Resources

In 2018 we published an open licensing primer for early literacy publishers on open licensing, with a brief section for authors and illustrators. So much has changed since then that we decided to take a fresh look at the issues and challenges, this time giving full attention to content creators, such as publishers, authors, illustrators, and teacher, all of whom have a stake in producing high quality and cost effective materials for education.

Education systems around the world have traditionally been characterized by closed knowledge systems, overly prescriptive curricula, narrow conceptions of success and achievement, and a failure to fully empower teachers as facilitators of learning. This inhibits their ability to develop a full spectrum of human learning capabilities amongst learners, especially in their formative schooling years.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education’. Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to support the removal of barriers to accessing resources and supporting inclusiveness (facilitated by digital literacy and information and communication technology). There are concerns about the quality aspect of OER, and how this is ensured for users and content creators. In addition, inclusion requires OER to be available in languages in which users prefer to access and use them.

Openly licensed educational content and librarians could enable more equitable access to quality resources, but only if governments, the development community, and other stakeholders pay attention to open educational resources (OER), open access, and other forms of open learning and research. This overview considers one global instrument aimed at facilitating openness, the UNESCO OER Recommendation, and carefully inspects it as it relates to the different library types in Africa and the user communities the libraries represent. 

In the last decade, a number of OER initiatives in African higher education have sought to address challenges related to the access, supply and contextualisation of educational materials. However, limited information is available on the effectiveness of such initiatives. To gain deeper insight into this, OER Africa conducted research between September 2019 and February 2022. The project analysed the effectiveness of eleven key African OER initiatives in higher education and their influence on developing and supporting effective OER practices.

This background paper was prepared for for: The World Bank, UNESCO and ILO (2023). Building Better Formal TVET Systems: Principles and Practice in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Washington D.C., Paris, Geneva: The World Bank, UNESCO, and ILO.

This report sets out to understand the effectiveness of OER policies to date and whether there is evidence of integration between OER policy provisions and other mainstream government policy commitments or strategic goals.

This assessment is aimed at identifying and assessing the current conditions and common practices under which Romanian training institutions operate and providing policy makers and training providers with key actions and recommendations to strengthen the education and training system in the country, with the intention of leading to increased economic productivity and competitiveness.

The World Bank has been implementing the Training Assessment Project (TAP) under the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) Initiative of the World Bank’s (WB) Education Global Practice to help governments assess the readiness of their training systems and institutions to support human capital development. In the case of Ukraine, the TAP seeks to support effective implementation of education reforms via the evaluation of the teacher education institutions’ performance.

This infographic provides an explanation of open licensing and how to use open licensing to increase access to high-quality teaching and learning materials, including textbooks and storybooks.