Exploring Cases that Highlight Successes with Open Educational Resources

While education systems around the world have made significant gains over the past two decades, they continue to face several challenges – particularly in the developing world. These include unequal access to educational opportunities, the variable quality of educational resources, and below par or inconsistent learner outcomes. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has brought these challenges into stark view, and even exacerbated them in some cases. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer viable solutions to many of these issues. Although the concept of OER emerged in the Global North through initiatives like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) MITOpenCourseWare initiative in 2001, OER are gaining traction globally, with an increasing number of OER initiatives that are expanding capacity in key areas such as OER advocacy, practice and research.

Advocates promote OER for its benefits, including increasing access to educational materials; improving scalability and circulation of resources; and providing the opportunity to adapt resources to suit learners’ needs and contexts. However, ongoing research and evidence is required to gain a comprehensive, measured understanding of such benefits.

Within this context, OER Africa coordinated a project for the Network of Open Orgs. The project involved a collaborative effort among several members of the Network to develop a set of seven case study summaries that collectively explored the success of OER and highlighted the implications of these initiatives for Continuous Professional Development (CPD) for OER practices.

The case studies were analysed to produce a set of key findings for this summary report.