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Quenching the Thirst: Open Educational Resources in Support of Drought Mitigation at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics

OAR@ICRISAT

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/6438/
 
Title Quenching the Thirst: Open
Educational Resources in Support
of Drought Mitigation at the
International Crops Research
Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
 
Creator Dar, W D
Balaji, V
 
Subject Information Science
 
Description Drought threatens the economic well-being of hundreds of millions of people
and can have a long-term impact on the ecology in many places across the globe.
Recent inter-governmental efforts reveal that preparedness is more effective than
relief in mitigating drought’s impact. To foster drought preparedness amongst
rural communities, highly focussed learning and support processes and systems
are required. The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
established a group of relevant activities under the rubric of the Virtual Academy
for the Semi-Arid Tropics. These activities are anchored by a set of practices for
learning content creation that are premised on creating and/or using OER in
the form of reusable learning objects. The intended groups of learners are rural
women whose exposure to the classroom milieu is nil or limited at best. The
process of content creation and the support systems for content delivery were
designed to accommodate these learners’ requirements. This chapter provides
a number of the details of this process, then presents and discusses the results.
What emerges is a picture of a value-chain wherein OER from highly regarded
technical resources is created for the intended audience, iterated for quality and
delivered via rural information centres to the learners; these learners become
the new contact points for hundreds of farmers to consult as sources of expertise
to solve a range of production-related problems in drought situations. Specially
developed techniques involving a geographic information system are also briefly
described.
 
Publisher Commonwealth of Learning and OER Asia
 
Contributor Dhanarajan, G
Porter, D
 
Date 2013
 
Type Book Section
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
Rights —
 
Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/6438/1/Dar-balaji-OER.pdf
Dar, W D and Balaji, V (2013) Quenching the Thirst: Open Educational Resources in Support of Drought Mitigation at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. In: Open Educational Resources: An Asian Perspective. Commonwealth of Learning and OER Asia, pp. 187-196. ISBN 9781894975612