In her keynote address at the International Conference on Open and Innovative Education in Hong Kong on July 4 2018, COL’s President and CEO, Professor Asha Kanwar highlighted some global trends and future directions of open educational resources (OER), suggesting that in order to move towards the future of effective learning, learners must become producers rather than consumers of OER.

One of the global trends shows that OER repositories are increasingly available in diverse fields. For example, to address the issue of language and cultural barriers in mainstreaming OER, COL launched L3Fpedia – the world’s first Tamil language OER repository created by farmers for farmers in Tamil Nadu, India. COL developed this repository in collaboration with Arul Anandar College, Reddiar Chatram Seed Growers Association and VIDIYAL.

While addressing some of the challenges of mainstreaming OER, Professor Kanwar noted the need for OER to open up education from its narrow academic confines to a broader perspective of lifelong learning. She posed the following questions: “Can OER contribute to creating a lifelong learning environment to support the changing learning needs of the 21st century? What will be the role of technologies in the future of teaching and learning?”