 Good day to all of you It's an honor to be invited to this very important conference on integration through openness knowledge communities in research and teaching I'm very grateful to Professor Thomas Kohler for giving me this opportunity to be present virtually at this conference and to bring to you some perspectives of openness and how these have impacted Education in the developing world But first a word about my organization the Commonwealth of Learning Which is an intergovernmental body? Established by Commonwealth heads of government and located in Vancouver, Canada with an office in Delhi Our motto is learning for development We work in 54 Commonwealth member states in all the regions of the globe and you can see from this map That it's a very wide spread and my examples will be from these Commonwealth countries Our mission is to help Commonwealth member states and institutions to harness the potential of distance education and information and communication technologies For expanding access to education and training we work in low-resource settings Where lack of access to education is a major barrier to human resource development According to the World Bank For countries to achieve sustainable economic development the age participation rates or APRs That is the participation of the 18 to 24 year olds in higher education Must be in the region of 40 to 50 percent which is the OECD average But age participation rates in South Asia are below 15 percent and in sub-Saharan Africa even lower below to 10 percent Likewise the global participation rates in secondary education are about 65 percent While in sub-Saharan Africa only 30 percent of those who complete primary education Can move to secondary schools Developing country governments are looking for alternative means of providing access to quality education to their citizens Opening up education in various ways is one such option My topic today is Opening up education in low-resource settings the users of open education resources or OER I will first look at three generations of open education and Will then focus on open education resources and their advantages Taking examples mostly from those low-resource Commonwealth countries. I Will finally take up the three challenges that need to be addressed if the OER movement has to reach the unreached and Will conclude with some of the initiatives that are being undertaken at the international level to address these challenges Let us now turn to the three generations of open education 40 years ago the Open University UK was launched to open up education to large numbers of people That was when the term open education became popular and the model captured the imagination of policy makers around the world The success of the British Open University led to huge expansion in open universities particularly in the developing world Asia alone has over 70 open universities and the numbers continue to grow Germany has its own open university the fun University at established in 1974 there has been a leader in global distance education and Professor Otto Peters formerly of this university has been a thought leader in this field and Continues to inspire distance educators from Malawi to Mongolia The founding Chancellor of the Open University of the UK Lord Crowder's statement of openness in relation to people places methods and ideas forms the Basis of the first generation of open education Open education is a philosophic construct That advocates the removal of barriers and constraints to learning Open education refers to policies and practices that allow Entry to learning with no or minimum barriers with respect to age gender or time constraints Open universities were oriented towards the massification of higher education Many open universities do not insist on entry qualifications Allow learners to accumulate credits at their own pace and convenience and are flexible enough To allow learners to choose the courses they wish to Towards their qualifications The principal technologies in this phase were print radio and TV telephone and teleconferencing The second generation of open education was shaped by the emergence and use of the internet and the worldwide web the first electronic course was launched in 1984 and The use of web-based programs allowed learners the choice to study on campus or at a distance Interactivity was a key aspect of the second generation with a high level of personalization through the use of ICTs This led to more flexible and blended approaches Many campus-based Institutions began to offer both face-to-face and distance learning programs thereby opening up access to newer constituencies in this phase we see a convergence of face-to-face and distance education provision the third generation of open Education may be seen to commence at the turn of the century with the open education resources movement Which is based on the idea that knowledge is a common valve and that technology can help us share use and reuse it The Massachusetts Institute of Technologies open course were initiative rise universities connections the open learn of the open University of the UK and the open education resources of the Netherlands open University initiated this movement Which has now been taken up in Asia Africa and Latin America This slide sums up the emergence of the three generations of open education models The first covers the 21 years from 1969 to 1990 the second from 1984 to 2005 In both cases the development is gradual In the third generation which could be seen to begin in 1999 We see a phenomenal growth showing that thanks to technologies Paradigms will change in much shorter time spans than Thomas Kuhn had initially imagined Let us briefly review what we mean by open education resources This phrase open education resources was first coined at a UNESCO workshop in 2002 There have been several definitions Since but here is one which captures the essence of what we mean by OER OER are teaching learning and research materials in any medium That reside in the public domain Or have been released under an open license That permits their free use and in some instances repurposing by others In short OER are educational materials which are free and freely available Are suitable not just for higher education, but for all levels of Education including primary and secondary OER can be reused and repurposed to suit different needs and could be available in any medium print audio video digital One key difference between OER and other educational resources is that OER Has an open license Which allows adaptation and reuse without having to request the copyright holder The concept of OER is not new to Germany The Berlin Declaration on open access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities was signed by key academics in October 2003 They said and I quote Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the knowledge is not made widely and readily available to society Content and software tools must be openly accessible and compatible In this presentation, of course, we are only speaking of content rather than software tools What then are some of the advantages of using open education resources I Will give you seven examples of how the use of OER can increase availability of content Improve the quality and cut the costs of education foster collaboration build capacity Open up access to affordable education and finally encourage the global exchange of knowledge The students of Banda College of Agriculture in Malawi, Africa Had no textbook on communication skills and were entirely dependent on the notes from their lecturers Now they have a textbook 75% of which is based on OER or freely available web resources and Supplement it with locally relevant activities examples and assignments Many of you have heard of the Indian Institutes of Technology or IITs in India These premier institutes in partnership with the government of India have made their engineering and technology courses available as OER These are being used in 509 institutions most of them in very remote locations In India with very limited resources Both teachers and students are using the free IIT resources to improve the quality of their teaching and learning The teacher education in sub Saharan Africa a Partnership between the Open University UK and institutions in 12 African countries have developed OER for teacher training in four languages English Kiswahili Arabic and French These were used by 320,000 teachers in 2010 alone and The free materials as well as the sheer numbers of users Can radically reduce the costs of providing quality teacher training My 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 Curricular of Botswana, Lesotho, Navibia, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago and Zambia With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation This has not only established communities of practice, but has helped teachers and institutions Save both time and money by collaborating on the content development The virtual university for small states of the Commonwealth is a consortium of 32 small states of the Commonwealth which have come together to develop capacity in online course development Several need-based courses in disaster management, tourism, entrepreneurship, fisheries, etc. Have been completed and are available on COAL's website Teachers who had never developed a single online course are now training other colleagues Three universities, the Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand The University of Southern Queensland, Australia and Athabasca University of Canada Came together in February this year to develop the model for an OER university The participating universities plan to put a percentage of their courses on their websites as OER So students anywhere in the world can access them free of cost They will then recruit retired teachers and volunteers on the lines of doctors without borders or engineers without borders Who will then provide free tutorial support to the students Students pay only if they wish to take exams towards a qualification This will cost students only 20-25% of what they would normally pay Thus making higher education more affordable and accessible to anyone in the world 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 in both directions A lecturer at the University of Ghana developed a simple procedure for a caesarean section and videotaped it It is now being used in the Netherlands for medical students Similarly, a lecturer at the Kwame Nekrumah University of Science and Technology Ghana Who also happens to be a world authority on the Buruli ulcer Has developed an OER module on the Buruli ulcer Which has been used by the World Health Organization or WHO And the University of Michigan in the United States While there are benefits, several challenges remain How can we reach teachers and students in remote and marginalised communities? It is these communities that need most help to improve the quality of education Many of them have not even heard of OERs Most of the available literature today on OER focuses on production How do we move to the next level and promote actual use and reuse? What kind of advocacy strategies will be needed to reach these constituencies? My organization, KALL, has developed various resources to generate awareness on OER and their uses Please look at the basic guide to OER Which has recently been developed jointly by UNESCO and KALL And is available on our website UNESCO and KALL also collaborated with the U.S. Department of Education To develop policy recommendations through international consultations at six workshops Which concluded in Paris in December 2010 These workshops came up with recommendations which require governments and higher education institutions To have one, policies to support the development and reuse of OERs Two, develop capacity in OER And three, support the improvement of national ICT infrastructures UNESCO and KALL have also developed international guidelines for the use of OER These are now in the public domain at our respective websites And would benefit greatly from your feedback OER has the potential to create genuine knowledge communities And capture the tremendous wealth of tacit knowledge that each one of us owns Technology has made the world more interconnected than ever before And we can collaborate across the different regions of the globe To pull our collective knowledge to address the great development challenges of our time On that note, let me conclude by wishing you every success in your deliberations Thank you very much for your kind attention