The OER Movement and its Implications for Local Knowledges

Case Study of the Dominican Republic and their development and use of OER

Presentation of Prelim AbstractSome Background Information on OERAlfonso Sintjago – April 15

CIES – ICT4D SIG THE FUTURE OF COMPARATIVE AND INTERNATIONAL

EDUCATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD - DAVID N. WILSON

“In my 1994 CIES presidential address I posed another “perplexing question” about “when comparative and international education will achieve recognition as something more than an ‘amorphous’ field” (Wilson 1994: 485).I believe that the answer is that globalisation has given comparative and international education increased recognition, and that ICTs have provided the communications tools to reach wider audiences. I urge all comparative and international educators to use this recognition wisely by doing their utmost to communicate effectively the results of the academic and field-based research and insights to policy-makers, educational reformers and practitioners”

Broader Academia“My view is that in the open-access

movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university—a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.” – Charles Vest 2006

What are OER?“open educational resources are digitised

materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research”

Term was first coined at a UNESCO meeting – 2002

OECD - the concept of “open educational resources” is both broad and vague.

Conceptual Map

Who is Involved? Over 3 000 open access courses (opencourseware) are currently

available from over 300 universities. In the United States 1 700 courses have been made available by

university-based projects at MIT (see Box 3.1), Rice University, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Notre Dame, and Utah State University. In October 2006 Yale announced that it will launch an OER initiative in autumn 2007.

In China 750 courses have been made available by 222 university members of the China Open Resources for Education (CORE) consortium.

In Japan more than 400 courses have been made available by the Japanese OCW Consortium, whose members have grown from seven in May 2005 to 19 in October 2006.

In France the 800 educational resources from around 100 teaching units that have been made available by 11 member universities of the ParisTech OCW project are expected to double during 2007.

Major OER InitiativesWikieducators.orgFree Textbook MovementConnexions ConsortiumOpenCourseWare ConsortiumCommunity Colleges Consortium for Open

Education ResourcesUNESCO Support for the OERU Initiative

Who Uses MIT OCW and OER? (2005)OCW is accessed by a broadly international population ofeducators and learners.• 61% of OCW traffic is non-US; East Asia-22%, Western Europe-15%, South Asia-6%, Latin America-5%, other regions-13%• 49% of visitors are self learners, 32% students, 16% educators

The OCW site is being successfully used by educators, students and self learners for wide range of purposes.• Educator uses: planning a course (26%), preparing to teach a class (22%), enhancing personal knowledge (19%)• Student uses: complementing a course (38%), enhancing personal knowledge (34%), planning course of study (16%)• Self learner uses: enhancing personal knowledge (56%), keeping current in field (16%), planning future study (14%)• 41% are completely successful; 51% are somewhat successful

Source:MIT OpenCourseWareEvaluation – 2005

Creative Commons LicensesAs of June 2006, the use of the different

license options had the following distribution:Attribution (BY) is used by 96.6% of all

licensors.Non-commercial option (NC) 67.5%.Share Alike (SA) 45.4%.No derivatives (ND) 24.3%.