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This paper presents a broad overview of education through history, focusing on understanding key moments of change. The purpose of exploring educational changes through history is to identify the drivers of large-scale educational change and reflect on what implications this might have for promoting similar types of systemic educational change today.

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.

This paper examines the concept of OER in more detail, offering a simple, clear definition, explaining the economic and educational potential behind that definition, introducing examples of OER practices around the world, exploring legal considerations, and highlighting some of the challenges to releasing the transformative
potential of OER.

This introduction first sketches a contextual setting for the chapters of the book that follow. With reference to the existing literature, it begins by reviewing OER developments and some of the questions that have arisen from advances made thus far. Drawing inferences from these questions, we identify some of the more important gaps in the way OER research has been conducted. it argues that failure to begin exploring these gaps carries risks that could impede further OER progress.

Governments across the world are increasing the openness and transparency of their services, a move also taking place in the education sector in some countries, signifying commitment to openness and ensuring that adequate attention and funding is paid to open educational resources (OER). This chapter assesses the extent to which policies are being developed and/or modified to support effective use of open educational resources. However, despite the growth of OER at many institutions, surprisingly few have developed and implemented formal OER policies.

Sharing of higher education teaching materials under open licenses is a growing global practice. Several models of adapting and sharing existing materials include: institutionally-driven initiatives that result in materials being shared, mostly through repositories; cascade models that have a strong mentoring component; use of network repositories; and conversion of commercial teaching resources for sharing as open educational resources (OER). The processes followed in these models are similar in many respects.

Rapid ICT development presents both opportunities and challenges for learners who face barriers to traditional means of delivering education, including those enrolled in increasingly large face-to-face classes. Digital systems are highly adaptable and flexible, and can be personalised to a wide variety of learning needs.

This research paper sought to engage with the challenge of determining the conditions under which use of OER can drive a transformative educational agenda in schooling systems, using case studies in the developing world as its action research terrain. The desktop research conducted served to reinforce the urgent imperative for transformation of traditional schooling models, which are increasingly unsuited to the world in which their students live.

This policy brief describes some of the potential disruptions brought by openness as they pertain to key higher education activities of teaching and learning, research, and the impact on higher education policy.