Launch of the UNESCO Open Educational Resources Platform
and the UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning
OER Policy Guidelines
UNESCO 36th General Conference
UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, France
Tuesday 1 November, 2011
Embedding Open Educational Resources
in Educational Practice
Sir John Daniel
President and Chief Executive Officer
Commonwealth of Learning
Director-General, Ms. Irina Bokova; Honourable Minister, Dr. Abraham Iyambo; Assistant Directors-General Mr. Janis Karklins and Dr. Qian Tang; Your Excellencies; Ladies and Gentlemen;
After the very pleasant launch of UNESCO’s ICT Competency Framework for Teachers yesterday evening it is a pleasure to be with you again for this launch of UNESCO’s Open Education Resources Platform and the UNESCO-COL Guidelines for Open Educational Resources in Higher Education.
The Director-General and colleagues have set the context for you.
The common thread that runs through these two evenings of launch and celebration is the conviction that ICT – Information and Communications Technology – can make a major difference in education, training and learning generally.
Indeed, the Commonwealth of Learning was established by Commonwealth Heads of Government over 20 years ago because they believed that mass-media and ICT were far too important to be left to the entertainment industry. They created a small agency to help governments and institution use technology to expand and improve education, which is what the Commonwealth of Learning has been doing ever since.
Moreover, I well remember that when I started getting interested in educational technology in the 1970s and 1980s UNESCO was then a powerhouse of international thinking on this topic through the leadership of Henri Dieuzeide.
Over recent decades tremendous progress has been made. By building on a succession of new media and technologies open and distance learning has advanced in spectacular strides so that tens of millions of people worldwide are now furthering their education as distance learners using a wide variety of systems. New institutions, usually called open universities in higher education and open schools at the secondary level, have grown rapidly to meet this need and some have become so large that they enrol more than a million students.
But there is a problem. Stand-alone institutions dedicated to technology-mediated learning are doing well. However, the introduction of ICT into teaching in conventional institutions – school classrooms and university campuses – has been much less successful.
ICT in the classroom: two challenges
We know why it has been less successful: there are two fundamental problems. First, ICT cannot improve education in classroom settings unless teachers know how to use them. Second, teachers cannot use ICT effectively unless they have appropriate learning materials to use with the hardware.
These two events have addressed these two issues in turn. Last evening, in launching UNESCO’s ICT Competency Framework for Teachers, we demonstrated a solution to the issue of teacher training that reflects the experience of both the IT industry, through Microsoft and Intel, and governments through UNESCO. COL is now working with UNESCO and the Commonwealth Secretariat to implement this Competency Framework in the Caribbean, southern Africa and other parts of the Commonwealth.
Tonight, our focus is on the second issue, the lack of materials for use with ICT, and our topic is Open Educational Resources – OER. Educators have long desired to share teaching and learning materials but until recently the ideal of sharing has encountered three obstacles.
First, teachers and institutions often suffer from the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome. Thankfully the rich resources of the Internet and social software are steadily curing that affliction. Most teachers no longer want to spend their time re-inventing the wheel.
Second, until materials development went digital sharing was tiresome. Materials always needed adaptation, and that meant re-typing large amounts of text and changing many illustrations.
Third, intellectual property rights were problematic. Copyrighted material was often buried in learning materials alleged to be free of restrictions. Conscientious users had to proceed circumspectly.
OER remove these last obstacles. First, they are almost always developed in digital format – even if they later reach students in the form of print. That makes them easy to exchange and adapt.
Second, the various open licences for sharing OER allow you to proceed with confidence both to distribute and adapt them.
Finally and very importantly for UNESCO’s mission of promoting global intellectual discourse, OER can facilitate exchanges that are genuinely multi-directional and multi-national.
At the OER session at the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, the then Principal of the University of South Africa, Professor Barney Pityana, crossed swords with his fellow South African Brenda Gourley, then Vice-Chancellor of the UK Open University. Barney Pityana argued that OER could promote a form of intellectual neo-colonialism whereby the rich north rams its OER down the throats of the poorer south.
But that it is not the reality. COL is a partner in a programme for Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, known as TESSA, through which thirteen African universities are working together to produce and use OER for in-service teacher education. Last year 320,000 African teachers in ten countries adapted and used these OER, which are available in Arabic, English, French and Kiswahili.
OER are spreading through Africa and around the world. They are so obviously helpful in expanding and improving education that they ought to become a sustainable and normal part of educational ecosystems. But we must face the fact that this has not yet occurred. OER have not yet entered the bloodstream of education.
To ensure that happens, OER must feature in the policies of governments and institutions.
This was the challenge that UNESCO and COL took up two years ago after the 2009 UNESCO General Conference with our project Taking OER beyond the OER Community: Policy and Capacity for Developing Countries.
Within this project we organised a series of seven workshops on OER for senior educational decision makers in Africa and Asia and a policy forum for governments here at UNESCO last December. Since then we have prepared two documents to support the next stage of the campaign.
The first is a Basic Guide to OER written by South Africa’s Neil Butcher under the editorial guidance of Asha Kanwar and Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić.
The second document, which we launch this evening, is Guidelines for OER in Higher Education. They were drafted by Zeynep Varoglu of UNESCO and Trudi van Wyk of COL with the aid of an international committee and an online consultation. I thank all who have helped us refine them.
The format of these Guidelines for OER is loosely modelled on the Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education that UNESCO published with the OECD in 2005. Like them, the OER Guidelines address six stakeholder groups in higher education: governments; institutions; academic staff; student bodies; and quality assurance, accreditation and academic recognition bodies.
Fostering governmental support for OER
In the next phase of the project, for which we are grateful for support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we shall focus particularly on cultivating government support for OER. Some governments have policies on OER but most do not.
In the period between now and the World Congress on OER at UNESCO next June we shall interact with governments worldwide in order to develop an inventory of their current practices and policies for increasing access to educational material. This is being done in close cooperation with the OECD, which is also surveying its Member States on OER.
These OER Guidelines, especially those addressed to governments, will illuminate the drafting of a declaration for the June World Congress on OER. They already reflect widespread consultation and worldwide input. However, in order to reinforce the role of Member States in guiding the drafting of this declaration, we are establishing an International Advisory and Liaison Committee constituted primarily of governmental representatives identified by UNESCO’s electoral groups.
We hope for a declaration that will, at the very least, express governments’ support for the principle that when educationally useful material is developed with public funds it should be made freely available to everyone.
These Guidelines do not argue that governments should engage more deeply in educational publishing – that is a political choice – but simply that when public funds are used to create useful material for teaching, learning or research it should be made openly available.
Neither do the Guidelines tell you either how to licence material in order to open it up for wider use. Good work is being done around the world on the development of open licences, not least on an open licence suitable for intergovernmental organisations like UNESCO and COL which should be models of openness. We need appropriate open licences that allow us to walk the talk.
We are fortunate to have Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić as the principal consultant for this project because she has the ideal background for the task. In 2005 she organised the process that led to the UNESCO/OECD Guidelines on Quality Provision in Cross-Border Higher Education and in 2009 she was Executive Secretary of UNESCO’s 2009 World Conference on Higher Education that flagged the importance OER. She is thoroughly familiar with COL, with the OECD and, of course, with UNESCO from which she retired two months ago as Head of Higher Education. Most recently she edited, with COL’s Professor Asha Kanwar, the Basic Guide to OER that I mentioned.
Today we launch the Guidelines for OER in Higher Education in the two languages of UNESCO HQ, English and French. However, I am delighted that funds are now available from UNESCO to translate them into the other UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish, as well as Portuguese. This will greatly facilitate our task of informing governments about the potential of Open Educational Resources and securing their support for their wider use.
Director-General, Colleagues: COL is proud to launch these Guidelines with you this evening and looks forward to working closely with UNESCO to foster support from governments for the important tool for educational development that OER represent.