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Open at the Margins: When Social Inclusion Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Concerns for the Future of the OER Movement in the Global South

Open at the Margins
When Social Inclusion Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Concerns for the Future of the OER Movement in the Global South
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table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Table Of Contents
  5. Acknowledgements
  6. Introduction
  7. Inequitable Power Dynamics of Global Knowledge Production and Exchange Must be Confronted Head On
  8. From "Open" to Justice
  9. The Fallacy of “Open”
  10. A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism, and Content
  11. Decolonising the Collection, Analyses and Use of Student Data: A Tentative Exploration/Proposal
  12. Reflections on Generosity of Spirit: Barriers to Working in the Open
  13. Open Pedagogy: A Response to David Wiley
  14. Open Education in Palestine: A Tool for Liberation
  15. Open Hearts, Open Minds, Crossed Purposes
  16. Antigonish 2.0: A Way for Higher Ed to Help Save the Web
  17. What is DigCiz and Why I am Not Marina Abramovic: Thoughts on Theory and Practice
  18. Locks on our Bridges: Critical and Generative Lenses on Open Education
  19. Reclaiming Disruption
  20. Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms
  21. Queering Open Pedagogy
  22. Student Spotlight: Matthew Moore, The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, 2nd edition
  23. Open Education, Open Questions
  24. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Open Research and Education
  25. OER and the Language Problem (Part 2): The Status and Function Rationale
  26. Towards Openness Provocation for #oeb17: How to Create a Non-inclusive Learning Environment
  27. Queer Histories, Videotape, and the Ethics of Reuse
  28. Breaking Open: Ethics, Epistemology, Equity, and Power
  29. OER, CARE, Stewardship, and the Commons
  30. OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining
  31. Open as in Dangerous
  32. When Social Inclusion Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Concerns for the Future of the OER Movement in the Global South
  33. What Open Education Taught Me
  34. The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation
  35. Open as a Set of Values, Not a Destination
  36. The Future of the Public Mission of Universities
  37. The Tyranny of “Clear” Thinking
  38. Open Praxis: Three Perspectives, One Vision
  39. Holding the Line on Open in an Evolving Courseware Landscape
  40. Exploring Origins as a Decolonizing Practice
  41. Openness in Whose Interest?
  42. Logic and Rhetoric: The Problem with Digital Literacy
  43. Educational Content, Openness and Surveillance in the Digital Ecology
  44. A Reflection on Open: An Open Reflection
  45. Accessibility Assessment

26

When Social Inclusion Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Concerns for the Future of the OER Movement in the Global South

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams

Originally published on April 17, 2018

Following Nancy Fraser’s concept of social justice as “parity of participation” (2005, p. 73), OER can unwittingly be used in three social unjust ways, namely (1) economic injustice or maldistribution; (2) cultural inequality or misrecognition; (3) political misframing.

In relation to economic injustice or maldistribution, the findings of the ROER4D project suggest that educators and students in the Global South can be impeded from full participation by the lack of access to material resources such as uninterrupted power supply, functional technological infrastructure, affordable and stable connectivity and adequate digital literacy skills. These types of obstacles need to be addressed through a range of more anticipatory open practices by OER creators, but will ultimately need governments, donor agencies and corporates to provide more equitable and affordable access to students and educators.

With respect to cultural inequality or misrecognition, findings from the ROER4D project suggest that educators and students in the Global South can be deprived of participatory parity due to the current domination of Western oriented epistemic perspectives and hegemonic English-language OER unless the opportunity to create or, at least, localise and redistribute OER in preferred languages and from alternative epistemic stances, is grasped and recognised. Although the ROER4D project showed that students and educators were likely, if at all, to use existing OER “as is” and then store adapted OER on password protected learning management systems, local OER were being created in specific contexts.

Referring to the political dimension in the context of OER representation (e.g. geographical, urban/rural, gender) and decision-making power (e.g. institutional, national and global) are important to consider, lest “those who suffer it may become objects of charity or benevolence […] or non-persons with respect to justice” (Fraser, 2005, p. 77). The ROER4D findings allude to devaluation or what Fraser terms “misframing” where students and educators have few ways of challenging their position in institutional, national and international processes. The ROER4D project highlights the need for educators to have copyright over their work in order to licence their teaching materials so that they have the choice to share them as OER.

With all the good intentions of the OER movement, my concern is that unless economic, cultural and political dimensions are adequately addressed the value proposition of OER will not be fulfilled in the Global South.

References

Fraser, N. (2005). Reframing justice in a globalising world. New Left Review, 36, 69–88. Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/II/36/nancy-fraser-reframing-justice-in-a-globalizing-world

About the Author

Emeritus Associate Professor Cheryl Ann Hodgkinson-Williams taught Online Learning Design, Advanced Research Design and Researching Higher Education courses to postgraduate students and supervises Masters and PhD students. Cheryl taught and supervised in the field of information communication technologies (ICTs) in education since 1994, first at the University of Pretoria, then at Rhodes University and then at the University of Cape Town. Cheryl was the Principal Investigator of the IDRC-funded Research in Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project which investigated the adoption and impact of the use of open educational resources in 21 countries in the Global South. She is an advisor on the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) project, the former Principal Investigator and current mentor of the Cases on Open Learning (COOL) project that is investigating the readiness towards open learning of TVET and HE institutions in South Africa. Cheryl is a former UNESCO Chair of Open Education and Social Justice and in November 2019 she was awarded the Open Education Consortium Leadership Award and was interviewed for Leaders and Legends of Online Learning podcast. Cheryl took early retirement at the end of January 2020, but is still active as a consulting researcher and an Open Education and Social Justice advocate.

Other works:

Hodgkinson-Williams, C.A. & Trotter, H. (2018). A social justice framework for understanding open educational resources and practices in the Global South, Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3), 204-224.

Hodgkinson-Williams, C.A. (2019). The Warp and Weft of Open Education and Social Justice. Keynote presentation at Open Education Global 2019, Milan, Italy, 26-28 November.

Attribution

When social inclusion doesn’t go far enough: concerns for the future of the OER movement in the Global South by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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