into shorter ones and faculties have to be willing to prepare courses for online platform," said Kanjilal, who also drew attention to the challenge of increasing trend of monetisation of MOOCs globally.
"The popular courses are all monetised," she added.
(This story has not been edited by Social News XYZ staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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