Open Educational Resources: Challenges and Perspectives - A Project Supported by the Open Society Institute

Session Title: Open Educational Resources: Challenges and Perspectives - A Project Supported by the Open Society Institute

Presenter: Carolina Rossini, Coordinator, OER-Brazil  & Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University

Download Video

Time & Date: 3:30 P.M. - 4:15 P.M., Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Location: Rm. C150

Session Description: Open Educational Resources is a concept that needs to be understood and appreciated from national perspectives and, mainly, from different structures of educational systems and strategies. Education is a deeply contextual and continuous process, so the global themes of access and openness must be studied in local implementations if they are to take root in local communities.

Brazil has taken one of the leading positions in the A2K, Open Source/free Software and Open Access movements, but still has taken small steps in consolidating an Open Education Resources strategy based in a structured approach. It is also notorious that some of the projects born during the current administration are technology driven, lacking a clear position inside a contemporary tendency. And unlike Open Access, which draws on the “invisible colleges” of research in which a biologist in Brazil has much in common with a biologist in Germany, Open Education must draw on much more local culture to make learning appropriate and lifelong. There is a significant need to both identify the global aspects of the OER movement and to learn skills and strategies to localize those aspects through the creation of country and community specific implementations.

Thus, in order to understand the complexity of a possible existing scenario of Open Educational Resources in Brazil and to propose recommendations, structuring the way forward, some basic research and mapping is needed.

The main goals of the OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES: Perspectives and Challenges are:

1. A green paper mapping the situation of OER in Brazil, how the educational policy is favorable for OER, the public money flow into educational materials (mainly textbooks), with some case studies. This green paper would be closed with a series of recommendations for policy on OERs for Brazil;
2. A toolkit focus in OER to be later distributed and promoted in Brazil. In this toolkit the idea is to clarify concepts around OER, put examples of strategies,IP/CC issues, tools and business models around OER, and also best practices that are being adopted. I will probably be working with ccLearn and others in designing this toolkit. I also organized a task-force in Brazil with representatives from academia and hopefully industry and government to give inputs as peers to the tool-kit;
3. Broker of connections between international initiatives with Brazilian initiatives;
4. A final conference to show results, discuss the recommendations, present international and national projects. The idea is to transform the conference in a working group or draft some consensus from the conference on a future public policy for OER in Brazil. During this conference, the results of the project would be shown, and we also would have the exposition of international projects and strategies focus on the promotion and implementation of OERs.