Working Groups: Open Educational Resources (OER) on open source learning management systems

I feel you, but fortunately the USA is actually an anomaly here ...

Recently UNESCO passed a Recommendation on Open Educational Resources.

https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000370936

After five years hard work, this was a UNANIMOUS decision from governments in pretty much every country in the world except the US, because Trump pulled out from UNESCO in general. 🙄

See some reaction from big OER supporters:

The standard argument I use is that making sure that the public money going into new projects going towards Open EdTech (and OER of course) will greatly increase the social impact of that project. Luckily this is a measure that funders generally care about.

We need to support and push all these OER upcoming opportunities as much as we can (via the above bodies possibly). And if you're in the US - please help get those Republicans out of power.

Re: Open Educational Resources (OER) on open source learning management systems

by Dan McGuire - Tuesday, 18 February 2020, 5:51 PM

I absolutely agree that pushing forward at the global policy level is crucial (I was one of the first ten people to join the Creative Commons Open Education Platform which now has over [I think] a thousand members globally.) The financial dynamics of the U.S market are a potential benefit to the rest of the world because if specific OER courses delivered on an open source LMS can be demonstrated to save U.S. institutions some of the money they're throwing at proprietary providers and also, and more importantly IMO, foment increased open educational pedagogy/practice, then those courses will be available for everyone else anywhere to use. It would also serve as a model of OER content creation. The U.S. would be supporting, or at least stimulating, the creation of content that can be used anywhere. The point is that there is already money flowing in the U.S. for the creation of content; the opportunity is to divert that flow to the creation of OER content that has been designed to utilize the features of an LMS like Moodle. I'm not suggesting that organizations everywhere shouldn't also push to create new OER content that is designed for delivery via an LMS. As it is now, there are not many working models of OER content being delivered via a fully functional LMS. As far as I can see, we're still mostly at the stage of posting PDFs on a LMS and calling it good, or using Google docs. What's needed is working models that will give the global organizations something to take off from.

I just spent last week in D.C. and there's a whole lot of work to do to get some reasonable people in power, but we're working on it.