About Saarthi
Saarthi: A Scholarly Gateway to OERs is a portal that compiles internationally and nationally developed OERs. It redirects users to OER site based on their selection criteria. Saarthi is also an academic communication platform for students and teachers to voice their opinion while participating in discussions or scholarly communications using a discussion board and post-board.
Open Educational resources
OERs has provided a platform to the schools for sharing and learning of information. Being free from copyrights (OERs follows Creative Commons or open licences) it motivates the teacher community, to be competent users of information by reusing, reconstructing and sharing content with the students without any legal issues. OERs discussed and used by the teachers among the students will aid in their research activities and positively incline them towards self-learning.
With the goal to give a single portal compiling all the available OERs resources in better searchable manner, Saarthi is developed. The CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) curriculum for Indian school education is considered for the appropriate subject wise division of OERs. The portal is a compilation of OER initiatives within India and around the world supporting the school education.
MEANING
SAARTHI is a Sanskrit language word that means ‘The Charioteer’. It acts as a charioteer to the knowledge seeker with a comprehensive list of OERs in a searchable manner.
MISSION
To compile Internationally and nationally developed OERs hosting open content for school education. To be a source of scholarly communication for students & teachers.
OBJECTIVEs
To be an accessible source of compiled OERs relevant to Indian school curriculum.
To provide a forum for Indian students and teachers for discussion & interaction.
VISION
To be a one-stop window for students in their self-learning journey and for teachers to add OERs in their classroom teaching.
JOURNEY OF SAARTHI
The Saarthi (development started in 2019) was initially titled as ‘OERLinks: Where Knowledge Gets Expansion‘. The discussion was on with family, friends and professionals to get the most suitable name for the website. In the year 2020, Mr. Arun Rajawat, (Income Tax Inspector, Delhi CCA – Income Tax Department ) had suggested the name SAARTHI. The name Saarthi was found suitable for the website. The Saarthi acknowledge his contribution.
Saarthi is thankful to Mr. Alank Jain for providing a meaningful and apt logo for the portal.
Saarthi is an outcome of PhD research work title “Open Educational Resources in Indian Publlic Schools: An Investigative Study”. After web analysis of 10000+ CBSE affiliated Indian Public Schools of Northern India the study identified that only 0.3% of schools are advocating OERs through their websites. Moreover neither those schools were covering all the possible resources nor they were listed in a standard ways. Hence the Idea of Saarthi came to provide the school students & teachers a dedicated portal directing them to the OERs and even providing them a platform for their academic communication, through forums & blog.
Saarthi is conceptualized and developed by Sagender Singh Parmar, PhD scholar, School of Library & Information Science, Central University of Gujarat (SLIS, CUG) Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India, as a part of his research initiatve to optimize the utilization of OERs among the school students and teachers. The student is greatful to his Dean, Guide and Faculty members of SLIS, CUG.
The Saarthi acknowledges the financial support provided by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Ministry of Education, Government of India under Doctoral Fellowship 2019-2020.
The SAARTHI has android application available to download from Google Play by the name SAARTHI: A Scholarly Gateway to OERs. The application is completely free to download and use.
The application is developed using APPLYPIE website.
Saarthi Logo
Elements in logo represents the meaning, infinity and wholeness of Saarthi
