1. KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL.
HOW OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
CHALLENGE THE VALUE-ADDED MODEL
OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and
Measuring Progress Division –
OECD/EDU

2. MIT OpenCourseware
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3. OER
• “Digital learning resources offered online
(although sometimes in print) freely and
openly to teachers, educators, students and
independent learners in order to be used,
shared, combined, adapted, and expanded in
teaching, learning and research. They include
learning content, software tools to develop,
use and distribute, as well as implementation
resources such as open licences.” (UNESCO)
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4. OER
• “OER are teaching, learning, and research
materials in any medium that reside in the
public domain or have been released
under an open license that permits their
free use and re-purposing by others. An
open license is one that allows anyone to
access, reuse, modify and share the OER.”
(Hewlett Foundation)
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5. OER
• Educational resources that are freely
available for use by educators and learners
are growing and increasingly used
– Increasingly digitised content materials (learning
objects), such as texts, simulations, images, videos to
complete courses
– Available for learners, but also usable in formal
education
– Linked to other developments in „openness‟, such as
open source software, open access publishing, and
new approaches to collaborative flexible learning

6. The OER community & movement
• MIT OpenCourseWare project (2001)
• UNESCO (2002)
• William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• OpenCourseware Consortium
• Berlin and Cape Town Declarations
• Open Universities
• CERI, Knowledge for Free (2007)
• Global Knowledge Sharing Initiative, the White
House Office of Science and Technology Policy
• UNESCO-COL Guidelines (2011)
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7. Recent developments
• From content-only resources to full
learning objects
• Including also forms of assessment
• And certification: „digital badges‟
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8. Benefits & risks
• The potential benefits for public education
are huge:
– Improving access of underprivileged learners to
quality resources
– Reducing cost of developing learning materials
– Improvement of quality, diversity and richness of
learning resources in formal education
– Innovating learning practices in formal education
– Raising effectiveness of post-secondary education
– Fostering lifelong learning and connecting formal and
informal learning

9. Benefits & risks
• But are also some risks, which probably ask
for national and international policies:
– Quality (assurance) of OER‟s
– Language, geographical and cultural bias
– Unbalanced streams of OER‟s between developed and
emerging countries
– Sustainability of business models in developing OER
– Interoperability issues: users may find it difficult to
locate, download, adapt and use regardless of
platforms

10. Benefits & risks
• For a long time, appropriate intellectual property
licensing was an area with a lot of confusion, but
recently the Creative Commons licenses are
recognised as excellent and most widely used
– CC BY: the most open, allows to freely distribute,
remix, modify, even commercially, as long as initial
creator is credited for
– CC BY-SA: idem, but new versions need to be licensed
as original
– CC BY-ND: original can not be changed
– Three other variants
– Each license exists in 3 formats: legal, human
readable, machine readable

11. Benefits Challenges
Open and flexible learning Language and cultural
opportunities sensitivity
Efficiency and quality of
Connectivity
learning resources
Cost-efficiency Quality
Innovation Copyright and licensing
Systemic transformative
Sustainability
capacity
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12. OER activity
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13. Education level with OER activity
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14. Relevance of benefits
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15. Relevance of challenges
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16. OER policy strategies
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17. Strategic issues for HE
• Integrating OERs in the institutional
processes of teaching and learning can
probably help to improve quality and
relevance and to connect the institution
better with state-of-the-art knowledge in a
networked, globalised community, right?
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18. Strategic issues for HE
• Private cost of HE is rapidly increasing,
but what are students exactly paying for?
If content knowledge is no longer defining
the unique selling proposition of higher
education institutions, how should their
added value be identified and marketed?
Is a high private cost sustainable when
more and more resources and even parts
of the educational process are freely
available?
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19. Strategic issues for HE
• Is it thinkable that individual portfolios of
skills assessments and digital badges can
become a more trustworthy alternative for
employers than institutional
qualifications?
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20. Thank you !
dirk.vandamme@oecd.org
www.oecd.org/edu/ceri
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