Degrees of ease: adoption of OER, open textbooks and MOOCs in the Global South

Abstract

Internationally, education institutions are under a great deal of pressure to provide rising numbers of students with access to quality education in increasingly economically constrained environments. For some time now, the affordances provided by the internet have enabled a range of educational activities to be supported digitally or conducted online. Three fairly new forms of web-enabled activities that are receiving attention are Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Textbooks, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). OERs and Open Textbooks have been hailed as a response to the demand for provision of flexible and cost-effective learning materials, while MOOCs have been touted as an answer to the provision of up-to-date and cost-effective tuition for growing numbers of students in so-called ‘developing countries’, or what I shall refer to as the Global South. This paper will offer a definition of these forms of teaching provision and learning support within the context of “Open Education” and identify the key activities underlying OER, Open Textbooks and MOOCs. It will interrogate the factors that seem to influence the ease with which educators and students in the Global South can contribute to or adapt existing materials and/or tuition to suit their contexts as a way to avoid any possible “neo-colonization and one-way flow of content based on the massive amount of content published by those in richer nations” (Amiel 2013: 127).