The National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER) was launched on 13th August 2013, during the National Conference on Information and Communication Technology for School Education.
NROER has been developed by the combined effort of the CIET (Central Institute of Educational Technology), NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) in collaboration with the Indian Government’s Ministry of Human Resource Development, and the Department of School Education and Literacy.
NROER is hosted on the Metastudio, an endeavour of the Knowledge Labs, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science and Education, Mumbai.
What is the National Repository of Open Educational Resources?
NROER is a digital repository for open educational resources. The education sector in India faces a multitude of challenges that the NROER seeks to address, offering a solution.
It is a collaborative effort of everyone who has a stake and is interested in education. The NROER offers resources for all school grades and subjects in multiple languages. The repository has digital aids such as educational audios and videos, images, documents and interactive modules. Besides, users can also contribute their resources.
The NROER is based on the idea of Semantic Maps. The resources are organised into an ever-growing semantic map of concepts, which acts as a learning aid for educators. Teachers can assess the curriculum critically and design their unique themes with the help of the available resources on the repository.
The digital resources are divided into five categories and mapped to Science, Social Science, Maths, Languages and Art Education. There is a list of concepts for each subject; the teacher can assess various resources like videos, presentations, question banks, and images on each topic. Educators can also upload resources that are reviewed by experts.
There is an option to download, share, comment and rate media resources available on the NROER.
Apart from this, NROER also offers users an opportunity to apply for various online courses and participate in online contests.
The mission of the NROER is listed below.
- To store, preserve and provide access to various digital resources for teachers and students.
- To enable community participation in the development and sharing of digital resources.
The objectives of NROER are mentioned below.
- To create quality educational aids for teachers and students.
- To motivate educators to develop contextualised teaching-learning resources.
- To motivate teachers to collaborate and curate new resources.
- To encourage educators to participate in online courses and conduct their classes.
- To celebrate the best practices in content creation.
What are the features of NROER?
- Open access to the resources.
- Free availability of resources.
- Shareability of resources.
- Resources are available in discrete pieces instead of being available in bulk, making the segregation of information difficult.
- The need to research from different sources minimises, as all resources on any particular topic are available on one platform.
- Resources may sometimes need to be contextualised by additional materials that support them.
- Users can add resources to the NROER, subject to proper licensing.
What does the NROER include?.
- An eLibrary is a warehouse of all resources and can be filtered based on:
- Media type
- Subjects
- Language
- Level
Users can also search using tags and view descriptions.
- eResources are mapped to different themes and topics in the National Curriculum Framework.
- Retrieval of resources is easy.
- Detailed resources for each topic are available.
- Metadata is data about data.
- Title, subject, class, description.
- Tags related to the available resources.
- eBooks
- Find books published by NCERT and other State boards
- Download a complete book or a single chapter
- Search for other publications, journals, magazines etc.
Who can contribute to NROER?
- Experts from various subject areas
- Independent producers, directors and filmmakers, and instructional designers interested in adding their educational content to the repository
- Government and non-government organisations who want to share their resources
To ensure that there are no copyright issues, NROER expects its members to follow the principles that safeguard freedom, sharing and collaboration.
The content on NROER is released under a creative commons licence.
What can be contributed to NROER?
Users can add any educational content that supplements the school curriculum. Resources that add value to various subjects offered at the school level can also be added.
The resources can be in the form of
- Video
- Audio
- Multimedia
- Graphics
- Learning objects
- Concept maps
- Educational games
- Photographs
- Essays/presentations
- Question banks
- Worksheets
- Activities.
Experts review submissions to maintain the quality before they are available on the repository.
What are the benefits of NROER?
The NROER offers many benefits to educators, students and other people, directly or indirectly engaged in the educational domain.
- Students can access data and information through NROER related to various aspects of learning in a safe, secure and easy manner.
- NROER encourages a paperless way of education and is environmentally friendly.
- It promotes enhanced and better communication between the teacher, students, and educators. Easy sharing of resources gives everyone a chance to improve their skills and knowledge base.
- Using the repository by students and teachers is a cost-effective way to learn; it saves time and money.
- Teachers and students have access to automated solutions which replace manual paper-based procedures.
- The use of resources and technology-based aids available on the repository enhances the teaching-learning process by making it interesting.
- NROER promotes connectivity between students and educators; scholars, researchers and teachers can also connect.
- Teachers can manage students more effectively.
- NROER promotes collaborative teaching and learning.
- One can teach from anywhere, spreading awareness of the impact of technology in the education field.
Conclusion
In a vast country like India that has students and educators spread in the remotest parts and use many languages, the National Repository of Open Educational Resources serves as a great equaliser. It attempts to deal with the inequalities that may arise due to various economic or social aspects. Anyone can access these digital resources to learn more effectively and interestingly from any nook and corner of the country.
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