Access to Open Educational Resources: Report of a UNESCO OER Community Discussion

UNESCO's international Community on Open Educational Resources has been active since 2005. It connects some 900 individuals in 109 countries to share information and discuss issues surrounding the production and use of Open Educational Resources ? web-based materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research.

The community returned to the issue of access in a new discussion, held in February and March 2009. The new discussion took up the issues first raised in June 2008, and explored access challenges and some of the potential solutions at hand. It was an opportunity to share creative responses from different situations. Broadly speaking, the discussion was conducted in three phases:

• Week 1: Identification and description of the main problems associated with access, and an initial development of a classification scheme.
• Week 2: Exploration of solutions and approaches, and their potential for the various types of barriers identified.
• Week 3: A concrete attempt to develop specific proposals.




• The present document is the summary report of this discussion.