A one day workshop on MOOC, SWAYAM and OER for Teacher Education was conducted in the college on the 21st of August, 2019. It was organized by the Department of Education, Centre for Pre-Service Teacher, NEHU, Shillong, in collaboration with the College of Teacher Education (PGT), Shillong.
The workshop was insightful as it enlightened the students with the platform of SWAYAM (Study Webs Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) which offered the numerous and various MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) courses, and a brief introduction to the OER (Open Educational Resources) available to us.
The workshop was divided into three parts to cater to the three different topics.
The first part consisted of an introduction to MOOC. MOOC offers two kinds of courses – credit and non-credit courses. The credit courses are taught for at least one semester as part of a subject or programme. While the non-credit courses can be viewed more as an awareness gaining programme and/or training of specific skill sets.
The conductor, Dr. M. Rajendra Nath Babu, took the students on a step by step procedure tutorial to enrol onto SWAYAM to get access to the MOOC courses. This was especially useful since both SWAYAM and MOOC were alien to the students prior to this workshop. The students were also briefed about another digital institute E-PG Pathshala.
The main difference between MOOC and E-PG Pathshala is that while both digital institues offer a large and massive e-content, only MOOC offers access to discussions and questions to be answered by experts in the field.
The second session was conducted by Dr. N. Amareswaran who discussed about the 6S – Search, Select, Study, Skillful, Store and Share. He gave insight into his blog ‘Look Up Aim High’ which gives access to various topics such as ‘e-Resources for higher education students and scholars’, ‘Teacher Education’, ‘Artificial Education’, ‘SWAYAM Guidelines’ to name a few. His session was riddled with jokes and laughter and it was a very interactive session. He enlightened the students on certain ‘tricks’ to enhance Google searches and how to operate Google Drive more effectively.
The third and last session was conducted by Dr. Manoj Rana, Assistant Librarian at NEHU. He introduced the concepts of the OER – Open Educational Resources, such as electronic journals, scholarly databases and information gateways. Dr. Rana also discussed digital libraries and how we as student-teachers need to be constantly updated on the information of our times else we shall become obsolete.
A brief video of how the Khan Academy teaches via audio-visual techniques was showed as well.
The session came to a close with the distribution of the certificates to all the student-teacher participants.
Overall, it was a fruitful learning experience, and with his new knowledge gained, hopefully, the student-teachers will carry it forward into their own future classrooms.
