At any one time, about 300 million children of school going age are not in school. Experience indicates that when schooling is disrupted, whether by a pandemic, a natural disaster or other reasons, not all children return to the classroom. In addition, most countries have growing numbers of young people who have not completed schooling, or not well enough to progress, and who find themselves neither in employment nor in further education and training.

Open schooling can create learning opportunities for those not in school, those who left school and those who are in school but not learning effectively. There is no single model for open schooling provision which might offer a complementary or alternative curriculum, or both. However, all models can benefit from greater use of open educational resources; open, distance and flexible methods and open educational practices. In this way it is possible to address issues of access, quality and affordability in a sustainable way.

This book offers guidelines and examples that will be of use to teachers, managers, policy-makers and education leaders interested to ensure that the education system meets the needs of all children and youths.

Its purpose is to provide readers with a quick and user-friendly introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and some of the key issues to think about when exploring how to use OER most effectively. The second section is a more comprehensive analysis of these issues, presented in the form of a traditional research paper. For those who have a deeper interest in OER, this section will assist with making the case for OER more substantively. The third section is a set of appendices, containing more detailed information about specific areas of relevance to OER. These are aimed at people who are looking for substantive information regarding a specific area of interest. Originally published 2011; Revised 2015.

This course is designed to be a basic course in Biodiversity Conservation.

Full course available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11599/2384

Employers in Saint Lucia and the region continue to lament that employees lack the skills to operate productively and efficiently at the workplace. The local cuisine of a country is one of its unique selling points (USP) which sets it apart from other places and attracts visitors. As a country whose economy depends heavily on tourism, it is imperative that visitors continue to sample the appetizing foods that Saint Lucia has been known to create, both those that they may be familiar with in their home country and those that are unfamiliar. In that regard, a course in Commercial Food Preparation with an emphasis on preparing delicacies using local produce and variation in preparing imported produce will equip hospitality workers with the skills, knowledge and competencies of how to prepare our local produce and other produce using our signature methods and techniques as well as cater to the pallet of people of different cultures. This is likely to foster longevity of the local cuisine and maintain a particular standard of preparing foods. Moreover, since the course can be taken by any nationality, it will be a medium to market the local cuisine internationally. Most importantly, it is hoped that the emphasis on local cuisine will encourage practicing and up-coming food preparation personnel to develop even more creative ways of preparing our local produce.

This course is intended for people who aspire to know all about how to think smart, get logical, improve decision making skills and use social networking efficiently. The learner needs to have basic knowledge of computers and the Internet.

This course is intended for people who aspire to know all about how to think smart, get logical, improve decision making skills and use social networking efficiently. The learner needs to have basic knowledge of computers and the Internet.

Full course available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11599/2383

The Educational App Development Toolkit for Teachers and Learners is designed to introduce the basic and some intermediate concepts of Android app development on the App Inventor (AI2) platform. It provides hands-on activities and tutorials to use the Designer and Blocks Editor components of App Inventor to create apps that can be readily downloaded and used on any Android smartphone or tablet. Furthermore, the hands-on sessions will guide you on how to use features such as text-to-speech, accelerometer, speech recognition, drawing, video, games and music playback. The Toolkit also provides guidelines on how to package and distribute your app. For teachers a training plan is also provided that can be used to provide training to students in an instructor-led environment.

This document or “toolkit” serves a few key purposes. First, it seeks to help those involved in the Open Educational Resource (OER) course development process do their work according to a few important underlying principles of good instructional design. Second, if you are a subject matter expert, curriculum developer, instructor, or administrator who has taken on the role of external reviewer, this toolkit should provide some clarity about what to expect from a well-designed course.

Garment production is an area of skill under high demand. Saint Lucia is known for its artistry in costume making for carnival and creative garment designs for the event ‘Hot Couture’. Garment production is a viable field because clothing is a commodity that is needed by everyone year round. However, there is need for fashion designers to be more innovative in their designs. A course in garment production has the potential to foster designers’ creativity by augmenting designs that already exist or crafting new ones. Upcoming designers will be given the opportunity to be trained and certified which are added boosts to their competencies and chances for employment and entrepreneurship.

This how to guide has been developed to assist teachers, teaching support personnel and educational technology administrators to: understand the value of open education, OER and open textbooks for teaching and learning; appreciate the potential value of developing an open textbook platform; select appropriate technology to build an open textbook platform, using either existing services offered free on the Internet or open-source tools, based on local needs and resources; and build, manage and maintain an open textbook platforms.

Recognising the potential of blended learning, COL advocates the systematic integration of technology in teaching and learning in higher education institutions through policy development, capacity building and the use of appropriate low-cost technologies. While working with partner institutions for building capacity and implementing technology-enabled learning, it became clear that a definitive source on blended learning design would help teachers to follow available best practices. The idea for this Guide to Blended Learning emerged from this need. We hope this will be a valuable resource for teachers developing blended courses for effective student learning.

This is a supplementary video for the Commonwealth of Learning Open Textbook Manual. It shows how to create Lessons in OER Commons. The OER Commons Lesson Builder allows instructors to create resources that are viewable by students as lessons, and by teachers as lesson plans with supplemental instructional resources.

This is a supplementary video to support the Commonwealth of Learning's Open Textbook Manual. It shows you how to use the OER Commons Open Author Tool to create Open Textbooks.

This course intends to equip learners with the knowledge and skills needed to solve problems in quantitative aptitude and handle advanced learning for further value addition.

Full course available at: http://hdl.handle.net/11599/2385

This course intends to equip learners with the knowledge and skills needed to solve problems in quantitative aptitude and handle advanced learning for further value addition.

This course is designed to give persons interested in art and design, a foundation in basic principles, knowledge of materials and technical skills.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are a relatively new phenomenon which is fast gaining academic credibility as well as the attention of policy makers on a global scale. With increased funding by governmental and non-governmental organisations paired with generous philanthropy, the volume of rich OER available freely to the masses has grown exponentially. As with any new academic movement, the initial challenge for the OER movement was to spread this new philosophy into mainstream academia whereby the use of OER in teaching and learning becomes accepted practice. With strong advocacy by Open Distance Learning (ODL) institutions buttressed by organisations such as the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and UNESCO, OER is currently achieving this objective and is rapidly gaining acceptance as a credible source of knowledge in many an academic community. The whole philosophy of OER rests on a foundation consisting of two fundamental concepts which are (i) free and open access to knowledge; and (ii) the ability to freely adapt and re-use existing pieces of knowledge. Even though the OER movement has been quite successful in firmly planting the first concept in the academic community, the second concept of re-use and adaptation is still to take flight on a larger scale. Although there are many inhibitors to the wider adoption of the re-use concept of OER, one of the major inhibitors is the current lack in capacities among the various stakeholders to effectively utilise existing technologies to adapt and re-use OER. This in turn has created a community of passive OER consumers who are not contributing to the expansion of the movement. The objectives of this report are to (i) explore the current technology landscape with respect to both proprietary as well as Free and Open-source Software (FOSS) technologies; (ii) identify techniques, actual and in development, for re-use of OER materials; and (iii) discuss the implementation in the context of a typical ODL agency. This peer-reviewed report is a detailed catalogue of technologies available to teachers as well as learners for the re-use of OER material in the forms of text, HTML, audio, video and data. It also compares the technologies based on access, openness, usability and availability. The report will serve as a resource for teachers and learners for re-using OER mater.