Prospectives and Challenges of use of OER in the context of E-Education

The digital era is changing various aspects of our life and the area of prime importance which is getting affected is the educational aspects of learners at a different level. Every moment newer innovations appear and teachers, students, and all the functionaries in the field of education get affected. In this context, the only way to improve the educational system is to make use of innovative technology and digital resources. The best resources available freely are Open Educational Resources (OER). The Paris Declaration on OER in 2012 has made it possible to enhance and extend the facility of open resources to all sections of society including students and teachers The OER lets these stakeholders create their material by combining text, pictures, sound, files, and video; that they can share with friends, colleagues and other educators from around the world. Thereby, this reduces geographical barriers, which is very useful in the context of the second Millennium Development Goal, which primarily focuses on the Universalisation of Primary Education. In this process, OER is quite useful and it is interesting to note here that in OER the "Consumers themselves become producers of education (Dhanarajan & Porter, 2013). The schools in a vast country like India are located in remote locations, where supporting infrastructure for OER is limited. This curtails the use of educational resources, but at the same time, there can be an effort to make use of online platforms like WikiEducator, Wikipedia, etc. These online forums can help to respond to the needs of learners and teachers, and encourage and facilitate the sharing and exchange of teaching-learning experience and expertise in larger geographical areas without dislocating themselves. This platform can also act as a reservoir and repository of resources with multiple media that are useful for students and teachers alike. This paper intends to look at perspectives and challenges in the use of OER in the context of E-education in the emerging digital world.