Whenever we talk about programs towards improvement in education and education leadership,  we all would agree that the most critical element of any program is the set of resources that reaches the stakeholders. Program teams spend a lot of time in creating the most relevant set of resources and the implementation teams try their best to ensure that the stakeholders adopt the tools and learnings from the resources.

In the open source platform space, such as ShikshaLokam, by design, whenever a creator creates a learning resource or an observation form or an improvement project on the platform, it becomes openly available for others to use as-is or to contextualize and innovate on top of that.

A public good is a good that is both non-excludable (no one can be prevented from consuming this good) and non-rivalrous (the consumption of this good by anyone does not reduce the quantity available to others).

One such example is the course for School Management Committees (SMCs) that was created on the platform. While a set of resources, created in English language,  was put together detailing the roles and responsibilities of SMCs towards school improvement, this single course was leveraged by different organizations for their programs. We saw this resource get translated to Hindi, Kannada and Tamil, being used for programs across states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Haryana.

While this was an example that showed the reusability and public good nature of the solutions on the platform, its mode of access also saw the same trend. Accessing resources via an embedded QR code as per periodic stakeholder activity saw great acceptance across programs – be it for Cluster Resource Persons in Karnataka or for School Management Committees and Head Masters in Tamil Nadu.

Do you have examples manifesting the value of building public goods, share with us!