The Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) is a collaboration between the Tata Trusts (Mumbai, India), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS, Mumbai, India). CLIx improves the professional and academic prospects of high school students from underserved communities in India through developing and delivering active-learning, open educational resources (curriculum and tools) and open source platforms in mathematics, science and English across. CLIx provides high school students from underserved communities opportunities for participation in quality education offerings at scale through the meaningful integration of technology with contemporary pedagogy.
CLIx is in approximately 460 schools, with 30,000 students and 3,300 teachers in 8th and 9th Standards in Rajasthan, Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram in India. Students and classes in CLIx schools are taking OER in topics such as Beginner and Elementary English, Geometry, Health and Disease, and Motion. CLIx includes a teacher professional development effort that leverages both face-to-face and digital/virtual opportunities to provide support and engagement for teaching with contemporary (open) pedagogical approaches (OEP). And CLIx has a significant technology development effort building interactive tools and open source platforms.
CLIx is at the same time an experiment in developing a contemporary curriculum, built on OER and OEP that can sustainably transform Indian secondary education; building capacity with educators, organizations, schools and states to support these activities; and a large scale implementation of OER and OEP.
This session will discuss the challenges from an open education perspective with developing and implementing an OER curriculum and open source software. And will explore the tensions between strong philosophical beliefs about OER and open source, the practicalities of capacity at all levels and implementation realities.
