Opportunities and challenges in the adoption of open educational resources for course development: a case study of Uttarakhand Open University

With the emergence of the open courseware movement, UNESCO coined the term Open Educational Resources (OERs) in 2002 in a forum on impact of open courseware for higher education in developing countries. Open Educational Resources movement has gained the momentum and recently global movement towards collaboration in the development and sharing of content is observed worldwide. Design and development of self learning material (SLM) in Open Universities is not only a costly affair but it is also very time consuming process. OER claims to provide an opportunity to develop high quality material in shorter time and also reduced the cost associated with the development of the study material. This paper is an attempt to find the effect of adopting OER practices for the development of SLM at Uttarakhand Open University and observe its effects on the development time, development cost and the quality of the SLM.