The TESS-India project (TESS-India 2015a) run by the Open University UK, funded by UK Aid and in partnership with the Indian Government, seeks to support India’s national educational policy by enhancing the classroom practice of primary and secondary school teachers through the development and use of freely available, adaptable Open Educational Resources (OER). As part of the implementation and dissemination of the OER the project has engaged in the development of learning through delivery of multiple iterations of a MOOC (massive open online course) ‘Enhancing Teacher Education through OER’ (TESS-India 2015b), aimed at supporting teacher educators (particularly within the Indian context) to access and use OER to “close the gap between policy and practice in classroom teaching and learning”, each time learning from previous experience and adapting accordingly. With the uptake of MOOCs in India becoming ever more common (Perris 2014), government support for their use more overt (Class Central 2016) and the need to support further sustainability the next logical step was to deliver the 3rd iteration of the MOOC in local language, of which Hindi was chosen as the official language of India (DOL 2014). Building on the work of previous studies of both the MOOC (TESS-India 2015c) and contextualisation of content (Perryman, Seal 2014, Buckler et al 2014) this presentation will explore the practical challenges of delivering English language originated content in non-Latin script (Hindi) and the extent to which this has increased the engagement of learners both within the ‘official’ learning environment and within social media. Participants will be able to take away some very practical approaches to adaptation of OER in respect to both language and low resource settings which will be relevant across multiple scenarios as well as an understanding of the application of social media across language barriers.
