 Greetings to all of you attending the PNGADE conference today. It's a pleasure to be present virtually at this very important event, and I'm grateful to Dr. Abdul Manan for giving me the invitation. My organization, the Commonwealth of Learning, works with many of you very closely, and we look forward to strengthening these partnerships much more in the future. My topic today is brief but very topical. It's about open education resources, and what are the next steps that we can take. I will first look at what we mean by open education resources. I will then give you two examples of OER development that my organization, the Commonwealth of Learning, supports, and I will then finally raise some questions about what we need to do to ensure that we take full advantage of the potential of this exciting development and improve the quality of our educational systems so that we can participate much more effectively and fully in the global knowledge economy. Let us first look at what we mean by OER. The open education resource movement may be seen to commence at the turn of the century and is based on the idea that knowledge is a common good, and that technology can help us share it so that we can use and reuse these resources. You may all be aware of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Open Coursware Initiative. There is then the Rice University's Connections Project, the Open Learn of the Open University of the UK, and there are many others which initiated this movement. But what are OER? We are referring to open education resources, not as open access hardware or software, but to content which is free and freely available. This is digital, reusable, and available at all levels of education, not just tertiary education, because as you know, in many of our developing countries the age participation rates, that is the participation rates of 18 to 24 year olds is only up to 10%. So what happens to the other 90%? Are they going to be kept out of this movement? The answer is no, which means that we have to bring open education resources at the school level as well. While there is no evidence yet to conclude that OER will be a panacea for educational ills, there are some potential advantages which include, OER foster the global exchange of knowledge, online collaborative OER development supports capacity building, collaborative OER development encourages the preservation and dissemination of indigenous knowledge, and the availability of high quality OER can raise the quality of education, not just for open education institutions but also for conventional institutions. So it stands to benefit all kinds of institutions within any national jurisdiction. Now the other advantage that is cited is that course authoring time can take up to 80% of an academic time as we all know in a distance education context. But if we collaborate to develop OER the responsibility is shared by many academics and because this responsibility is now shared by many people it saves both course authoring time and money. It's also clear that offering free content raises the profile of the university as it did in the case of the MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also encourages potential students to enroll because in the MIT open course fair initiative one of the benefits to MIT was that 35% of the freshmen attending the university were already aware of their courses because they had actually gone and seen their open course fair materials. And then the other finding from this study on who uses OER which is produced by MIT that 17% of educators use this free content. Most of it is used by students and all over the world. The number one users of the MIT OER are students from China and Indian students are at number three. As we've seen the OER development started in American universities such as Rice and MIT but there were many concerns that this might become yet another form of cultural imperialism and this was raised at the World Conference on Higher Education organized by UNESCO in 2009 and there was a call for developing countries to join this movement and start offering and developing OER. And in this slide you can recognize two prominent South African academics Professor Bani Pichana and Professor Brenda Gulley who actually led this debate. Today many developing countries are increasingly investing in OER. Some of these initiatives are Sakshat of the Indian government. They are offering free OER especially in engineering education and you should take advantage of that. You can use the materials. The China Open Resources for Education initiative is another one where all materials are offered free and many of the MIT OCW materials have been translated into Chinese and are offered through this joint initiative of the Ministry of Education and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Vietnam has also started an open courseware initiative as has Japan's open courseware initiative and there are many more in developing countries and in developed countries. Now fully aware of these developments my own organization, the Commonwealth of Learning initiated several projects and I'll just mention two of them. The first is the Virtual University of the Small States of the Commonwealth and many of you have heard of this. It's a consortium of 32 small states which have come together to develop capacity in online course development, develop the materials which are freely available and offer these courses through existing tertiary level institutions in the participating countries. Several need-based courses have been developed already for example on disaster management, tourism, entrepreneurship development, sustainable agriculture, etc. and these are all available on our call website. Please feel free to take whatever you need, adopt and adapt as necessary. The second call initiative is a six-country partnership to develop 20 sets of course materials in print and online formats based on the secondary school curricula of Botswana, Lesotho, Navibia, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago and Zambia. Here again the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation supported this work and this combines the professional development of teachers with the development of OER. It is expected that providing high quality materials free of cost and enhancing the capacity of teachers will contribute to improving the quality of secondary education in both open and conventional schools in the participating countries. Now these materials are again being developed in print and online format and I would encourage you to use these as necessary and applicable. And what makes this call approach particularly important is that it focuses not only on collaborative content development but also on capacity building and on creating communities of practice It's not simply about cutting costs but also about improving the quality and effectiveness of education. Now I come to my final point what are the emerging developments and what do we need to do next? So what are the impacts that OER are having on universities? Let me quote an example from your region. This is an example of an OER university which is a collaboration between the University of Southern Queensland and Otago Polytechnic and this OER university proposes to use open education resources to open up education to anyone anywhere in the world. So what does this mean? It means that the students will study using OER according to their need. Voluntary tutors would provide free support and students will only pay if they wish to be assessed which means if they don't want to be assessed they don't need a qualification or a credential they don't have to pay anything to the university they simply study and move on as they require and the total cost of any degree then or any qualification would only be up to 20-25% of the overall cost of a degree or diploma or certificate if they were doing it in a conventional institution. So OER as you can see are potentially having an impact because here are issues of equity people who do not have money can actually go to an OER university and study at a fraction of the cost that they would have to in other cases and which they may not be able to afford. So it's opening up access to higher education as never before. But there are still some questions which need to be addressed because as I said, you know it's not only about higher education it's also about other levels of education. So who are we developing OER for? The fundamental players are only two teachers and students. How can we reach them in remote and marginalised communities? For example in some remote hills in PNG how do we reach them? These communities that need most help to improve the quality of education most of them have not heard of OER how can we make them partners in this movement? Many educational institutions have traditional governance structures and teacher-centred pedagogic practices the OER on the other hand is much more a people's movement and it requires a learner-centred and decentralised approach. There is a basic contradiction then between the centralised and decentralised institutional models. Will the centralised structures allow a decentralised approach? What kind of advocacy strategies will be needed to reach these constituencies? The second point is that most of the available literature on OER so far, you know this is only about 10 years old focuses on the production of OERs. But producing OERs is not enough how do we move to the next level and promote actual use and reuse? And how will this help us achieve development outcomes? We all want to achieve the MDGs we are nearing 2015 many of our countries have not achieved those how can OERs actually help us accelerate the learning process so that we can work towards development? And finally there are many strong players in OER who have emerged in different regions of the world there are many international regional and national initiatives in OER as I've given you a glimpse of some of them. We have OER Africa the Commonwealth of Learning is working with UNESCO on policy advocacy IDRC in Canada is working with Bawasan Open University in Asia on OER capacity development Now how can these different groups come together as a network of stakeholders so that the collective impact can be enhanced? The point is that how do we actually make use of this initiative to propel ourselves into the knowledge economy of the 21st century? So let me conclude on that note and wish you very well in your deliberations and thank you very much for your attention.