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Date: 2nd November, 2007
Dear Mr.
Prime Minister,
Our success in the knowledge economy hinges to a large
extent on upgrading the quality of, and enhancing the access to, education. One
of the most effective ways of achieving this would be to stimulate the
development and dissemination of quality Open Access (OA) materials and Open
Educational Resources (OER) through broadband internet connectivity. This would
facilitate easy and widespread access to high quality educational resources and
drastically improve the teaching paradigm for all our students. As a part of
our consultative process, we constituted a working group of experts, including
distinguished members from the academia, government, private sector and users
to suggest necessary measures to improve the quality of Open Access in India.
A list of the members of the working group is set out in the Annexure. Our
consultations with stakeholders have helped identify a few key reform proposals
which are elaborated as follows:
1. Support the production of quality content by a select
set of Indian institutions. A set of key institutions should be selected
and experts representing diverse knowledge areas like agriculture, engineering,
medicine, arts, humanities, science, education, etc. should be asked to develop
standards-based content, which can be customised to diverse user needs. This should
be made available not only to Indian institutions but also for global use. The
efforts made through the project of Ministry of Human Resources Development –
National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) for creation of OER
in the areas of Engineering and Technology should be applied in other areas of
education also. The content in the repositories should be multi-media,
interactive and available in different regional languages. These projects
should cover a wide range of subjects mentioned above. To speed up the
creation, adaptation, and utilization of OER, it is necessary to launch a
‘National Econtent and Curriculum Initiative’.
2. Leverage global open educational resources. Sustainable
development of quality content relevant to India is a difficult and expensive
proposition, given the diverse needs of various sectors in our emerging
knowledge economy. Emerging international and national initiatives are offering
quality educational content as open resources. It is vital for India
to leverage these initiatives as they are readily available for adoption and
adaptation and to serve as a model for further indigenous content production.
We found that there are already 200-300 free knowledge repositories available
across the world. The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) is separately
disseminating this information through its website.
3. Encourage Open Access. Open access material
stimulates research and helps students, teachers and researchers across the
world, as discussed in the attached report. Therefore at a policy level, all
research articles published by Indian authors receiving substantial government
or public funding must be made available under Open Access and should be archived
in the standard OA format at least on his/her website. As a next step, a
national academic OA portal should be developed. The government should allocate
resources to increase the current digitization efforts of books and periodicals
which are outside copyright protection. Separate funding should be allocated to
develop a new high quality OCR software package so that new and old fonts in
many different Indian languages can be converted into ISCI/ASCI code and OA
portals and servers could be upgraded regularly. Appropriate financial
resources should be earmarked for these endeavours. This will also facilitate machine
translation of these valuable resources.
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