Experts Meeting on Defining Open Educational Resources (OER) Indicators

ICT in Education Unit is processing a one-year project, “Open Educational Resources (OER): Indicators for National Adoption and Impact”, to develop a set of indicators on OER’s adoption and impact. These indicators will provide the evidence base required for policy-making and to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the OER policies and initiatives at the national level. The forthcoming expert meeting convenes all the leading experts in OER field to share their insights and recommendations to the project.

The term “Open Educational Resources” (OER) was first coined in 2002 at UNESCO’s Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. Since then, there has been a significant increase in the development, use and sharing of OER as more and more governments and institutions come to realise their value.

To date, UNESCO has performed extensive work in OER including regional policy and training workshops in Africa, Asia and with the Gulf Cooperation Council. These regional workshops have led to national workshops and seminars that provided comprehensive support and an eventual framework of creating and implementing a national OER policy.

Although the OER programme has moved quickly to a level of competency shared across all stakeholders, there are very few ways to measure and evaluate its adoption and effectiveness towards global education goals, only assumptions on OER’s potentials—and to a greater degree, assumptions on OER’s successes. What is currently lacking is developing indicators to be adopted by different organizations and governments to track worldwide adoption of OER.

UNESCO in collaboration with its Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) will take the lead in developing a set of indicators on OER’s adoption and impact by Member States. This project aims to define these indicators to measure adoption and direct impact of OER policy at the national level.