Not only do national education policies determine the educational principles and objectives that a sitting government adopts, they can also have a far-reaching effect on a citizen’s quality of and access to education, including whether that access is equitable and inclusive. Effective education policies can be transformative for a country and its people. This applies equally when one considers the potential impact of national Open Educational Resource (OER) policies on learners, educators, and education systems. OER provide possibilities to innovate in teaching and learning, to reimagine how education systems function and the values that they promote, and to expand access to inclusive and equitable quality education as outlined in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4. ^[1]

Policy is a key indicator of OER practice. When an OER policy is well-designed and implemented it can act as a driving force for creating and sustaining vibrant OER ecosystems.[2] It thus follows that one of the OER Recommendation’s five objectives and areas of action is to develop supportive policy. The Recommendation notes that this includes:

"Encouraging governments, and education authorities and institutions to adopt regulatory frameworks to support open licensing of publicly funded educational and research materials, develop strategies to enable the use and adaptation of OER in support of high quality, inclusive education and lifelong learning for all, supported by relevant research in the area."[3]

Work on OER policy has already started in many countries around the world and international bodies such as UNESCO are supporting efforts to develop such policies through, for example, the forthcoming release of guidelines for national governments and institutions on OER policy and capacity building in the first half of 2023. But what progress has been made so far on OER policy development and implementation?

A new report by Neil Butcher & Associates (NBA) sets out to understand the effectiveness of OER policies to date and whether there is evidence of integration between OER policy provisions and other mainstream government policy commitments or strategic goals. The research involved a review of 27 standalone OER policies and 16 policies that contained OER commitments. The research also sought to strengthen understanding of the most effective strategies and approaches to create government policy and regulatory environments that facilitate implementation of UNESCO’s Recommendation on OER and OER more generally.

The report contains three key findings.

1. There were unforeseen challenges with finding OER policies that fitted the research criteria

For a policy to qualify for inclusion in the dataset, it needed to meet three criteria. There needed to be:

• Evidence that the policy had been approved by the government.
• Availability of baseline documentation of what OER activities were already underway in the country before the policy came into effect (where available).
• Evidence of meaningful OER practices that were implemented since the policy was approved.

The research team was only able to identify a handful of policies that met our criteria – 27 national standalone OER policies and 16 policies that contained OER commitments.

2. There was limited evidence of policy implementation in line with the policy provisions of standalone OER policies and other policies that contained OER commitments.

Of the 27 national standalone OER policies, only two fitted all criteria and provided sufficient evidence of meaningful OER practices following implementation. There were four instances of OER commitments in other policies (e.g. Information and Communication Technology policies) that matched the qualifying criteria. However, in most cases, there was limited evidence available of sustained and comprehensive policy implementation in line with the policy provisions.

It was not possible to tell which type of policy (standalone versus a different policy containing OER commitments) was more impactful for various reasons, including that there were too few qualifying policies to draw a meaningful comparison. There was also conflicting information online, and sometimes a lack of information online regarding a causal link between OER practices that occurred as a result of policy commitments.

3. When looking at the relationship between OER policy provisions and national plans or strategies, OER policy is not a precondition for meaningful OER practices, but it does seem to be an enabler in creating a coordinated national effort geared towards OER implementation.

For a coordinated national effort to proceed optimally, there needs to be alignment between OER policy provisions and a government’s strategic priorities. Ideally, this should be consistently expressed in the government’s overall vision for the education system and in the documents that it releases and implements including policies, legislation, national plans, and strategies.

Ultimately, the research provides insight into the global OER policy landscape, outlining successes in OER policy development and implementation. It highlights a need to problematise the idea of educational policy as it relates to the OER movement and interrogate why OER policies are developed, their function, and how they are implemented. The report provides a series of recommendations and areas for further enquiry, centred around the suggestion that until OER policy commitments are directly connected to the attainment of national level policy commitments and the overall vision for the national education system as expressed in government documents, they are unlikely to be impactful.

Other recommendations include allocating more resources to policy review processes to determine the validity, relevance, and progress in achieving policy outcomes. The report also encourages governments to consider possible misalignments between national policy provisions and what is realistic to implement. It concludes with a series of questions that governments might reflect on when starting the OER policy development process.

OER Africa will release a subsequent thought piece on these findings and how to take the recommendations forward.

Access the full report here.

Related articles

• International Day of Education on 24 January 2023
• The UNESCO OER Recommendation and effective, inclusive, equitable access to quality OER
• Why is 'Open Education' important?

Image: World Bank Photo Collection, Openverse (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The United Nations (UN) set out the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. SDG 4 concerns “inclusive and equitable quality education.”[1] While there have been a number of proposals[2], it is not clear the extent to which Open Education or OER are assisting with achieving the goal, so the International Day of Education may provide a focal point for associating SDG 4 with the open education movement. The UN designates specific days, weeks, years, and decades as occasions to mark particular events or topics to promote the objectives of the organization. Since 2019, the UN’s educational arm (UNESCO) has celebrated the International Day of Education on 24 January. This, year the theme is “to invest in people, prioritize education.”

This year’s Day will call for maintaining strong political mobilization around education and chart the way to translate commitments and global initiatives into action… Education must be prioritized to accelerate progress towards all the Sustainable Development Goals against the backdrop of a global recession, growing inequalities and the climate crisis.[3]

The concept note for the International Day of Education builds on the UN Transforming Education Summit held in September 2022. It calls for strong political mobilization around education to translate commitments and global initiatives into action. The critical areas highlighted are 

1. Foundational learning; 
2. The green and digital transitions; 
3. Gender equality;
4. Education in crisis; and 
5. Financing.

How do these fit with OER and the UNESCO OER Recommendation that we discussed in March 2022? While the International Day of Education does not specifically link to OER, we note that the day provides an opportunity to showcase OER within each of the critical areas, or create OER where they are not available. The concept note stresses the need to capacitate policy makers, teachers and educators to make education transformative, while one of the OER Recommendation’s areas of action is to build stakeholder capacity, as we highlight below. Here, we briefly examine each of the critical areas from the UN Transforming Education Summit, to show how OER and other available resources can help with operationalising the Recommendation.

1. First, a key to foundational learning is literacy. The UNESCO concept note states that “six out of 10 children cannot read and understand a simple story at age 10.” Open licensing is crucial in enabling children to both learn to read and practice reading, as it provides freely accessible and downloadable resources in contexts where they may be none. The African Storybook initiative provides open access picture storybooks in the languages of Africa, while the Early Literacy Resource Network gives access to high-quality books and learning resources in multiple languages.
2. The Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) assists learning institutions at all levels to transition to digital learning with their Technology-Enabled Learning initiative. CoL is also at the forefront of green education, as can be seen in its video on Promoting Learning for Sustainable Development. CoL’s policy is that all of its resources are openly licensed.
3. The OER Africa post in November 2022 provided instances on how gender intersects with open resources, such as  Girls Can Code Initiative, Girl Code Africa, and the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET). A Practice Guidance note on gender equality is available here, while Oxfam has produced a book on the subject with practical examples.
4. Ideas around education during emergencies and crises have been prevalent even before the shutdowns of 2020 and 2021. Useful openly licensed resources can be found at education in emergencies and protracted crises. Particularly useful from an educational technology standpoint is the rapid evidence review on Education in Emergencies that summarises best practices on access to education, content, support and psychosocial well-being.
5. For the critical areas above, the financing of education is crucial. UNESCO has produced an education simulation model to assist sectors to make the best decisions on how to finance education. The World Bank is the largest financier of education in the developing world, so understanding its priorities is important for anyone involved in educational finance.

To operationalise the UNESCO OER Recommendation’s area of action to build capacity of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER, it is necessary to

• Build awareness regarding the usefulness of OER.
• Capacitate educators at all levels to create, re-use, adapt, and redistribute OER.
• Raise awareness regarding the advantages of Open Access works.
• Make OER widely accessible and findable in appropriate repositories.
• Promote digital literacy skills to enable users to develop, access and adapt OER.

OER Africa, in its association with the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA), the Association of African Universities (AAU), and selected universities on the continent, is building capacity of their members in accordance with the OER Recommendation, so that the ideals of the International Day of Education and the Sustainable Development Goals can be realised. We would welcome hearing from any interested persons who are working along similar lines; our email address is info@saide.org.za

Related articles:

• The UNESCO OER Recommendation and effective, inclusive, equitable access to quality OER
• International Literacy Day 2022: ‘Transforming Literacy Learning Spaces’
• International Youth Day: Open learning as a driver to realising the Sustainable Development Goals?

Image courtesy of USAID, Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

UNESCO OER Recommendation

UNESCO members states unanimously approved the OER Recommendation on November 29, 2019. It is the first international normative instrument to embrace the field of openly licensed educational materials and technologies in education and builds on almost two decades of UNESCO work on OER.

The Recommendation pinpoints five essential areas of action to build and sustain a worldwide OER ecosystem:

1. Capacity-building;
2. Developing supportive policies;
3. Effective, inclusive, and equitable access to quality OER;
4. Creation of OER sustainability models; and
5. Use of international cooperation to foster OER.

UNESCO will publish guidelines on these five action areas in early 2023.[1] This communication is about action area three—effective, inclusive, and equitable access to OER—which touches on all five areas. We are focusing on areas one to three from the list below.

What does effective, inclusive, and equitable access to quality OER mean?

UNESCO’s list is quite broad:

1. Ensuring online and offline technical access;
2. Supporting OER stakeholders to develop gender-sensitive, culturally, and linguistically relevant OER, particularly in under-resourced and endangered languages;
3. Ensuring that the principles and programmes are in place for gender equality, non-discrimination, accessibility, and inclusiveness;
4. Ensuring public and private investments in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and providing increased access to OER, particularly for low-income, rural, and urban communities;
5. Incentivizing the development of, and research on, OER; and
6. Developing and adapting existing evidence-based standards, benchmarks, and related criteria for OER quality assurance.

The UNESCO guidelines will discuss and analyze this and the other action areas in detail; this article provides examples of innovative ways that OER is being used in educational systems from basic to tertiary education to ensure effective, inclusive, and equitable access to quality openly licensed content.

Policies and implementation

There are some institutional and national policies on technical accessibility, which are reported on in the forthcoming UNESCO guidelines. Policies on gender, culture, and language are less entrenched. In some African countries, there are policies in place to use local languages in teaching through grade three or four.  However, a lack of sufficient content, appropriate teacher training, and public attitudes that favour English or other colonial languages, makes implementation difficult.  In Kenya, for example, the implementation of mother tongue education policy: [2]

'is likely to flop if it is not supported by careful implementation strategies that take care of teacher training, the production of teaching/learning materials and attempts to change the attitudes of parents towards indigenous languages.'

In Sierra Leone, the politics of language complicate policies in favour of learning in local languages: [3]

'People are looking at it like, if you are literate in mother tongue, what will you eat? Will it get you a job? Are you even considered literate?'

The UNESCO OER Recommendation requires governments to report to UNESCO annually on their progress in meeting the Recommendation using an accepted list of criteria. Governments will begin reporting in 2023. Progress in meeting all of the action areas in the OER Recommendation will be known as reporting continues, including this action item on accessibility, inclusion, and equity.

Online and offline technical access

According to the Recommendation, all content created for the Internet, whether it is used online or offline, must meet certain technical standards to ensure that resources can be accessed by the visually, hearing, or otherwise impaired individuals

In a 2021 briefing paper co-published by UNESCO and the United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD), the organizations identified six barriers to accessible OER for people with disabilities or those who are underserved in education: [4]

• Languages used in the creation of resources (particularly for English language learners) and the readability level; [5]
• Images, charts, and figures which are instrumental to the text, however, do not include alternative text; [6]
• Multimedia such as video, which does not include transcripts or closed caption; [7]
• Lack of access to digital technology for learning; [8]
• Poor assistive technology compatibility with OER; and [9]
• Locating appropriate OER resources can be difficult. [10]

Figure 1: CUNY accessibility logo

The City University of New York (CUNY) in the United States has created an OER accessibility toolkit to assist librarians, faculty, staff, and developers meet some of the challenges enumerated by UNESCO and UNPRPD. [11]  It does not address problems associated with languages, for example, or locating accessible OER resources.

The toolkit contains information on:

Creating Accessible Content: Tips on how to create accessible Word documents, PDFs, images, videos and other multimedia.

Platforms: Which OER platforms are accessible? What are the pros and cons of each one?

Evaluating your OER site: Determine if your site is accessible and see how to fix issues on your site.

Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs): Collection of VPATs from various vendors to see relevant information on how a vendor’s product or service claims to conform to IT standards for people with disabilities. (Section 508 Standards in the US Rehabilitation Act).

The University of British Columbia in Canada has published a similar open education toolkit, which is far more detailed than the one produced by CUNY.

There may be a disjuncture in how different authorities determine what is entailed in accessibility.  UNESCO includes language, gender, and culture in the OER Recommendation.  CUNY, UBC, and other universities examine the technical aspects of accessibility, but not the broader societal issues that also impact on the ability to people to use content.

Much has been written about accessibility policies and there are clearly excellent toolkits available, but it is not always easy to identify accessible OER to support diverse learners. Accessible OERs are not readily apparent on relevant hubs and in Google searches. This appears to be an unmet need for anyone who wants to adapt existing content that is already accessible.  In an interview with University World News, Kesah Princely, a blind PhD student in conflict resolution at the University of Buea in Cameroon, outlined some of the accessibility problems he and other students face: [12]

'The challenges are quite enormous. The library is inaccessible to blind students because there are no books in Braille, nor are there audio recorded materials. Infrastructure-wise, it is also not accessible to people in wheelchairs. Some of these students with disabilities are not even aware of the school library, just because things are not well explained to them.

Also, the curriculum is not well designed to suit learners with different abilities. It becomes very difficult for us with visual impairment to comprehend some key courses, especially those which have to do with images. Photojournalism is an example. In other areas, like mathematics and diagrams, the lecturers lack the requisite skills to explain the concepts to learners with visual impairment.'

Gender, cultural, and linguistically sensitive OER

Below are some instances on how gender, culture, and language intersect with content and its use. Not all the examples are openly licensed, but they provide ways to ensure that inclusion is an essential consideration. There is nothing to stop you, the reader, from modelling your efforts on the ideas given in these examples and using an open licence.

Gender

Use of the Internet and other technologies are now essential, for education and much else. UNICEF reports the disparities between the sexes both as users and designers of technology:

'There is a gender digital divide: girls are disadvantaged when it comes to digital adoption, have lower levels of access to and use of digital technology than boys, and often they are not benefitting from digital technology in the same way as boys.'[13]

The UNICEF office for East Asia and the Pacific therefore produced a toolkit of best practices, to support innovators, designers, and implementers of digital products and services, to benefit girls and young women equally and help close the gender digital divide.

Figure 2: Blowing bubbles and writing code at Girls Code Africa

The Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) puts ideas about gender-based best practices and training to work. WOUGNET, which partners with many different international organizations, including UN Women, has a mission of promoting the use of ICTs by women and girls for gender equality and sustainable development. There are also many programmes to teach African females of different ages how to code, such as the African Girls Can Code Initiative and Girl Code Africa.

Programs carried out by WOUGNET and the ones to teach girls coding, empower females with the kinds of skills they require in their work and studies.  WOUGNET focuses on adult women in training, technical support, networking, and advocacy to empower women.  Its workshop on digital security training, for example, showed how social media platforms can be misused to the detriment of women’s safety [14]. Coding is important for a number of reasons.  According to the British organization, Funtech, girls who learn to code improve in math, writing, and creativity.  Coding also offers girls admission into a variety of tech careers. [15]

Openly licensed digital story platforms, such as African Storybook and StoryWeaver, have numerous stories promoting the roles of girls and women. StoryWeaver has a special section for middle readers on challenging gender stereotypes, which includes a boy who is mocked because he wants to dance and a girl who lifts weights.

Culture and language

In 2019 UNESCO celebrated a Year of Indigenous Languages and marked this effort by releasing the Los Pinos Declaration in 2020. In this document and elsewhere, UNESCO integrates culture and language with several key principles including:

'Centrality of indigenous peoples – ‘Nothing for us without us’, according to the principle of self-determination; the right to use, develop, revitalize, and transmit languages orally and in written forms to future generations which reflect the insights and values of indigenous peoples, their identities and traditional knowledge systems and cultures; the equal treatment of indigenous languages with respect to other languages; and the effective and inclusive participation of indigenous peoples in consultation, planning and implementation of processes based on their free, prior and informed consent right from the start of any development initiative as well as the recognition of the specific barriers and challenges faced by indigenous women, whose identity, cultural traditions and forms of social organization enhance and strengthen the communities in which they live.' [16]

Initiatives that focus on the use of mother-tongue languages sometimes also incorporate gender into their efforts. In 2016, the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning reported on one such instance on maternal health, literacy, and language. In Bolivia, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport worked in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund to implement a bilingual literacy project in reproductive health. The project was instituted in response to high levels of illiteracy and high maternal and infant mortality rates among poor people, particularly those from indigenous populations. It employed a gender-based approach and primarily targeted women. Learning was conducted in both indigenous languages and in Spanish. This bilingual approach is vital because it helps learners to comprehend the issues covered, while drawing on the learners' experiences and cultural sensitivities. This initiative was then implemented in Paraguay, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala, with coordination and support from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL/ ECLAC). [17]

In Canada, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Indigenous Services Canada works collaboratively with partners to improve access to high quality services for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. Resources on the platform have been created by the Public Health Agency of Canada, Indigenous Services Canada, and various Indigenous organizations, with a vision to support and empower indigenous peoples to independently deliver services and tackle the socio-economic conditions in their communities. COVID-19 awareness resources are available in English, French, and languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of Canada. [18]

Turning to the youngest learners and nascent readers, Dorcas Wepukhulu of African Storybook explained the importance of using local languages and familiar images as follows:

'For children’s literacy material to be equitable and inclusive, it must be appropriate for the child’s context and age, with images that make sense to the child and support the meaning of the written text, it must also be available, accessible and affordable. With technology and open licensing, ASb aims to get storybooks to every child learning to read, in a language that is familiar to them; with content that speaks to their interests, and experience.' [19]

Interconnections and complexity

The UNESCO OER Recommendation is about creation and utilization of openly-licensed content.  This action area on accessibility, inclusion, and equity addresses the underlying issues that are necessary to both produce and use OER.  Governmental policies and implementation are critical to the success of the Recommendation if it is to have benefit. Some areas are technical, but others impact on cultural assumptions, towards language, for instance, or girls’ education.  The complexity of action item three is therefore notable.

References

[1] Guideline authors include OER experts in the action areas covered by the UNESCO OER Recommendation and listed in alphabetical order: Tel Amiel, Javiera Atenas, Melinda dela Peña Bandalaria, Neil Butcher, Lisbeth Levey, Ahmed Tlili, and Zeynep Varoglu

[2] MANDILLAH, Lucy. Kenyan curriculum reforms and mother tongue education: Issues, challenges and implementation strategies. Educ. as change [online]. 2019, vol.23, n.1 [cited  2022-11-18], pp.1-18. Available from: <http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1947-9417201.... ISSN 1947-9417.  http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/1947-9417/3379. 

[3] “Mother tongue won’t help you eat”: Language politics in Sierra Leone. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345815874

[4] https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000380471

[5] Rets, I., Coughlan, T., Stickler, U., & Astruc, L. (2020). Accessibility of Open Educational Resources: how well are they suited for English learners? Open Learning, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2020.1769585 (This journal requires a subscription to access articles or a fee of $47 for purchase.)

[6] Coolidge, A., Doner, S., Robertson, T., & Gray, J. (2018). BCcampus open education: Accessibility toolkit (2nd ed.). https://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit/

[7] Ibid.

[8] UNICEF. (2021). Responding to COVID-19: UNICEF annual report 2020. https://www.unicef.org/media/100946/file/ UNICEF Annual Report 2020.pdf

[9] Zhang, X., Tlili, A., Nascimbeni, F., Burgos, D., Huang, R., Ting-Wen Chang, Jemni, M., & Mohamed, K. K. (2020). Accessibility within open educational resources and practices for disabled learners: A systematic literature review. Smart Learning Environments, 7(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-019-0113-2

[10] Anderston, T., Doney, J., Hendrix, B., Martinez, J., Stoddart, R., & Wright, M. (2019). The five laws of OER: Observations from Ranganathan. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 7(1), https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jlsc/article/id/12846/

[11] CUNY OER accessibility toolkit, last updated 2021. https://guides.cuny.edu/accessibility/home

[12] Njie, Paul. (2022). All students must learn about inclusive education – Activist. University World News. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202211161601561

[13] https://www.unicef.org/eap/innovation-and-technology-gender-equality

[14] https://wougnet.org/website/news/newsingle/70

[15] https://funtech.co.uk/latest/why-should-girls-learn-to-code

[16] https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/los_pinos_declaration_170720_en.pdf

[17] https://uil.unesco.org/case-study/effective-practices-database-litbase-0/bilingual-literacy-and-reproductive-health-bolivia

[18] https://www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1586548069915/1586548087539

[19] https://www.earlyliteracynetwork.org/blog/how-do-we-ensure-quality-equitable-and-inclusive-education-all-early-literacy-qa-part-3-3