Sharing Nicely

I spent the last three days at the Open Courseware Consortium meeting hosted by the China Open Educational Resources network in Dalian, frantically running from meeting to meeting, promoting the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, doing a presentation on how OCW can be extended through accreditation, and participating in the OCWC board sessions.

The Open Courseware Consortium is the largest global network of universities that publish open educational resources. It was originally established at MIT, but with a clear mission to become an independent entity that represents institutions from all over the world, increase the amount of open courseware that is shared and developed, and increase its reach and impact. Over the past year, some members have worked very hard to develop the necessary governance documents and processes, which led to the election of the first Open Courseware Consortium board and the OCWC will shortly be incorporated as a non-profit organisation. From the perspective of our work at UWC, we were very happy to be voted onto the first board of the Open Courseware Consortium for the next two years. Three other institutions are represented for two years (the MIT, the Open University UK, and Keio University in Tokyo) and four others will participate for one year initially (TU Delft Netherlands, University of Korea, Tecnologico de Monterrey Mexico, and University Juan Carlos III Spain) to ensure sufficient board turn-over. Affiliate board members are the Utah State Universities Center for Open and Sustainable Learning and CORE, the Chine Open Resources for Education project.

The fact that an open courseware project from a small, previously disadvantaged institution in South Africa was asked to help shape the work of this global university network, is both indicator for the consortium members’ commitment to increasing reach and impact, and comes with a big responsibility for us to represent the needs and perspectives of institutions in developing countries. As every business consultant will say – a great challenge, and a tremendous opportunity!

Over the past few years, I have been commenting on the imbalance between the OER movement’s statements about supporting developing nations and the allocation of funding, which went almost entirely to well established and resourced institutions in developed countries. During the meeting I spoke to many of the participants from the developed countries about this issue and get the sense that there is a real interest and willingness to engage in order to find solutions together – but that there also seems to be a lack of strategies that are effectively put forward by developing country institutions. Of course, that is related to lack of capacity and awareness, but that creates a dilemma – as the South does not want to patronised and “developed” by the North, yet the North does not understand how it can effectively engage and collaborate. This is definitely an area that I will put some of my energy into in the next 2 years.

I also want to thank the Shuttleworth Foundation for providing a last minute travel grant to support my attendance at the meeting and hereby enabling African representation at the first board meeting.