We’ve heard a lot about OER at CityTech, and there have been recent pushes to fund Open Educational Resources at CUNY and SUNY. Now, let’s take a look at OER in the worldwide context!
OER: A Worldwide Movement
UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) hosted the first Global OER Forum in 2002, which lead to the Paris OER Declaration – an effort to encourage OER support at the government level.
Why this global interest? As the Slovenian education minister notes, “OER is one of the ways to make education really inclusive, accessible, and open to everyone.”
A World of Possibilities
OERAfrica is one example of a site that brings together policy, research, and links to educational content. The project is geographically-specific, devoted to 
“to harness OER practices in ways that resolve some of the deep-seated pedagogical challenges facing African higher education institutions.”
Another interesting project is the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages, “a digital archive of endangered literature in Australian Indigenous languages of the Northern Territory of Australia.”
Developed under a Creative Commons license, the site hopes to integrate “collaborative research work with the Indigenous communities,” and includes full text books in languages like Djambarrpuyŋu, Golumala, and Ḻiya-galawumirr.
The Future of OER?
As we can see, there are a variety of efforts towards making content more available to a worldwide audience, and openly-licensed, as OER. In a future post, we’ll take a closer look at some of the context in which this movement developed, and critiques along the way.
