Professional Learning Communities through the Subject Teacher Forum

The Subject Teacher Forum (STF) is an “in-service teacher education” programme for high school teachers in Karnataka was started in 2010-11 by RMSA Karnataka, in collaboration with IT for Change. Over the last four years, ITfC has trained around 500 Government High School teachers in mathematics, science, head teacher and social science, as master trainers to integrate ICTs for teacher professional development. ITfC has also trained around a 100 head teachers, as master trainers, to integrate ICTs for school leadership. These master trainers have trained around 6,000 of their colleagues across the state of Karnataka. All participants have become member of the subject wise virtual forums and are actively sharing ideas, resources, insights and seeking support. The mailing groups have crossed more than 35,000 emails so far, this would make this the largest programme of its kind in the world (where more than 5,000 teachers in a single geography are forming communities of learning and are in regular interactions with one another for continuing professional development). The virtual forums are created and maintained by ITfC, working closely with RMSA.

The Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER) programme for high school teachers in Karnataka was started in 2013-14 by DSERT Karnataka, in collaboration with IT for Change. Over the last two years, ITfC has trained around 300 Government High School teachers on this collaborative “Open Educational Resources” (OER) programme embedded within the STF to access, create, review, adapt, share and publish OERs. Teachers are working on creating supplementary and complementary resources for the class IX and class X topics as per the state syllabus. The STF programme has also taken the KOER programme across to teachers in the state and the KOER site has registered more than 500,000 hits in just about a year.

ITfC has commenced a participatory action research of the KOER programme, to understand “whether and how, a bottom-up approach, where participants collaboratively and actively co-create contextual resources ('embedded' within a 'community of learning'), can support effective OER models”

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