Information Technology and Communications (ICT) can be a valuable tool for improving the quality and relevance of education, if harnessed to drive pedagogical models where the focus is in collaborative work, development of skills in practice and generate context-based knowledge.
The coKREA research project aims to study whether and how a bottom-up approach, where participants collaboratively and actively co-create contextual resources (embedded within a community of interest), can support effective Open Educational Resources (OER) models. The project is led by the Karisma Foundation in Colombia.
The project is being carried out in collaboration with teachers from different southwestern Colombian schools, who have formed teams in their own institutions for creating OER and designing didactic proposals to be used with their students. Two objectives are addressed: collaborative creation of OER and research to understand what happens in this process.
The project began in April 2014, when teachers from 11 schools in 4 Provinces of Colombia formed their own teams, bringing together a total of 54 teachers.
The three major challenges that seem to be emerging include the various levels of (1) collaborative work; (2) awareness of an open culture and open licensing and (3) interest in participatory action research.
Discussion will focus on information collected to date and progress in the co-creation of OER.