Navigating the Challenges of Open Educational Resources (OER)

A timeline of OER initiatives

• 2001 - MIT launches OpenCourseWare, one of the first major OER initiatives, publishing course materials online for free
• 2002 - The UNESCO Forum on the Impact of Open CourseWare for Higher Education in Developing Countries coins the term “open educational resources”
• 2007 - Cape Town Open Education Declaration states OER can help make education more accessible, especially where learning materials are scarce
• 2012 - UNESCO Paris OER Declaration recommends governments promote OER to widen access to education at all levels and contribute to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education
• 2012 - The OER Project internationally is born and both BC and Ontario join as a family of free, online, comprehensive curricula for social studies teachers and their students
• 2020 - The OER Project launches World History Project AP curriculum aligned with the AP World History: Modern Exam, as well as the Climate Project three-week course

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Commonwealth of Learning responded by curating educational resources for teachers and students, releasing guidelines on distance education, launching the Open Door coalition with more than 50 partners to deliver learning and provide access to OER, and collaborating with Coursera to offer 10,000 free licences to needy individuals. This has been at the forefront of the OER movement since it began.

So too has the OER Foundation (founded in 2009), based in New Zealand. It is behind many initiatives to promote OER, including the founding of OERu — a network of universities and colleges that aims to make higher education more accessible and affordable for learners everywhere, especially those excluded from the formal education sector.

Let’s take stock of the 10 big questions we should ask about OER

1. How do we capture the imagination and commitment of more faculty, instructors and institutions?
2. How do we make it easier to find quality, usable OER? And, in the age of AI, how do we develop and implement a powerful search tool to bring these opportunities alive?
3. How do we make OER easier to deploy by building on a common platform?
4. How do we increase trust in the quality of free resources and how do we reach a point where OER are perceived to be as good as or better than commercial materials and are widely adopted? How do we establish more quality assurance and peer review mechanisms?
5. How do we increase the flexibility of institutional processes (e.g. textbook ordering) to easily accommodate OER instead of traditional textbooks?
6. How do we make it easier and less time consuming to find, adopt and adapt OER?
7. How do we provide more training and support to faculty coordinators/leaders to adopt and use OER? How do we overcome the technology issues, intellectual property management issues and other related concerns?
8. How do we provide more incentives to faculty?
9. How do we increase investment to lower costs for students, improve learning outcomes through OER and enable quality resources to be adapted to local circumstances?
10. How do we involve students in co-creation to spread the use of OER?

Let’s continue to develop and support OER in the future to provide richer and more engaging learning experiences by:  

• Building a culture of openness and collaboration. When educators experience the benefits of OER for students, it can inspire them to embrace open practices more broadly in their work. Engaging in open communities connects instructors and students while promoting knowledge sharing.
• Providing time and support for faculty to implement OER.
• Providing faculty professional development, training, resources and incentives to make the transition from purchased to open resources, adopting and integrating OER into courses and enlisting librarians to curate OER.
• Using AI-enabled technology to make it easier to locate relevant, high-quality OER — and addressing concerns about the quality of some OER materials and the perception some educators have of OER as inferior to commercial materials.
• Involving students in the design, development and deployment of OER, enabling learners to become active co-creators of knowledge.