OE Global played an active role in drafting the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation which was unanimously adopted on November 25 by 193 UNESCO member states at the 40th UNESCO General Conference. OE Global sees this as a unique and important milestone offering a major opportunity to advance open education around the world.
OE Global believes that the best way forward to ensure successful global implementation of this recommendation is to join forces in a coalition. We see the benefits of a coalition as:
- Showing through action how organizations supporting open education around the world can work together
- Ensuring that each of our organizations do not duplicate efforts or offer separate, competing, redundant support
- Distributing the effort to develop and deliver robust comprehensive support across a coalition in such a way that we leverage our respective strengths and expertise
- Ensuring that resources and services in support of the recommendation are high quality, comprehensive, and consistent across our organizations
- Making it easier for our members and constituent stakeholders to clearly know who to get what support from by not offering separate and conflicting support
- Signalling to governments, funders, and the global open education community that our organizations are working in a coordinated way to support the recommendation
- Making it easier for funders to provide targeted funding by reducing the number of duplicate proposals they might get from each of us to do similar things
- OE Global believes we can achieve more together than we can separately.
OE Global reached out to a trusted network of partners with an established track record of collaboratively working together. As a result of that outreach an initial group of founding partners was formed including (in alphabetical order):
- Commonwealth of Learning
- Creative Commons
- International Council for Open and Distance Education
- Jožef Stefan Institute
- Knowledge 4 All
- OE Global
- Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO
- SPARC Europe
- SPARC North America
This coalition will meet and collectively develop an action plan in 2020. The focus will be on implementation support for the Recommendation’s five areas of action:
- Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, use, adapt and redistribute OER
- Developing supportive policy
- Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER
- Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER
- Facilitating international cooperation
- Monitoring and reporting