Since its establishment in 1985 by an act of parliament, the Indira Gandhi
National Open University (IGNOU) has contributed significantly to the development of higher education in India through the open and distance learning (ODL) mode. It was established with a vision to serve as a national resource centre for ODL, with international recognition and presence, to provide seamless access for all to sustainable and learner-centric quality education, skills upgrading and training, using innovative technologies and methodologies. IGNOU has emerged as the largest university in the democratic world, serving the educational aspirations of around 2.8 million students in India and 32 other countries.

IGNOU’s learning resource repository, eGyanKosh, initiated in 2005 with the intention of digitising self-instructional material, has emerged as one of the world’s largest repositories, with more than 40,000 self-instructional text materials, and around 2,000 videolectures covering over 2,200 of the university’s courses. The repository has become very popular in a short time and is being used the world over by student and teacher communities for its rich content.

So far, the courses available on eGyanKosh and FlexiLearn have been licensed
material available as open access content that one can register to use free of cost, but that is non-derivative, non-reusable and governed by copyright rules. The university has now decided to provide all its learning resources as open educational resources (OER) through its open licence policy. IGNOU envisions that it will be a leading developer of OER, with the use of its own as well as others’ OER fully incorporated into teaching and learning at all levels within the university system. This case study provides an insight into the process of eGyanKosh evolving from a digital repository to an OER repository.

Keywords

eGyanKosh · IGNOU · learning resource repository · open courses · Open Educational Resources