 I'm John Daniel of the Commonwealth of Learning and I'm with Tansri Raj Dhanurajan, the President Emeritus of Orwasan Open University, who was my predecessor at the Commonwealth of Learning. And we're going to be talking about this very trendy subject of open educational resources. I believe it's an important development, but perhaps the first thing we should talk about Raj is whether it is an important development. You've looked at this. I mean, do you think this is yet another educational technology fad or do you think there's something real there? Well, John, I hope it's not a fad. Certainly it has created a buzz at least in some circles over the last few years. My sense is it is another asset. Now how the higher education community especially wishes to use it or is able to use it is a big question. I mean, if one looks at the way Matsura, I hope I got his name right, defined it as part of his big picture description. We talked about shared knowledge is the valuable knowledge. In that context, any educational resource that's made available for sharing without handcuffs or leg irons attached to it has got a value. My only concern would be having an asset. An asset only becomes valuable if we don't have to use it. But that's been the kind of challenge I sense we certainly are confronting in Asia. It's a little comfortable for people like you and I to moan that some technologies are not being used, maybe in the context of formal higher education, especially institutionalized higher education or higher education from public institutions, the usage of e-learning has been rather limiting. Private enterprise had made greater use of it in terms of their training, corporate training issues and all of that. Even in Malaysia, there is a good example. I think the growth of Islamic banking has meant a whole way of doing a business of banking and retraining people who are trained in the other way of banking had become an issue and a fairly big issue. Central Bank of Malaysia set up a training institute and they have gone on and used to use quite a lot of at least digitized learning resources for their training purposes. So you do get some successes but not necessarily from the communities that you and I have been dealing mostly with. Although I think actually one can argue that Asia will be more successful with e-learning. John Bagley has just written a book in which he argues that because in Asia the traditional forms of open distance learning and the newer forms coexist, people still remember the lessons they learned in the traditional mode whereas in North America there are lots of people who think that ODL began in about 1999 with the internet and have completely forgotten all the lessons we learned about how to do ODL. Yes and John Bagley perhaps is a little bit more flattering than I think the situation. I think while Asian distance education enterprises have had a reasonably good presence and I think we are looking at 70 or so open universities and in excess of about 15 million participants. The quality of those ventures especially in the teaching and learning interface does not give me confidence that transforming themselves or using e-learning portals, digitizing information will help the learner, the autonomous learner, the self-learner where we have been able to get away with is simply through the fairly heavy intervention of the human support. I think the Asians make up for the deficiencies of the learning materials through tutorial. By lots of human. Now how could you do that in an e-learning environment which one assumes that open educational resources in some sense is beginning to signal that social learning, autonomous learning taking place, unless the product, unless the materials have a capacity to help, I fear that it will be just either text or a resource that may not have the quality of instruction that some of us may desire. Well certainly, specifically on open educational resources, the Commonwealth of Learning has now made quite a commitment to this. I think we're the only intergovernmental body that has a formal corporate policy on it and in a number of our programs, the Virtual University for Small States, the Commonwealth, we've got an open schooling project with five African, one Caribbean countries doing a whole senior secondary curriculum. As OERs there's this TESA project which we're small players in which is reaching hundreds of thousands of African teachers. That one in a way shows that this can work but I think the jury is still out to some extent but as you say, I mean I think in Asia probably the first use will be for institutions to get hold of better materials or incorporate better materials than they might develop themselves. I suspect we're some way from students putting together their own a la carte curriculum by grabbing OERs off the web. I mean I suspect that's true everywhere but probably particularly in Asia where that's not yet an idea that's very widespread I don't think. I think agencies like the MQA, the other washed docks of the ministries of other education or higher education have all consumer interests in mind when they regulate. They also inhibit innovations that the institutions can bring about and in that sense educational systems are probably a greater inhibitor of innovations in terms of teaching and learning and self-learning than one would wish them to be. You've looked at the sort of state of play of open educational resources in Asia a bit What did you learn from that? We're still beginning to analyze the data and from what little we have found so far there are maybe about four if not five different dimensions that requires perhaps even further drilling. The awareness and knowledge of open educational resources and their usability certainly is not widespread even at the level of institutional heads and I'm thinking specifically of institutional heads of institutions like Vavasan Open University and other open universities. They are not aware of what the resources are, how they can be put together to make a meaningful cohesive cause of studies leading to programs so awareness in terms of that is lacking, awareness in terms of the conventions governing intellectual property rights is also missing in a very big way so that's the first difficulty. The second difficulty is infrastructure we are looking at the IT infrastructure. While close to about 1.5 or even nearer to 2 billion Asians have access to the internet access doesn't necessarily mean widespread penetration that's being very much an urban phenomenon. A couple to that is the size of the pipes. The pipes that are available in terms of speed and volume or whatever is also limiting so we are not able as a consumer of resources to be able to sit in front of a computer and say I can get this in a snap, you have to wait hours, that's discouraging. While internet access is there we are also a little uncertain as to how e-ready many of our nations are. Other than the high income countries like Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Singapore the middle income and low income countries their e-readiness status and rank seems to be somewhat poor. They are in the lower half of 100 countries and the upper half of the 100 while the five nations that I spoke of they are some in the top 10 so there is this disparity. So in the lower income countries OERs are much more a sort of specialist thing for teachers who have the bandwidth rather than for the general fund. Even there there is a lack of capacity in terms of e-learning itself so teachers can have access to it but if they are going to be using it for example if I were to download a YouTube video and incorporate it into my lesson or whatever the capacity of a learner to learn through that medium so there are some some some gaps you have infrastructure problems we also have policy issues no institution in Asia other than maybe some in South Korea have yet a policy declaration I should compliment the commonwealth of learning by the way for coming out with its policy statement on open educational resources talking about institutions in Asia none of them that's a few in South Korea have institutional policies governing an approach to OER and that's further exacerbated by a lack of policies at a governmental level so many of these countries have signed up to the Creative Commons convention so you put all of them together and then you see what are the practices there are attitudinal difficulties in terms of you know if I were to use I just give a couple of examples if I were to use open educational resources and incorporate into my lesson will my colleagues respect me on the other hand if we have good textbooks in just like a conventional system where teachers would find that they could actually strip and assemble such textbooks I may be under the CC by license as they could then you are getting a taking another step in in in unbundling certainly the the rigidity of a published textbook and putting in place both the open textbook as well as additional resources it's going to an evolutionary process gradually and it's not just the developing world I mean California is a peculiar place because it's meant to be very rich but in fact it's on its backside in terms of government finances but Swachnega one of his big things was you know open textbooks and I saw some figures somewhere that by using OER based textbooks the state of California was going to save three hundred and fifty million dollars every year on the cost of sex was or the people of California were which is not insignificant but I do take your point about the difficulty with teachers because we've been running this project called open educational resources for open schools with Seychelles, Lesotho, Botswana, Zambia, Namibia and Trinidad and Tobago now and it's been difficult not through any lack of willingness but the teachers had to do this on overload which is so often the case when they're asked to do new things and as you can imagine the connectivity in Zambia is not the greatest however because of the extreme toughness of my colleague Francis Ferreira who operates I think we've got there we've got pretty well the whole thing now available both in print and in e-learning mode some of which has also got some quite nice multimedia with it so it shows it can be done and of course we're very keen that the developing countries be generators of OERs and not just consumers and that some of their OERs go go around the rest of the world. That will be ideal in that sense I am rather thrilled by the efforts of the African Virtual University they are putting together and putting out there a slew of teacher training materials under an OER banner with full CC by licensing and then I think the AVU has had its share of difficulties but if they get this act right their value given their their their access to most of sub-Saharan Africa and the many languages that they use would make a lot of difference certainly in Africa and I've seen some of their materials it's very helpful materials very similar to the Commonwealth of Learning stamp materials. That can be made available to which is now got a new lease of life under the under the because that started in your time now it now has a new lease of life under this. So OER is a new bus yes it's a new terminology but some of us have been doing this without calling it an orphan education. No that's right exactly I mean the the African Virtual University is a wonderful example of people snatching victory from the jaws of defeat because you know it was set up on a crazy Western World Bank model and was almost about to go under and then this rather good new leader sort of had the sense to take in a good direction and you know we're the other area we're using is in you started in your time the Virtual University for small states which 10 years later is now beginning to get traction and 32 small countries are sharing stuff and adapting it and it's all quite promising but you know it's still I think we're not there yet worldwide but what you've said is is very encouraging. Is there is a lesson there I think I mean if you take the story of the Virtual University it would have been easy for the Commonwealth of Learning to give it up but it sustained its energy and its interest and that's really the value of the Commonwealth of Learning. Yeah I learnt both at UNESCO and at Col that you've got to take the long view in development because often just at the moment you're thinking of cutting something because it's not showing much progress is actually the moment when it's taking off and I've been very lucky in having some very good sort of thinkers on that. So I think that I hope that it's been a useful exchange for the wider world about this trend which we both think has promise but will need a lot of work of open educational resources. Absolutely right John you know from a flunky retiree to one someone who might be retired and might join the club as another flunky yes it's a nice way to finish this conversation. Well thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here and enjoy the rest of your stay in Penang. So we hope you found that a useful discussion on open educational resources. Watch this space because you're certainly going to find open educational resources at a theatre near you and I hope they will be useful in your own work in education whatever and wherever it is. Thank you.