OpenEd20

In India, the COVID educational disruption affected 32,07,13,810 learners, including 3,43,37,594 in tertiary education. In response to the mass destruction, Koneru Bhaskara Rao & Hemalata Human Development Foundation (KBR & HL Human Development Foundation), India has been conducting remote "eLearning for professional development" (eL4PD) programmes since April 2020. Designing and developing Moodle-enabled and OER-enabled online courses are the key takeaways for the eL4PD participants. Our Foundation’s eL4PD programmes have enabled 100+ in-service Higher Education teachers not only to design and develop Moodle-enabled and OER-enabled online courses but also to build eLearning capacity of their colleagues or institutions.
What about the pre-service teachers, who rarely get exposure to technology-integrated teaching-learning? How will they develop competencies to integrate ICT in their professional practice to ensure the equity and quality of learning in schools in alignment with the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) of India? To address these questions, our Foundation has taken up another initiative to provide practicum training for pre-service teachers / Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) students through a 4-month virtual eLearning Internship from July 2020. The 4-month eLearning Internship aims at: (1) training on and engaging the interns in designing and developing online courses (upon completion of the Class 5 Math open course development, the Interns self-evaluate and peer-evaluate the quality of the course that they have developed using an online course evaluation rubric and submit the course and eLearning Internship project report to the Mentors for review), (2) releasing the open course with a CC BY license to facilitate free access on our Moodle site or enable schools or school teachers to download the Moodle backup file and restore the course on their Moodle site in order to track their learner’s engagement and progress and (3) improving the supply of skilled eLearning professionals to Indian academia so as to meet the emerging eLearning requirements of the country.
This paper presents (i) how our Foundation and Open Education India Mentors virtually engaged the eLearning Interns in the first two months in learning about and developing knowledge and skills on OER, Moodle and online course design using the backward design approach and (ii) eLearning Interns’ experience and perceptions on designing Moodle-enabled and OER-enabled eLearning.

Learning Outcomes:
1. Designing remote and virtual eLearning internship to improve the supply of skilled eLearning professionals.
2. Understanding Indian National Education Policy and one of its thrust areas “Technology Use and Integration”
3. Equipping the pre-service teachers with the skills required for engaging in open educational practices (OEP)
4. Designing and developing OER-enabled online courses on Moodle (open source Learning Management System)
5. Promoting open education culture in India