<mods:mods version="3.3" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-3.xsd" xmlns:mods="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"><mods:titleInfo><mods:title>Quenching the Thirst: Open&#13;
Educational Resources in Support&#13;
of Drought Mitigation at the&#13;
International Crops Research&#13;
Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics</mods:title></mods:titleInfo><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart type="given">W D</mods:namePart><mods:namePart type="family">Dar</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">author</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:name type="personal"><mods:namePart type="given">V</mods:namePart><mods:namePart type="family">Balaji</mods:namePart><mods:role><mods:roleTerm type="text">author</mods:roleTerm></mods:role></mods:name><mods:abstract>Drought threatens the economic well-being of hundreds of millions of people&#13;
and can have a long-term impact on the ecology in many places across the globe.&#13;
Recent inter-governmental efforts reveal that preparedness is more effective than&#13;
relief in mitigating drought’s impact. To foster drought preparedness amongst&#13;
rural communities, highly focussed learning and support processes and systems&#13;
are required. The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics&#13;
established a group of relevant activities under the rubric of the Virtual Academy&#13;
for the Semi-Arid Tropics. These activities are anchored by a set of practices for&#13;
learning content creation that are premised on creating and/or using OER in&#13;
the form of reusable learning objects. The intended groups of learners are rural&#13;
women whose exposure to the classroom milieu is nil or limited at best. The&#13;
process of content creation and the support systems for content delivery were&#13;
designed to accommodate these learners’ requirements. This chapter provides&#13;
a number of the details of this process, then presents and discusses the results.&#13;
What emerges is a picture of a value-chain wherein OER from highly regarded&#13;
technical resources is created for the intended audience, iterated for quality and&#13;
delivered via rural information centres to the learners; these learners become&#13;
the new contact points for hundreds of farmers to consult as sources of expertise&#13;
to solve a range of production-related problems in drought situations. Specially&#13;
developed techniques involving a geographic information system are also briefly&#13;
described.</mods:abstract><mods:classification authority="lcc">Information Science</mods:classification><mods:originInfo><mods:dateIssued encoding="iso8061">2013</mods:dateIssued></mods:originInfo><mods:originInfo><mods:publisher>Commonwealth of Learning and OER Asia</mods:publisher></mods:originInfo><mods:genre>Book Section</mods:genre></mods:mods>