 A very good day to you, it's an honor to be invited to this conference on open education resources. I am very grateful to the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and other organizers of this conference for giving me this opportunity to bring you some perspectives on how open education resources or OER can transform education by increasing access, improving quality and cutting the costs of education, particularly in the developing world. My topic today is can OER transform education, a developing world perspective, but first let me set the context by telling you the story of a visit to a small West African country. Colleagues from the Ministry of Education announced that they had improved the quality of education in the country. When I asked what was the evidence, they were very clear. Until two years ago they could provide only one textbook for six students. Now they were able to give one textbook for each student. This example helps illustrate the dire needs of many developing countries. Now OER could provide a solution, but OER penetration in the developing world has been slower than in the industrialized countries. But there are emergent examples which give an indication of how OER are being used in low resource contexts. First let's take the issue of availability. The students of Banda College of Agriculture in Malawi had no textbook on communication skills and were entirely dependent on lecturers. Now they have a textbook, 75% of which is based on OER harvested from the web and supplemented with locally relevant activities, examples and assignments. Now a lecturer at the University of Jaws, Nigeria discovered this textbook and needing one has adopted it a very nice instant of South-South collaboration. Second, the question of quality. Many of you may have heard of the Indian Institutes of Technology or the IITs. These premier institutes in partnership with the government have made their engineering and technology courses available as OER. Now these are being used in over 500 institutions, most of them in remote locations with very limited resources. Both teachers and students are using the free IIT resources to improve the quality of the teaching and learning. Third, the issue of costs. Can OER help us reduce costs? The teacher education in Sub-Saharan Africa which is a partnership between the Open University UK and 18 universities in 12 African countries has developed OER for teacher training in four languages English, Kiswahili, Arabic and French. These were used by 320,000 teachers last year alone and the free materials as well as the sheer numbers of users can radically reduce the costs of providing quality teacher training. My own organization, the Commonwealth of Learning has initiated a six-country partnership to develop 20 sets of course materials in print and online formats based on the secondary curricula of Botswana, Lisuto, Nibibia, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago and Zambia. This has not only established communities of practice but has helped teachers and institutions save time and money by collaborating on the content development. Another initiative taken by my own organization is the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth which is a consortium of 32 small states and small states you know are countries with a population of less than 1.5 million. Now these small states have come together to develop capacity in online course development. Several need-based courses on disaster management, tourism, entrepreneurship, fisheries, etc. have been completed and are available on Kohl's website as OER. Teachers who have never developed online courses are now training other colleagues. Then there is a question of access which can be opened up to newer constituencies through translations because as you know language is a major barrier. The China Open Resources for Education or CORE has translated the Massachusetts Institute of Technology open course wear materials into Chinese. Kohl's instructional design template has been translated and adapted by the Open University of China. Materials from Kohl's website have been translated into Ukrainian. So far we have usually seen a one-way flow of knowledge from the developed to the developing world. OER can provide for a global exchange of knowledge. For instance, a lecturer at the University of Ghana Medical College developed a simple procedure for a caesarean section and videotaped it. It is now being used in the Netherlands. Similarly, a lecturer at the Kwame Nakruma University of Science and Technology who also happens to be a world authority on the Baruli Alsa has developed an OER module which is being used by the World Health Organization and the University of Michigan. While we can see several benefits emerge, there are many challenges that need to be overcome. Now this slide gives you an indication of the digital divide across the world. While in North America there are over 80 computer and internet users per 100 persons, in Africa the number of computer and internet users is less than 10 per 100 persons. So if we look at OER as technology, we certainly start with a very major disadvantage. Can we shift the discussion to the social domain? The present debates in OER are too focused on technology and there is rarely any discussion on issues such as stakeholder engagement and the politics of power. As Manuel Castells put it, there is a fundamental form of exercising power that is common to all networks, exclusion from the network. However, because the key strategic networks are global, there is one form of exclusion thus of power that is pervasive to include everything valuable in the global while excluding the devalued local. Castells explains that the network making power operates on the basis of two mechanisms. One, the ability to constitute program and reprogram networks and two, the ability to connect and ensure cooperation. These important stakeholders of education in Africa, South Asia and Latin America may be far beyond this network making power due to regional, gender, class and ethnic factors. They are therefore excluded from these networks. Is it perhaps because of these inequalities that institutions and individuals from the resource poor communities have had a limited role in the OER movement? Now what's the situation at the institutional level? Many educational institutions have traditional governance structures and teacher-centered pedagogic models. The OER initiative requires a learner-centered and decentralized approach. There is then a basic contradiction between the centralized institutional and decentralized OER approaches. Will OER thrive in closed educational settings? What would institutions need to do to benefit from this emergent phenomenon? A recent survey of how OER are being used in 13 Asian countries sum up the key challenges that different constituencies face. Teachers felt they did not have either the time or the capacity to locate, adapt and repurpose OER material relevant to their work. Learners felt that OER should be fully open, half open didn't help and materials should be accessible on alternative technologies such as mobile devices. Technical support personnel said there were no standard practices in the packaging and reuse of OER. Development was concerned about the challenges relating to intellectual property and copyright issues. Concerns regarding competition and revenues were also raised. So how can we address these challenges? One major barrier is awareness. If you ask teachers in remote schools in India if they've heard of OER the answer is no. How can we reach them in far-flung and marginalized communities? It is these communities that need most help to improve the quality of education. How can we make them partners in this movement? In order to raise awareness the Commonwealth of Learning or CALL has developed a basic guide to OER developed jointly with UNESCO. This month UNESCO and CALL also launched the international guidelines for the use of OER. These are meant for five constituencies, governments, institutions, teachers, students and quality assurance bodies. These two documents are available as OER at our respective websites. Another strategy for addressing the challenge of using OER is localization which is at the heart of the OER process. A PhD thesis submitted this year examines how OER are being used in 12 community technology centers in remote regions in Nepal for providing non-formal education. The study concludes that the successful adoption of OER depends on effective localization and proposes four principles. First, it is important to involve the locals and cast the OER into the language of the select constituency. For example, a housewife speaks differently from a shopkeeper. Second, a community of practice is essential as it bolsters localization. The community interacts through group conversations or through social media and learn from each other. Third, the localization must be done in appropriate formats which could be audio, text, video, wall newspaper, etc. The fourth principle is that effective localization is proportional to the understanding of local contexts. While these principles have emerged from a non-formal educational project, how can we adapt them to the formal education sector to address the issue of effective use? Policy makers are concerned about the financial viability of using OER. Let me highlight three different models currently in use. The TESA model, which is the teacher education in Sub-Saharan Africa. This was initially funded by donors, but by involving the local institutions at every stage of the process, these partners have now taken on the responsibility of committing their own financial resources to develop, duplicate and distribute the resources to their staff and students. Connections of Rice University. Funded by donors initially, it's now a consortium of 20 for-profit and non-profit entities. For example, the for-profit COOP shares revenues from books printed using connections materials. The third example is the NPTEL from India, which is a state-funded initiative and is sustainable for precisely that reason. The general trend in the developing world is to use OER to address certain core needs. They are not looking at OER for lifelong learning, but for qualifications. There is a tremendous demand for qualifications at all levels, secondary as well as post-secondary. OER are not simply seen as a value add to existing educational provision, but also as a route to earning credentials. The only way to reach the unreached constituencies in remote and distant locations is through the use of appropriate technologies rather than computers alone. So there's need for a lot of additional content that could be used through mobiles. In many developing countries such as India, China, Vietnam, it is primarily the state rather than philanthropic organizations which has come forward to support OER initiatives. Keeping these developments in mind, my colleagues Dr. Bala, Dr. Abdur Rahman and I attempted to redefine OER in a paper published in the American Journal of Distance Education last year. We placed the emphasis on the stakeholder rather than on technology and on process rather than product. And let me share this definition with you. The phenomenon of OER is an empowerment process facilitated by technology in which various types of stakeholders are able to interact, collaborate, create and use materials and processes that are freely available for enhancing access, reducing costs and improving the quality of education at all levels. The emphasis is on empowerment. The OER movement can help transform education by, one, involving all kinds of stakeholders to participate, collaborate, create and share, two, encouraging consumers to become the producers of knowledge, and three, enabling us to harness the wealth of tacit knowledge across the globe to address the great development challenges of our time. And on that note, let me thank you for your kind attention.