Curation and Creation of Open Educational Resources: An Experiment in Teaching Undergraduate Chemistry

The term Open Educational Resources (OER) describes teaching-learning materials and resources located in the public domain; its usage, re-mix, and redistribution with no or limited constraints. The richness and diversity of content available in OER can be harnessed to create opportunities for fruitful students’ engagement. Teachers need to be exposed to OER and and shown how to develop such resources. The authors of the current paper were exposed to OER during a workshop held in a local college in Mumbai in 2018. All participants of this workshop were invited to send proposals to the global mentoring programme of the Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) conducted by the University of Nova Gorica (UNG) and the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for OER and Open Learning at the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI), Slovenia. As part of this, the authors developed the following courses for the OE4BW programme held in 2019, 2020 and 2023: (1) Organic Chemistry of food, (2) Nucleophilic substitution, (3) Organic synthesis - The retrosynthesis way, (4) Pericyclic reactions, and (5) Basics of stereochemistry. This paper will primarily focus on the insights gained in the creation of OER. In addition, the authors’ experiences in using OER in regular undergraduate classroom teaching and the students’ feedback will also be presented.