Giving Compass' Take:

• At EdSurge, Rebecca Koenig reveals how open educational materials have attained global reach, offering higher-quality resources to students across the world.

• How can more equal educational opportunities increase global mobility? What can you do to help increase  and improve open resources for schools worldwide?

• Learn more about the struggle towards opening up educational resources.

Open educational resources have gone global and may help make learning more accessible, equitable and inclusive around the world.

So says the new Educause Horizon report, which identifies technologies and trends that are changing higher education.

“It is moving up the adoption ladder,” says Susan Grajek, vice president of communities and research for Educause, of OER. “It is no longer a niche solution that people are dabbling in, and it’s really moving from being something that people are piloting and experimenting to something people are hoping and expecting to be able to use as a mainstream technology.”

With that transition comes higher standards, Grajek adds—something that higher powers are starting to consider. At the October 2019 UNESCO General Conference meeting, multiple governments agreed to adopt a set of legal and technical standards for OER materials so that they can be better shared across borders.

“The way we need to be able to harness all the diversity, all the variety, of these multitudinous resources is to have this layer of standards,” Grajek says.

The report identifies Canada, Western Europe, and parts of South America and the Middle East as leading the international effort to create and disseminate OER. It also explores how open educational resources may have varying effects in different countries.

For example, students in Egypt generally lack access to high-quality textbooks, and those that are available are usually expensive and written in English, not Arabic. If Eyptian and Arab universities invested in creating OER materials in Arabic, or translating existing ones, they’d be better able to offer “locally relevant content to the least-advantaged learners/educators,” writes Maha Bali, associate professor of practice at American University in Cairo.

Read the full article about the worldwide impact of open educational resources by Rebecca Koenig at EdSurge.