In my first post as the 2022 OER & Beyond Contributing Editor. I'd like to talk about some really amazing work being done on a global stage to bring the open education movement - particularly issues around OER - to life across all of the member states of UNESCO.
Like many faculty, I suspect, I first stumbled into adopting/adapting/creating [1] ... aacing OER out of a fairly equal combination of an empathetic desire to get cheaper textbooks for my struggling students and an arrogant insistence that I needed complete control over the resources I use in my teaching. Maybe there's also a little selflessness in the desire to have the pedagogical control to do things like add a social justice theme to a math class, or to give my students a voice in the materials they use in my classes.
After these first steps of practical empathy and the assertion of pedagogical academic freedom, into the world of open education, I think many open education practitioners fairly quickly come to believe in a powerful cultural norm favoring radical openness. This ethic of openness goes something like this: challenges facing education in many settings around the world are mostly likely to be resolved by an approach which centers values of openness and sharing.
I think this point of view is actually very natural to folks in the academic world, which values sharing of knowledge and acknowledges the importance of multiple viewpoints and thoughtful, impartial critical thinkers (such as peer reviewers) in the advancement of scholarship. An open educator who shares their work in editable form and with a very open license is simply acknowledging that openness may be uncomfortable but is the most likely approach for their work to have beneficial uses and to form part of the future of their discipline's pedagogy.
Having adopted this perspective and practices which support it, it seems to me only natural that open education practitioners will aac OER locally (and develop policies and structures to support their open work within their local organizations) but will always be thinking about OER globally.
At which point, we might stop and wonder: what is happening on a global scale to support open education and OER? The answer is that there is a very exciting global effort underway, around the 2019 UNESCO OER Recommendation, to share widely knowledge of open education and particular open tools and resources, and to forster policies and structures which will lead to greater aacing of OER and a sustainable, equitable environment for those doing the aacing.
UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, was founded in 1945 and has 193 member states, including all UN members except the United States of America, Israel, and Lichtenstein [2]. There have been relatively few official Recommendations in the history of UNESCO, as they require careful negotiation of all member states.
The OER Recommendation was adopted unanimously on November 25, 2019. It built on a rather remarkable history of international activity in open education, including:
One of the first benefits which the Recommendation provides is a canonical version of a definition of the term OER itself! There have been various versions, due to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Creative Commons, and many others - but if 193 diplomats were able to agree on the version in the Recommendation, it is the text we should use going forward! This helps if you are ever trying to write an institutional policy or law [3], or clearly define terms in a scholarly paper researching OER practices.
The text UNESCO ended up on was
Parsing these definitions carefully and mapping them to the Creative
Commons suite of licenses and public domain tools, we can finally put
to rest the definition of OER - while acknowledging that some groups
and communities will continue to use other, related terms like Open
Access and Free Cultural Works - and settle on the diagram:
Beyond definitional clarity, the Recommendation lays out very concrete priorities for action in the areas [this is a quote from the Recommendation, used by fair use]:
Unsurprisingly, the first four of these action items are the kinds of things many of us in the open education movement have been doing in our institutions, regions, and national governments as we try to build and solidify open ed success - which is not to say that these are easy things: rather the opposite! Use and application of open licensing has a learning curve [4]. Supportive policies based on research results are hard - think of the different approaches and false starts we all know about [5]. Enabling "equitable access, co-creation, curation, and searchability, including for those from vulnerable groups" is a high priority for many OER teams, but of course this is only because we are well aware of how the community has work to do in this area. And how to sustain OER creation is one of the great open problems in even the most successful regional or institutional projects today, and one for which we often get together to talk and brainstorm solutions.
Of course all of the work and insightful approaches being developed for these action items at particular institutions and in regions and nations face an extraordinary test when we think about generalizing them to different cultures, legal/governmental/education systems, levels and types of commonly available technology, etc., across the globe. But perhaps we should return to the article of faith I mentioned at the beginning of this post, that openness and sharing provide our best hope of solving the hard problems of education - including open education - or, as we used to say in the FLOSS movement, "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." So, based on our faith in openness, the openness of action item 5 from the Recommendation promises to bring all the eyes of the world cooperatively to work together and (try) to debug education in many nations at the same time.
There is an amazing group of NGOs contributing their expertise and experience to this global effort, in a sort of Network of Open Orgs [6] that includes
working to bring the Recommendation to fruition. There will be an opportunity for interested individuals to contribute to this work, to help others by sharing their knowledge and expertise, and to learn from others in the same way.
I can say that personally, one of the moments I cherish the most in my experience as an OER author is when I learned that a resource of mine was the main, required text at a university in a country I've never visited on a distant continent. As nations work to realize the vision of the UNESCO OER Recommendation, maybe these incidents of global sharing will become much more common - and I, for one, am happy to work to help bring about that happy future.
This post by
Jonathan Poritz
originally appeared in the
OER & Beyond blog on 6 April 2022,
where it was licensed
CC BY 4.0.
If TASL attribution to this post is necessary, please use this
OER&Beyond URL as the Source.