The Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx) is a technology-enabled initiative at scale for high school students. The initiative was seeded by Tata Trusts, Mumbai and is led by Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA USA. CLIx offers a scalable and sustainable model of open education, to meet the educational needs of students and teachers. The initiative has won UNESCO’s prestigious 2017 King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the field of Education.

CLIx incorporates thoughtful pedagogical design and leverages contemporary technology and online capabilities. Resources for students are in the areas of Mathematics, Sciences, Communicative English and Digital Literacy, designed to be interactive, foster collaboration and integrate values and 21st-century skills. These are being offered to students of government secondary schools in Chhattisgarh, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Telangana in their regional languages and also released as Open Educational Resources (OERs).

Teacher Professional Development is available through professional communities of practice and the blended Post Graduate Certificate in Reflective Teaching with ICT. Through research and collaborations, CLIx seeks to nurture a vibrant ecosystem of partnerships and innovation to improve schooling for underserved communities.

CLIx aims to reach approximately 1,100 schools, 1,100 Head Masters and 1,11,000 students in 4 states during the period 2015-2018. With an eye on capacity building, Teacher Professional Development (TPD) courses for approximately 4,500 teachers are to be conducted during the same period, to strengthen their competencies and confidence.

Successful implementation of the project could pave the way for increased coverage, not only of regions and schools but also of subjects and age-groups. The future would lie in the model’s replication throughout the country, in keeping with the National Curriculum Framework (NCF 2005). It also has the potential to travel to neighbouring countries.

True to its vision, CLIx has converted its high quality assets into Open Educational Resources (OERs) and has released them under open licenses so that anyone could reuse, re-mix, modify and adapt these OERs to varied contexts. It aim, in the process, to be truly free - where it defines 'free' as the spirit of freedom and independence to create, learn and grow! The CLIx offerings in the form of exemplary open courses and OER repository can be accessed at https://clixoer.tiss.edu