The South joins a global conversation on open education - University World News
ab1630's bookmarks 2018-02-25
Summary:
"A 21-country study aimed at understanding how open educational resources (OER) can improve access, enhance quality and reduce education costs in the Global South not only fills a major gap in empirical research, but has helped to grow a community of researchers in the region and given educators in the South a space to voice their own perspectives and participate in a global conversation.
According to Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, principal investigator and director of the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project which conducted the research, the project builds on previous OER research in the Global South but represents a “world first” in terms of its scale and reach.
“This was a first stab at exploring open educational resources use and impact from a Global South perspective,” she told University World News. “We have been able to generate an empirical baseline upon which further OER research and advocacy can be built.”
The four-year project, out of which a 16-chapter edited volume has been produced, entitled Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South and published as an open access publication by African Minds, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and ROER4D, had the development of greater research capacity as a key objective....
Funded in the main through a grant by Canada’s IDRC and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development to the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 2013, with additional funds from the Open Society Foundations for a project in Latin America, ROER4D brought together a total of 103 researchers across 21 countries and 16 time zones in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. ..."