Equipping Language Educators at Scale: Open Educational Resources and Institutional Collaboration for Professional Development and Practice
Published | June 2009 |
Conference | 8th International Language and Development Conference, British Council |
ABSTRACT
In much of South Asia (e.g. India, Bangladesh, Sri-Lanka) there had been a post-colonial emphasis on the use of mother tongue. For instance, in Bangladesh, a nation almost solely founded on the basis of the language movement (Bhasa Andolon) of 1952. About 98% of the country’s population speak Bangla . Bangla was the medium of education at all levels except in a small number of schools (Hossain and Tollefson, in Power and Shrestha, 2009). However, in an increasingly globablised world, English Language is now re-emerging as a significant factor in economic development. It is widely perceived that many graduates fail to gain employment because their English skills or qualifications fall below the required level of functional literacy. (British Council, 2009).It has therefore become paramount to develop effective skills in the use of spoken and written English and some governments have been taking measures to address this need. For instance, the Bangladeshi government in collaboration with the Department for International Development (DFID) of the UK government jointly funded the English Language Teaching Improvement Project (ELTIP). (Power and Shrestha, 2009, p.2). But research evidence (Power and Shrestha, 2009, p.2) show that, despite the huge investments since the early 2000s, the quality of English remains low. This indicates that more needs to be done, or it needs to be done differently.
There is therefore a need to train or upskill large numbers of English Language Teachers (ELTs), both in relation to their own level of English Language proficiency, and in relation to their teaching skills and practices. The situation calls for responses that are effective, imaginative, and capable of operating scale. It may possible for such responses to transcend national boundaries, whilst recognizing local teacher identities and contexts.
Keywords | international development · language · scale · teacher professional development · technology |
Language | en |
URL | http://oro.open.ac.uk/17799/ |
Export options | BibTex · EndNote · Tagged XML · Google Scholar |
Viewed by 200 distinct readers
CLOUD COMMUNITY REVIEWS
The evaluations below represent the judgements of our readers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Cloud editors.










Click a star to be the first to rate this document
▶ POST A COMMENT
SIMILAR RECORDS
Transforming English language learning in rural classrooms: OERs, mobile technologies and scale
Power, Tom; Umar, Abdurrahman; Hedges, Claire
Through its “OERs for English Language Teaching (Pan-Commonwealth)” project, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is working in partnership with educational institutions throughout Africa and the Commonwealth to ...
Match: power, tom; hedges, claire
Leading campus OER initiatives through library–faculty collaboration
Goodsett, Mandi; Loomis, Barbara; Miles, Marsha
With the rising costs of tuition and textbooks, Open Educational Resources (OERs) are becoming increasingly important. The university library, in collaboration with faculty, is a natural leader of OER initiatives at ...
Match: collaboration
Institutional repositories of Open Access: A paradigm of innovation and changing in educational politics
Koutras, Nikos; Bottis, Maria
In the Lisbon Summit (2000), the European Commission adopted the triangle of knowledge (education, research, innovation). These three concepts are fundamental “ingredients” of the European educational policy. In ...
Match: institutional
Open Educational Resources: Cost, collaboration and consideration
Hamilton, Elizabeth
This paper attempts to examine the use of Open Educational Resources in both higher education and K-12 levels in the United States. Benefits of OER are explored, as are considerations education administrators must give ...
Match: collaboration; technology
MOOCs, institutional policy and change dynamics in higher education
O’Connor, Kate
The last couple of years have witnessed a growing debate about online learning in higher education, notably in response to the global massive open online course (MOOC) phenomenon. This paper explores these developments ...
Match: institutional
Open educational resources and institutional repositories
Ferguson, Christine L.
This installment of The Balance Point column delves into the ways in which libraries create and store open educational resources (OER) in institutional repositories (IR), addressing issues such as preservation and ...
Match: institutional
Development of OERs through international collaboration E-QUAL case study
Gupta, Parul
Development of Open Education Resources (OER) is similar to product development and it requires due attention to get the final product. Generally, the focus is laid on the final product and not on the process. However, ...
Match: collaboration
Institutional culture and OER policy: How structure, culture, and agency mediate OER policy potential in South African universities
Cox, Glenda; Trotter, Henry
Several scholars and organizations suggest that institutional policy is a key enabling factor for academics to contribute their teaching materials as open educational resources (OER). But given the diversity of ...
Match: institutional
An empirical study on users' adoption of MOOCs from the perspective of the institutional theory
Gao, Shang; Yang, Yuhao
MOOC, which stands for massive open online course, has attracted millions of users around the world and it has a promise to be a very important element of future education. However, there is a little research on users' ...
Match: institutional
OER impact: Collaboration, evidence, synthesis
Farrow, Rob
The OER Research Hub (OERRH) project works collaboratively with open education initiatives around the world to examine the impact of open educational resources. In this paper I will outline methods for organizing and ...
Match: collaboration