Our Response to COVID-19

As India faces a disruptive moment in education, teachers and students have the challenge of continuing to teach and learn during the lockdown. Technology can be an enabler in this moment of crisis. We, at the Centre for Education Innovation and Action Research, bring to you a wide range of resources to help you continue teaching and learning during this time. 

We are committed to offer our expertise and services to help different stakeholders in education transition to other modes of teaching and learning. The Connected Open and Online Learning (COOL) is our response to COVID-19 through which we hope to reach out to teachers, teacher educators and students. If you are a teacher in a school or teacher educator or a student teacher in a Teacher Education Institute (B.Ed./M.Ed.) you will find useful resources for your class and for your own professional development. These resources are available in English and a few modern Indian languages. The COOL initiative is seeded by Tata Trusts and supported by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya National Missions for teachers and teaching (PMMMNMTT)

Our Initiatives under COOL 

 1. Resources for Teacher Education 

      We are mapping our short term and post-graduate certificate programmes like Reflective Teaching with ICT courses with the NCTE curriculum to offer them online to student teachers (B.Ed.) across the country. Three pedagogy courses (English, Math and Science) are already hosted on the TISSx platform. Most of the courses will be available in two languages; Hindi and English. Details of these courses are also available on the NCTE website. We are mapping other free open online courses to the NCTE curriculum to provide a wide range of curated resources. We have mapped 12 resources/courses so far for student-teachers and teacher educators which are hosted on TISSx platform and more are in the pipeline. 

Some of our courses are also mapped to the M.Ed curriculum and in partnership with Mumbai University we are offering weekly webinars to teacher educators and M.Ed students under the Teaching and Learning Consortium (TALC) 2020.

In partnership with DSERT, Karnataka, we have also conducted weekly bilingual webinar series in Kannada and English for the nodal officers and faculty-in-charge of the District Educational resource Centre project, Karnataka. A summary of the webinar series is available here. 

Click here to see previous webinars

 2. Ground Assessment - Research 

a. Edtech Weekly Podcast: Voices from the ground

      Understanding the needs of the ground is a critical exercise to respond to the current situation. Under this initiative, we gather information from some of the key stakeholders of school education. This is hearing voices directly from the field. Weekly one practitioner is interviewed on current education challenges, innovations and interventions happening on the ground, interviews are done in different Indian languages. Till now we have interviewed 8 practitioners from various walks of life eg, teachers, administrators, educational foundations, etc. 

Click here to see previous podcasts 

b. Ground Assessment Study

     We are also gathering primary data from principals, teachers, parents and students to get a sense of field realities and plan interventions accordingly.  These findings are posted on a weekly basis on our website for wider access and use. So far we have received data from 300 participants from different regions of the country including both rural and urban locations.  

Click here to see the previous report

Are you a teacher or student-teacher?  If you would like to participate in our survey please click on the link relevant to your work or profile.

      a. Teachers Tool (for teachers, headteachers, and teacher educators): 

      b. Student Teachers Tool (for students of education studies including B.Ed, M.Ed, MA(Ed)):

3. Multilingual Webinars for school teachers and students by ITE & CLIx 

Integrating Technology in Education (ITE) and Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) are the two programs of the center which have been working in educational technology. Based on the experience and learning of these programs we are conducting weekly webinars for students and teachers in different languages. These are interactive sessions (some conducted by school teachers) and covered different aspects such as introducing synchronous and asynchronous technologies, orientation to computational thinking, and other OERs. There will also be a focus on including hands-on learning and mental health. These are conducted in different Indian languages. 

We have so far conducted 9 webinars which were attended by 150 (avg) teachers and students from across India and more are coming up

4. Content Curation and creation- OER Repository  

      A repository of OER is being designed where free and open educational resources will be hosted with meta-tagging subjects, grades, languages, type of technology etc. This page will help teachers, parents, students, educators to search for resources efficiently.  Many organizations and individuals are curating and creating resources, which are free and may be very useful in diverse contexts. Such resources will be collated and added to the repository page. This repository will be hosted on https://clixoer.tiss.edu. Please visit the webpage for more details and to share OERs with us. You can also access award-winning CLIx resources for Maths, Science, and English for middle and high school students here. 

5. Online Course on ‘Technology for Connected Learning’ for teachers and educators 

      We have developed a course on “Technologies for Online Learning in School Education”. This is open for all and is specifically targeted for school teachers and educators. It provides an understanding of principles of learning using technology, introduces the learner to synchronous and asynchronous modes of learning, provides an orientation to different tools of assessments, and introduces them to the world of Open Educational Resources (OERs). This course is freely available to help teachers and educators to plan teaching sessions for their students using technology. It will importantly orient them on how technology tools requiring low bandwidth can be used to connect with their students and continue teaching and learning. It is available in English on the TISSx platform from 11th May 2020 and will soon be available on the Diksha platform. We also plan to translate the course in multiple Indian languages. So far 223 teachers have enrolled in this course. We have recently announced digital badges. Learners who will be completing the course will receive the ‘Course Completer’ digital badge. 

•  Register yourself for resources in Teacher Education on https://www.tissx.tiss.edu 
•  Please fill this form to register yourself for receiving updates on the above initiates (Courses, Webinars, OERs, Research)

COOL Newsletter

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