Open Education Resources - The Context
We are witnessing a change in the aspiration, consumption, and education-employability landscapes.
Unlike earlier gradually skills careers are not being looked upon as second class livelihood options compared to the traditional and non-skills career options. As the skills careers (e.g. chefs) receive increasingly positive and even preferential acceptance more youth are aspirationally inclined to adopt skilled professions.
Demand for a better life-style has percolated to to the bottom of the pyramid. This has triggered the
Connectivity with affordable and accessible Internet, mobile penetration, peer-connectivity, and access to information has:
- Opened a much wider array of career options
- Started connecting people (socially and professionally)
- Made information easier to find and consume
Awareness, information, learning, and employability opportunities have thus become democratized.
Open Education Resources - The Need in the Skills Context
While there is an exponential growth in the number of players who are creating (and often duplicating) skills training content. Most of it is not available to the potential target audience.
Increasingly products, services, and information when made available are spawning success stories. While there is a need and a demand, the supply of proper channelization, consumption, and assessment followed by accepted certification that links to employment is missing.
Providing skills learning content is equivalent to building highways where none existed or where smaller roads prevented traffic flow. Once connected, growth of the areas around is inevitable and empirically proven.
Providing curated learning opportunities are key to triggering adoption and usage. This is where Skills Open Education Resources can:
- Help make career choices with information that lets one evaluate options
- Initiate and sustain self and assisted study
- Channelize intent into learning and thereafter employability
Open Education Resources - Potential Impact on the Skills Value Chain
The skills value chain is currently an effort intensive 'push' initiative for the players in the space, since after expending a large amount of effort the end realization yield is often not encouraging.
Open Education Resources has the potential of introducing a 'pull' mechanism that will impact multiple touch points and ease the effort required as well as deepen the impact. Some of the touch points in the skills value chain include:
- Mobilization
- Career Choice/Counselling
- Learning (Knowledge Acquisition through self-learning, flipped education and other means)
- Certification
Open Education Resources - Why this is the Right Moment
Almost all developed nations and large parts of the Occident already has well-formed vocational systems in place, often intertwined with the basic and extended education system, developing nations are in the midst of fine-tuning vocational frameworks as an evolutionary process.
This is actually an advantage. Just as India leap-frogged into 2.5G avoiding the transition from analogue in mobile telephony, we can use Open Education Resources , along with the distilled wisdom and also adopt mature frameworks to quickly leap frog into a situation that enables a quantum jump in impact in the Skills space.
The socio-political climate in India is at an all time most conducive.
We are witnessing a change in the aspiration, consumption, and education-employability landscapes.
Unlike earlier gradually skills careers are not being looked upon as second class livelihood options compared to the traditional and non-skills career options. As the skills careers (e.g. chefs) receive increasingly positive and even preferential acceptance more youth are aspirationally inclined to adopt skilled professions.
Demand for a better life-style has percolated to to the bottom of the pyramid. This has triggered the
Connectivity with affordable and accessible Internet, mobile penetration, peer-connectivity, and access to information has:
- Opened a much wider array of career options
- Started connecting people (socially and professionally)
- Made information easier to find and consume
Awareness, information, learning, and employability opportunities have thus become democratized.
Open Education Resources - The Need in the Skills Context
While there is an exponential growth in the number of players who are creating (and often duplicating) skills training content. Most of it is not available to the potential target audience.
Increasingly products, services, and information when made available are spawning success stories. While there is a need and a demand, the supply of proper channelization, consumption, and assessment followed by accepted certification that links to employment is missing.
Providing skills learning content is equivalent to building highways where none existed or where smaller roads prevented traffic flow. Once connected, growth of the areas around is inevitable and empirically proven.
Providing curated learning opportunities are key to triggering adoption and usage. This is where Skills Open Education Resources can:
- Help make career choices with information that lets one evaluate options
- Initiate and sustain self and assisted study
- Channelize intent into learning and thereafter employability
Open Education Resources - Potential Impact on the Skills Value Chain
The skills value chain is currently an effort intensive 'push' initiative for the players in the space, since after expending a large amount of effort the end realization yield is often not encouraging.
Open Education Resources has the potential of introducing a 'pull' mechanism that will impact multiple touch points and ease the effort required as well as deepen the impact. Some of the touch points in the skills value chain include:
- Mobilization
- Career Choice/Counselling
- Learning (Knowledge Acquisition through self-learning, flipped education and other means)
- Certification
Open Education Resources - Why this is the Right Moment
Almost all developed nations and large parts of the Occident already has well-formed vocational systems in place, often intertwined with the basic and extended education system, developing nations are in the midst of fine-tuning vocational frameworks as an evolutionary process.
This is actually an advantage. Just as India leap-frogged into 2.5G avoiding the transition from analogue in mobile telephony, we can use Open Education Resources , along with the distilled wisdom and also adopt mature frameworks to quickly leap frog into a situation that enables a quantum jump in impact in the Skills space.
The socio-political climate in India is at an all time most conducive.
