Open Educational Resources and Capacity Building for Development

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

www.sparc.arl.org

Open Educational
Resources
and Capacity Building for
Development
Nicole Allen
OER Program Director, SPARC
6th Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals
December 10, 2013 • United Nations, New York, NY

Open Educational Resources Program

nicole@sparc.arl.org


www.sparc.arl.org

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of
academic and research libraries working to create
a more open system for sharing the results of
research.
www.sparc.arl.org



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Open Educational
Resources (OER)
Teaching, learning and research materials
in any medium, digital or otherwise, that
reside in the public domain or have been
released under an open license that
permits no-cost access, use, adaptation
and redistribution by others with no or
limited restrictions.
- UNESCO



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OER enables
capacity building by
enabling education



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Education Builds Capacity
Providing girls one extra year of education
beyond the average boosts eventual wages
by 10–20 percent. Studies have found
returns to primary education on the order of
5 to 15 percent for boys and slightly higher
for girls.

Source: “What Works in Girls’ Education,” Herz and Sperling 2004
http://www.cfr.org/education/works-girls-education/p6947
Slide adapted from http://www.righttoresearch.org



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Access to Materials Enables
Education
When free textbooks were supplied to
primary schools, controlling for other
influences, girls were 30 percent more likely
to enroll, but no effect was recorded for
boys’ enrollments.

Source: “What Works in Girls’ Education,” Herz and Sperling 2004
http://www.cfr.org/education/works-girls-education/p6947
Slide adapted from http://www.righttoresearch.org



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OER & Capacity Building
• Cost savings. Free for students,
teachers, schools and governments.




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Siyavula is a social enterprise built on
community, openness and technology,
working to make high quality educational
resources available to every learner and
teacher in South Africa.

Learn more: http://www.siyavula.com/



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During a teacher strike in 2010, the
South African government contacted
Siyavula to deploy open textbooks
throughout national public schools.
Siyavula currently offers more than 20
open textbook titles, which have been
used by more than 4 million students –
saving more than 230 million Rand
(USD $23 million).
Every student gets a print copy that
they can keep, and the books can be
downloaded in a PDF format for free,
for use on tablets, smartphones and
laptops.
Image Credit: Siyavula.com (used under fair use)




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• Access. Can be used and distributed in
any format, for any device – on or offline.




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OLE International is a social benefit
organization with a mission to increase
access to quality education through the
integration of technology.

Learn more: http://ole.org



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Olé’s Community Learning Centres
(CLCs) Program will enable refugees
in Dadaab, Kenya to access highquality OER through the use of tablets
linked to a digital library that works off
the internet with locally generated
power.
This project will make it possible for
more than 440,000 refugees to access
resources relevant to their needs and
interests. This program will also build
capacity at the local level, employing a
team of 6 refugees to serve as
Coaches and Technical Geniuses.

Image Credit: Ole.org (used under fair use)




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• Localization. Can be freely adapted and
translated to suit local needs.




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The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science
and Technology OER initiative seeks to
promote open learning through an open
exploration that enables faculty, students and
the global academic community to access OER
to maximize the impact and reach of their
scholarly work through open sharing.
Learn more: http://web.knust.edu.gh/oer/pages/



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When you look in textbooks it’s

difficult to find African
cases.
[S]ometimes it can be confusing
when you see something that
you see on white skin so nicely
and very easy to pick up, but on
the dark skin it has a different
manifestation that may be
difficult to see.
-Richard Phillips, lecturer, Department of
Internal Medicine, KNUST (Ghana)

Image CC:BY-NC-SA Kwame Nkrumah
University of Science and Technology

Slide credit: University of Michigan. Adapted from
http://www.slideshare.net/ummedicalschool/capacity-building-forglobal-health




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• Localization. Can be freely adapted and
translated to suit local needs.
• Sharing. Worldwide audience, inviting
collaboration and shared resources.



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The mission of the African Health Open Educational
Resources (OER) Network is to advance health
education in Africa by creating and promoting free,
openly licensed teaching materials created by
Africans to share knowledge, address curriculum
gaps, and support health education communities.

Learn more: http://www.oerafrica.org/



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The Paris OER Declaration, adopted during the World
Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress in June
2012, was the first step for the development of policies
supporting OER. The Declaration aimed at
encouraging governments to contribute to the
awareness and the use of OER and to develop
strategies and policies to integrate OER in education.
Learn more: http://www.unesco.org/oercongress



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Key Recommendations
Foster awareness and use of OER.
Promote and use OER to widen access to education at
all levels, both formal and non-formal, in a perspective
of lifelong learning, thus contributing to social
inclusion, gender equity and special needs education.
Improve both cost-efficiency and quality of teaching
and learning outcomes through greater use of OER.




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Key Recommendations
Foster strategic alliances for OER.
Take advantage of evolving technology to create
opportunities for sharing materials which have been
released under an open license in diverse media and
ensure sustainability through new strategic
partnerships within and among the education, industry,
library, media and telecommunications sectors.




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Key Recommendations
Encourage the open licensing of
educational materials produced with
public funds.
Governments/competent authorities can create
substantial benefits for their citizens by ensuring that
educational materials developed with public funds be
made available under open licenses (with any
restrictions they deem necessary) in order to maximize
the impact of the investment.



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OER in North America &
Europe
• U.S. State Department launched the Open Book
Project to expand access to OER in Arabic
http://www.state.gov/p/nea/openbook/
• U.S. Department of Labor providing $2 billion in grants
for workforce training, requires all materials be
licensed as OER http://www.doleta.gov/taaccct/

• European Commission launched “Opening Up
Education” initiative to increase the use of digital
technologies for learning and spur OER creation,
policies http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13859_en.htm



www.sparc.arl.org

Nicole Allen
@txtbks
http://sparc.arl.org


Open Educational Resources and Capacity Building for Development

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