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 82 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
Motivations to deposit: Two approaches to Open Educational Resources (OER) within Languages and Social Sciences (LSS) at Aston University
Hayes, Sarah; Lowe, Pam K.; Gruszczynska, Anna; Marsh, Darren
In Spring 2009, the School of Languages and Social Sciences (LSS) at Aston University responded to a JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and Higher Education Academy (HEA) call for partners in Open Educational ...
Match: collaboration; language
Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge
Casserly, Cathy; Smith, Marshall S.; Iiyoshi, Toru; Kumar, M. S. V.
Match: collaboration; teacher professional development
Localizing OER in Afghanistan: Developing a multilingual digital library for Afghan teachers
Oates, Lauryn; Hashimi, Jamshid
The Darakht-e Danesh (‘knowledge tree’) Online Library is the first open educational resource (OER) initiative in Afghanistan, established to enhance teacher subject-area knowledge, access and use of learning ...
Match: language; teacher professional development
Building a community for developing OERs
Botes, Corne; Ferreira, Frances
The transition to lower secondary education is now at the centre of the Education for All agenda in many countries. As more children are progressing through primary school the demand for secondary school places is ...
Match: collaboration; technology
Offering cMOOCs collaboratively: The COER13 experience from the convenors’ perspective
Arnold, Patricia; Kumar, Swapna; Thillosen, Anne; Ebner, Martin; et al.
This paper shares the experience of offering the community-oriented MOOC called “COER13.” The focus is on how the convenors perceived the collaborative endeavor of planning and implementing this cMOOC, and on the ...
Match: collaboration
Promoting open access and open educational resources to faculty
Crozier, Heather
Student debt is a complicated issue and many institutions of higher education are investigating solutions to ease the financial burdens of their students. Adopting Open Educational Resources (OER) in the classroom ...
Match: collaboration
MOOCS: What The Open University research tells us
Ferguson, Rebecca; Coughlan, Tim; Herodotou, Christothea
This quality enhancement report recommends priority areas for university activity in relation to massive open online courses (MOOCs). It does this by bringing together all The Open University’s published research work ...
Match: collaboration
Adapting and sharing open educational resources: a social networking approach
Mikroyannidis, Alexander; Okada, Alexandra; Connolly, Teresa
Open educational resources (OER) have recently emerged as an answer to the need for open and reusable educational material, freely available online. This paper describes a social networking approach in adapting and ...
Match: collaboration
Simplicity and design as key success factors of the OER repository LeMill
Toikkanen, Tarmo
This article focuses on the OER (Open Educational Resources) repository LeMill, which is a web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources, provided as a free and open service to everyone at ...
Match: collaboration