TESS India is an Open University UK led partnership funded by UKAID to improve teacher education in India thereby improving the classroom experience of millions of students in schools across India.

TESS India Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on ‘Enhancing teacher education

through OERs’

What is a MOOC?

“A massive open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open

access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings,

and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community

interactions between students, professors, and teaching assistants. MOOCs are a recent and

widely researched development in distance education which was first introduced in 2008 and

emerged as a popular mode of learning in 2012.”

(Source: Wikipedia)

TESS India is an Open University UK led partnership funded by UKAID to improve teacher education in India thereby improving the classroom experience of millions of students in schools across India.

Why TESS India MOOC?

Teacher Education through School based Support or TESS India has been working for

enhancement of Teacher education across seven states in India. The project, started in 2012, is

headed by The Open University UK and funded by The Department for International

Development (DFID) UK, with close involvement of Government of India (MHRD). Teacher

development is a highly complex process and there are many different ideas about the best way

to prepare and support quality teachers. For the purpose of improvement in the quality of teacher

education, TESS India has developed 125 Open Educational Resources (OERs) which have

also been localised.

As a part of dissemination of the resources developed, TESS India conducted a Massive Open

Online Course (MOOC) called 'Enhancing Teacher Education through OER: TESS India.'

It is a six-week, task-oriented course that focuses on how to select and adapt Open Educational

Resources (OER) to help support quality in teacher education. The course is free for all to take

and the participants can take it at their own pace and convenience. The course designed for

teacher educators, who may be working in a university, in a teachers’ college, local resource

centre or a headteacher working with the teachers in school.

Course Details

How to recognise and model active, learner-centred teaching approaches

How to use OER (Open Educational Resources) to plan and enact activities that promote/ teacher professional learning and pedagogic change

How to give and respond to feedback aimed at enabling practice focussed learning and pedagogic change

How to select and use OER to meet your own professional learning needs?

The six-week course aims at opportunities to learn to:

recognise and model active, learner-centred teaching approaches

become familiar with the TESS-India OER and their potential to support teaching and teacher education

use OER (including TESS-India OER) - to plan and enact activities that promote teacher professional learning and pedagogic change

Select and use OER to meet your own professional learning needs.

TESS India is an Open University UK led partnership funded by UKAID to improve teacher education in India thereby improving the classroom experience of millions of students in schools across India.

Phase 1 MOOC:

Course started: May 27th

, 2015

Course Ended: July 12th

, 2015

No. of Participants: 3095

For TESS India MOOC, blended learning methodology was adopted and Contact Classes were

conducted for the selected participants in each state. The Contact centres were organised across

Assam, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. The

purpose of these classes was to support learning among participants as the concept of MOOC is

comparatively new for teachers in India. The classes were highly interactive and participants

showed keen interest in learning about the course and online learning.

The TESS India MOOC turned out to be a huge success. See below the infographic:

TESS India is an Open University UK led partnership funded by UKAID to improve teacher education in India thereby improving the classroom experience of millions of students in schools across India.

TESS India is an Open University UK led partnership funded by UKAID to improve teacher education in India thereby improving the classroom experience of millions of students in schools across India.

TESS India is an Open University UK led partnership funded by UKAID to improve teacher education in India thereby improving the classroom experience of millions of students in schools across India.

The same TESS India MOOC is being re-launched on November 23rd

, 2015 and TESS India

along with DSERT, State Education Department, which is nominating 5 participants from 34

District Institute for Educational Trainings (DIETs) and 7 College for Teacher Education

(CTEs). Apart from that, 5 participants each from our partner institutes, RVEC, Vijaya Teacher’s

College, Gulbarga University, Karnataka State Open University (KSOU), Sacred Heart Teacher

Training Institute (TTI) and Regional Institute of English South India (RIE SI) will also take up

the MOOC. The participants of MOOC – first round will become facilitators of it in this second

round. Their training will be conducted for facilitating the course in their respective institutes.

Expected number of participants: 205 + 30 = 235