UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration

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The UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration, otherwise known as the Paris declaration on Open Educational Resources, is a declaration urging governments to promote the use of open educational resources (OERs) and calling for publicly funded educational materials to be released in a freely reusable form. [1]

Contents

Creation

In June 2012, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) held a World OER Congress. This took place at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris with financial support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. [1] [2] At this point, the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement was a decade old, the term having been coined in another meeting at UNESCO in 2002. [2] The congress wrote and, on 22 June, formally adopted a ten-point declaration calling on states to realise the benefits of open education.

Content

The declaration was influenced by article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which says that "Everyone has the right to education", and article 13.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which "recognize[s] the right of everyone to education". [3] It defines open educational resources (OER) as:

"teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions."

It makes ten recommendations for governments relating to OER: [4]

  1. Foster awareness and use of OER.
  2. Facilitate enabling environments for use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).
  3. Reinforce the development of strategies and policies on OER.
  4. Promote the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks.
  5. Support capacity building for the sustainable development of quality learning materials.
  6. Foster strategic alliances for OER.
  7. Encourage the development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts.
  8. Encourage research on OER.
  9. Facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER.
  10. Encourage the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds.

Impact

In addition to the Paris declaration, UNESCO and COL have worked on regional and national projects to encourage governments around the world to adopt policies on open educational resources. [2] A review published by UNESCO in 2015 describes the impact on government policies as "modest" while identifying some examples of success. [2]

The Scottish Open Education Declaration, created in 2013 by a network of individuals from educational organisations in Scotland, is based on the Paris declaration. [5] [6]

See also

Related Research Articles

Openness is an overarching concept or philosophy that is characterized by an emphasis on transparency and collaboration. That is, openness refers to "accessibility of knowledge, technology and other resources; the transparency of action; the permeability of organisational structures; and the inclusiveness of participation". Openness can be said to be the opposite of closedness, central authority and secrecy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational resources</span> Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content.

OpenLearn is an educational website. It is the UK's Open University's contribution to the open educational resources (OER) project and the home of free, open learning from The Open University. The original project was part-funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OpenLearn is a member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open education</span> Educational movement

Open education is an educational movement founded on openness, with connections to other educational movements such as critical pedagogy, and with an educational stance which favours widening participation and inclusiveness in society. Open education broadens access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems and is typically offered through online and distance education. The qualifier "open" refers to the elimination of barriers that can preclude both opportunities and recognition for participation in institution-based learning. One aspect of openness or "opening up" education is the development and adoption of open educational resources in support of open educational practices.

Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information, is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work, meaning "works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose."

An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost.

The Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, was a web-based publication of educational material from a number of Tufts University courses, providing open sharing of free, searchable, high-quality course content to educators, students, and self-learners throughout the global community. The Tufts OCW initiative encouraged the publication and free exchange of course materials on the World Wide Web. First launched in June 2005, Tufts OCW provided materials with strong representation from Tufts' health sciences schools, some of which were equivalent to textbooks in depth. All materials on the Tufts OCW site were accessible and free of charge. As Tufts OCW is not a distance learning program, no registration, applications, prerequisites, or fees are required and no credit is granted. Tufts ended funding for its Open Courseware initiative in 2014, and content on the Tufts OCW web site was removed on June 30, 2018.

Open.Michigan is a collection of open initiatives and projects at the University of Michigan (U-M). Open.Michigan supports the open access and use of U-M resources for teaching, learning, and research. Open.Michigan promotes open content licensing and supports the reuse, redistribution, and remixing of educational materials for use by others worldwide. Some of the key efforts underway under the Open.Michigan umbrella include U-M's Open Educational Resources publishing activities, development of software tools that support creating open content, and various open content repositories.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational practices</span>

Open educational practices (OEP) are part of the broader open education landscape, including the openness movement in general. It is a term with multiple layers and dimensions and is often used interchangeably with open pedagogy or open practices. OEP represent teaching and learning techniques that draw upon open and participatory technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. Because OEP emerged from the study of OER, there is a strong connection between the two concepts. OEP, for example, often, but not always, involve the application of OER to the teaching and learning process. Open educational practices aim to take the focus beyond building further access to OER and consider how in practice, such resources support education and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning. The focus in OEP is on reproduction/understanding, connecting information, application, competence, and responsibility rather than the availability of good resources. OEP is a broad concept which can be characterised by a range of collaborative pedagogical practices that include the use, reuse, and creation of OER and that often employ social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, empowerment of learners, and open sharing of teaching practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OER Commons</span> Freely accessible online library

OER Commons is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.

Open educational resources (OER) are learning materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. OER policies are adopted by governments, institutions or organisations in support of the creation and use of open content, specifically open educational resources (OER), and related open educational practices.

This outline of open educational resources provides a way of navigating concepts and topics in relation to the open educational resources (OER) movement.

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Open Educational Practices in Australia refers to the development, implementation and use of Open educational resources (OER), open access, open learning design, open policies, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to open up education in Australia.

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References

Open Access logo PLoS transparent.svg This article incorporates text from a scholarly publication published under a copyright license that allows anyone to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute the materials in any form for any purpose: Campbell, Lorna M. (June 2013). "The Benefits of Open" (PDF). cetis.org.uk. Centre for Educational Technology, Interoperability and Standards. Retrieved 11 June 2016. Please check the source for the exact licensing terms.

  1. 1 2 Bonk, Curtis J.; Lee, Mimi M.; Reeves, Thomas C.; Reynolds, Thomas H. (2015-06-12). MOOCs and Open Education Around the World. Routledge. ISBN   9781317614159.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Fengchun, Miao; Sanjaya, Mishra; Rory, McGreal (2016-04-18). Open educational resources: policy, costs, transformation (PDF). UNESCO Publishing. ISBN   9789231001482.
  3. ↑ Farrow, Robert (2016-05-13). "A Framework for the Ethics of Open Education". Open Praxis. 8 (2): 93–109. doi: 10.5944/openpraxis.8.2.291 . ISSN   2304-070X.
  4. ↑ Campbell, Lorna M. (June 2013). "The Benefits of Open" (PDF). cetis.org.uk. Centre for Educational Technology, Interoperability and Standards. Retrieved 11 June 2016.
  5. ↑ Cannell, Pete; Page, Anna; Macintyre, Ronald (2016-05-17). "Opening Educational Practices in Scotland (OEPS)". Journal of Interactive Media in Education. 2016 (1). doi: 10.5334/jime.412 . ISSN   1365-893X.
  6. ↑ "Scottish Open Education Declaration". Open Scotland. Retrieved 2016-07-13.
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