Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South: Degrees of Social Inclusion

Abstract

Across the Global South, educational institutions are under pressure to provide students with equitable access to affordable and good-quality education in economically constrained environments. The demand for equity of access to affordable and appropriate educational materials is felt in these countries that face growing student numbers, decreasing government funding, increasing textbook costs, and lack of locally relevant educational resources.The rapid growth and broad deployment of digital technologies have provided educators and students with platforms for locating, creating, sharing, and using educational materials at an unprecedented scale. This is a development that many (e.g., Daniel, Kanwar, and Uvalić-Trumbić 2009; Smith and Casserly 2006) have hoped would expand equity of access for those from resource-constrained environments. However, not all the educational materials located on the Internet are legally adaptable or shareable.Moreover, even if learners and educators have access to materials on the Internet, whether openly licensed or not, the content may not be suitable for their needs or it may lack relevance because it is based on worldviews or contexts that do not speak meaningfully to their own. Engaging with open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP), which entails creating materials, sharing them on public platforms, reusing the original materials verbatim, customizing them, combining them with other materials, and sharing these publicly, has been advocated as a way of reaching groups that are socioeconomically, geographically, linguistically, and epistemically marginalized. In many parts of the world, educators in schools, higher-education institutions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are starting to collaboratively create educational materials with the intention of sharing these freely with other educators and students.These OEP include activities such as collaboration among educators, cocreation among