Hyderabad : Today, SCERT and TISS launched the CLIx Open Educational Resources (OER) web portal at Indira Priyadarshini Auditorium, Public Gardens, here. The portal was launched by Dr B. Janardhan Reddy, Secretary, Education, T. Vijaya Kumar, Commissioner & Director of School Education, B Seshu Kumari, Director, SCERT and Prof. Padma Sarangapani, TISS.
The DEOs of Warangal Urban, Karimnagar, Vikarabad and Siddipet, teachers and students were also present at the event. SCERT and TISS awarded Course Completion certificates to 66 teachers, who were enrolled in the Post-Graduate Certificate Program in Reflective Teaching with ICT, offered by the Centre for Education Innovation and Action Research (CEIAR), TISS Mumbai.
During the program, students and teachers demonstrated the CLIx modules and interactives, showcased their work and shared their experience of using technology and the CLIx resources. TISS also presented its findings from research studies on the learning outcomes of CLIx that shows significant gains among students in English with 52.5% gain in listening, 25.3% gain in speaking, in Mathematics with 45% gain and in Science with 39.8% gain relative to their pre-test scores.
The Connected Learning Initiative (clix.tiss.edu) is a program seeded by Tata Trusts and led by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA from 2015 at CEIAR. CLIx offers a scalable and sustainable model of open education for high school students and teachers. CLIx incorporates thoughtful pedagogical design and leverages contemporary technology and online capabilities, aimed at improving access to quality education in under-served and resource constrained contexts.
In Telangana, CLIx is being led and implemented by the SCERT in 300 schools across 13 districts and has reached 18,163 students, 2,730 teachers and 175 teacher educators. The CLIx Open Educational Resources (OERs) are released under open licenses where anyone can reuse, re-create, modify and adapt them to their varied contexts. In this release, more than 100 hours of content in English, Hindi and Telugu languages with options for online and offline versions, more than 40 digital interactive and teacher support material will be available on the CLIxOER web portal (clixoer.tiss.edu). In addition to the OER resources, the portal provides insights into the educational design and development processes and the research that went into the creation of these high quality resources. These are of relevance to teachers, educators, students and policy makers.
CLIx Project Director, Professor Padma Sarangapani said that the “Collaboration with Telangana State has been successful because of the exemplary leadership and initiative taken by the state Commisionarate and SCERT, and their commitment to strengthening the government school system. CLIx has achieved international recognition because we have been able to show that ICT labs in schools can be managed by the schools themselves and teachers can be successful in integrating ICT into active learning in all subject areas.”
B. Seshukumari, Director SCERT, appreciated that most of the schools have shown very good
response, teacher training component has come up very nicely. CLIx has brought positive changes. Commissioner T. Vijay Kumar said “with peer learning concept, students are helping each other to learn. The technology will accelerate learning. We have to go forward with this Connecting learning approach. The children must have these 21st century skills that are absolutely essential in today’s day and age. Even basic literacy in these skills has the potential to expose them to the global landscape of using technology and even something as advanced as learning to code in school.”
Dr. B. Janardhan Reddy, Secretary, Education, congratulated CLIx for empowering students and commented that “there is a need of digital connectivity to reach out to all classrooms. The success of this project will inspire us as well as TISS. We have to strengthen the infrastructure and reach 29000 schools in Telangana. The program is a success and improvement was seen in every sector for Science, Maths and English”.
CLIx won UNESCO’s prestigious King Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa Prize for Use of ICTs in Education in March 2018 and has recently been awarded the Open Educational Resources Collaboration Award for Excellence 2019 by the Open Education Consortium (OEC) for developing a successful online environment that supports the collective production of open resources through technologically mediated collaborative platforms. (NSS)
