Fostering social inclusion through open educational resources (OER)

This special issue explores open educational resources (OER) and the ways in which they can be used to support social inclusion, one of the key challenges that need to be addressed in today’s technologically rich digital environment (Conole, 2011). This call is timely as we are at a point in OER research where we need to move beyond the creation of OER repositories to consideration of how they can be used effectively. The OPAL project (http://oer-quality.org/) is a good example, as it focuses on exploration of the practices around the creation, use, and management of OER. There are now many repositories of good practice; however, despite this research suggests that learners and teachers are not using and repurposing OER extensively (McAndrew et al., 2009). New social and participatory media that have emerged in recent years seem to have immense potential for use in learning and teaching, in particular to support new forms of communication, cooperation, and collaboration (Conole & Alevizou, 2010). The key characteristics of these new technologies, such as peer critiquing, collective aggregation, personalization, networking, and more open practices, generally sit well alongside what constitutes good pedagogy and more learningand learner-centered approaches such as inquiry-based learning, scenario-based learning, dialogic and reflective learning, and more constructivist and situated pedagogies generally (Mayes & de Freitas, 2004). The vision behind the OER movement (promoted through organizations such as the Hewlett Foundation and UNESCO) is that making educational resources freely available to all is a fundamental right. The hypothesis is that making OER freely available will lead to their being used more by learners and teachers, as well as being repurposed, hence promulgating good practice. In particular, new social and participatory media provides a range of mechanisms for sharing and discussing OER. OER are of particular importance in addressing the challenges faced in developing countries, where it is evident that conventional approaches to education are not going to meet the needs of learners and teachers there (Daniel, 2010). However, despite the rhetoric about new social and participatory media generally and OER specifically, the reality is that their uptake and reuse in formal educational contexts has been disappointing. Furthermore, the ever increasing technologically rich learning environment in which today’s learners and teachers are immersed is raising issues in terms of social exclusion; the technological divide might be narrower but it is deeper—those not connected or not using these new technologies are being left behind at an alarming rate. Distance Education Vol. 33, No. 2, August 2012, 131–134