The Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) (40 C/32) was adopted at the 40th UNESCO General Conference in Paris on 25th November 2019 as the culmination of a long process of UNESCO engagement with the concept of OER. Now that it is adopted and a UNESCO Dynamic Coalition has been discussing the next steps, this raises the practical question of what steps government and educational institutions at all levels can do to help to operationalize the OER Recommendation.
To help to unpack the possibilities, OER Africa has been facilitating a process to support UNESCO and its stakeholders to consider what actions they might consider taking in each of the four key areas of the Recommendation:
1) Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER;
2) Developing supportive policy;
3) Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER; and
4) Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER.
This work is being done with support and input from a Network of Open Organizations organized by Open Education Global. Discussions are in very early phases but has so far led to development of a very detailed Matrix of possible actions to operationalize the OER Recommendation. The draft Matrix considers in detail all the Actions identified for each Area of Action in the OER Recommendation and lists possible initiatives that governments and institutions might take (analysed separately for each stakeholder group). It is a work in progress.