GEM Report 2023 and Open Policies

This blogpost is a co-production of Ben Janssen (OpenEd Consult) and myself.

On 26 July, the annual UNESCO Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report was launched. This year’s theme of the report is: Technology in education, a tool on whose terms?

From the website of the GEM Report (emphasis added by me):

As recognised in the Incheon Declaration, the achievement of SDG 4 is dependent on opportunities and challenges posed by technology, a relationship that was strengthened by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology appears in six out of the ten targets in the fourth Sustainable Development goal on education. These references recognize that technology affects education through five distinct channels, as input, means of delivery, skill, tool for planning, and providing a social and cultural context.

There are often bitter divisions in how the role of technology is viewed, however. These divisions are widening as the technology is evolving at breakneck speed.  The 2023 GEM Report on technology and education will explore these debates, examining education challenges to which appropriate use of technology can offer solutions (access, equity and inclusion; quality; technology advancement; system management), while recognizing that many solutions proposed may also be detrimental.

Click picture to download the GEM-report

Background paper: Key Policy Issues in Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) have the promise of being a technology for contributing to widening access to education and enhancing its equity and inclusiveness. Last year, UNESCO-GEM commissioned Ben Janssen, Dominic Orr and me to write a background paper for the GEM Report 2023 about key policy issues in OER. In this blog, we present a concise summary of our report. In a separate blog, Dominic has reflected on OER in the context of the GEM Report.

Our task was to give an overview of the adoption of OER worldwide (mid 2022), and to sketch out trends, main challenges and opportunities associated with OER. Otto et al. (2021) published the results of a systematic review of empirical OER research found in journals between 2015 and 2019. We have taken this review, and in particular the publications it covers, as our starting point. We supplemented the list of publications with journal publications for the period 2020 to 2022, using ERIC and the same search criteria as Otto et al., and using other sources like the OER Knowledge Cloud, Oasis, and the OERWorldMap. The latter database has been discontinued since May 2022, but we made a copy of the data in good time before writing the report.

We began with outlining the potential values of OER for resolving major challenges in education, making a distinction between the generic value of OER, independent of a context, and the derived value of OER. Then, the actual situation and trends in the adoption of OER worldwide are described, mainly based on available empirical OER research. Next, the main players in the development of OER content, including individuals, communities of teachers, educational institutions, and public authorities are displayed. Whereas in the beginning it were primarily individuals and institutions, nowadays increasingly national governments have become important players in the adoption of OER. In a following chapter, examples of six types of policy that governments can introduce to contribute to the acceptance and mainstreaming of OER in teaching and learning are presented (see below). In a separate chapter, the challenges that COVID-19 has brought to education are described, as well what the role of OER is and could be within that context. Finally, an overview is given of the challenges that need to be addressed at the micro-, meso-, and macro-level (nationally and globally) if OER are to reach full maturity.

The background paper in its totality outlines the situation in 2022, in which acceptance of OER seems to us to be at a tipping point. Worldwide awareness of OER and their potential for improving the quality of education and access to high-quality education is growing, the COVID pandemic has increased the need for OER, and the UNESCO Recommendation on OER has mapped out a path towards a situation in which, by 2030, OER will have been adopted on a large scale worldwide to provide optimum support for the SDGs.

The background paper is available as a separate publication.

Click picture to download the Background paper

Six types of policies for enhancing development and use of OER

Although awareness of OER and the number of OER activities have increased considerably, mainstreaming of OER will only take place when there are more targeted policies from governments aimed at addressing capacity problems in obtaining, reusing, and sharing OER, organizing sufficiently inclusive and equitable access to quality content, and sustainable and/or reliable access to the Internet.

International organizations such as COL and UNESCO have played an important role in advancing policies on OER around the globe. The UNESCO 2019 Recommendation on OER is an important policy manifesto to support mainstreaming of OER. Since then, many member states have been engaged in OER policy driven activities. These activities can be found embedded within a wider range of policies supporting the advancement of OER. Following the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and Atenas et al. (2020), we have identified six types of policy that can support the development and widespread of OER. For each type, examples are given regarding supporting the uptake of OER.

  1. Policies that focus on the creation and use of OER. The overall objective is to encourage knowledge producers to openly license the content that they produce. Included is the production and use of open textbooks. Examples are the policy of the Dutch government to create and maintain the platform Wikiwijs and the OER policy of the provincial ministries of education in Sri Lanka (COL, 2016).
  2. Comprehensive strategic education policies with an OER component. This type of policy refers to strategies for (parts) of the education system that include OER as a building block. An example is the ‘Open Learning Policy Framework for South African Post-School Education and Training’ established by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) (Goodier, 2017; Marín et al, 2022).
  3. Policies related to general ICT for learning with some OER component. This type of policy is typically national or regional ICT, e-learning, or distance learning policies or strategies in which OER are embedded, but in which OER are not the central element of the policy. An example is the Digital Strategy for Cyprus.
  4. Policies aimed at open government that include an OER component. Open government policies (OGPs) focus on national priorities for open government in which values are formulated for transparency, accountability, and public participation. OER can act as a leverage for these policies. An example is the Third National Action Plan from the Brazilian government.
  5. Open Access, Open Science and Open GLAM Policies. Worldwide, we are witnessing the fact that OER are increasingly becoming part of Open Science policies, Open Access policies, and Open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) policies. An example is the Dutch Rijksmuseum with their open collection of cultural heritage.
  6. Labor market policies. This type of policy has a strong focus on skills development for the labor market and incorporates OER. An example is the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund Grants Program of the USA Department of Labor.

OER policy: it should not be only about access

As Dominic says in his blogpost, the OER uptake worldwide is dependent on good policies and regulations which encourage the development and use of OER, and storage and discoverability tools beyond the individual market-focussed strategies of edtech companies. The GEM 2023 Report highlights various aspects of access to content and content delivery. Access to high quality learning will only be achieved through better distribution channels for materials (open access), and the opportunity to adapt and localise these materials to the needs and context of the learners (rights to reuse and adapt).

But these policies should not just focus on availability and accessibility of OER. They should also address the innovative use of OER in educational practices, e.g., Open Pedagogy.  The closest to these requirements are institutional policies of type 3. These policies of applying OER in education aim at quality improvement of education. It is, in our eyes, an important lever to make teachers aware of the potential of OER because it is directly related to their passion of delivering quality education.

References

Atenas, J., Havemann, L., Neumann, J., & Stefanelli, C. (2020). Open Education Policies: Guidelines for co-creation. Open Education Policy Lab. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4032993

COL (2016). OER Policy – Provincial Ministries of Education Sri Lanka. http://hdl.handle.net/11599/2360

Goodier, S. (2017, August, 24). A look at the open learning policy framework for post-school education and training in South Africa. ROER4BLOG. https://www.roer4d.org/3091

Marín, V., Zawacki-Richter, O., Aydin, C., Bedenlier, S., Bond, M., Bozkurt, A., Conrad, D., Jung, I., Kondakci, Y., Prinsloo, P., Roberts, J., Veletsianos, G., Xiao, J. & Zhang, J. (2022). Institutional Measures for Supporting OER in Higher Education: An International Case-Based Study. Open Education Studies4(1), 310-321. https://doi.org/10.1515/edu-2022-0019

Otto, D., Schroeder, N., Diekmann, D., & Sander, P. (2021). Trends and Gaps in Empirical Research on Open Educational Resources (OER): A Systematic Mapping of the Literature from 2015 to 2019. Contemporary Educational Technology, 13(4), ep325. https://doi.org/10.30935/cedtech/11145

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