End result of this event:

• Theme - Capacity of users to access, re-use and share OER: Identifying a set of basic and advanced technologies that can be immediately deployed across OER siloes repositories in order to extract value for users.
• Theme - Ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality OER: Identifying technologies and addressing equitable access to quality lifelong learning for all, including persons with disabilities.
• Theme - Language and Culture: Initiating a programme of ground-breaking actions that will deliver, by 2022, an online OER market free of language barriers, delivering automated translation quality, equal to currently best performing language pair/direction, in most relevant use situations and for at least 90% of the learners in UNESCO official languages.
• Theme - Changing business models: Initialise a process of creating a level playing field for attracting businesses to the Openness agenda and defining services for OER that can potentially lead to innovative business models and new revenue streams, including companies that are not in the traditional education market.
• Theme - Development of supportive policy environments: Initialise initiatives for openness to properly Open-up and improve access to data, materials, etc., as it is not enough just to open national databanks and “open up” governments, which are the main funders of OER, but require enactment of sound policies at the highest possible level, their follow-ups and implementation measurability, and allow for businesses’, researchers’, and technologists’ engagement in the nested process.
• Theme: Security and Privacy: With educational issues present, security and privacy concerns are extremely important and require a renewed attention to both enable teachers and pedagogues to help learners in the best way and allow each user to have full confidence in the protection of his data.

Rationale

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence. It allows computers to become more accurate in predicting outcomes without explicit programming, using algorithms that iteratively learn from data.

Although there have been many good practices reported, OER still haven’t reached wider deployment. This is due to a chaotic OER space that is scattered across many sites, content that is available in various modalities, formats, languages and quality and the lack of services to allow easy discovery, structuring and bundling, personalised digestion of content to serve teachers and learners needs and preferences.

Here we present an agenda that culminates in connecting all digital aspects of OER with advanced technologies and create value for business.

Preamble

Two of the trustees of the Knowledge 4 All Foundation are UNESCO Chairs and leading scientists in Artificial Intelligence and actively involved in creating technologies and products for OER.

In October 2016 one of the Chairs had a presentation of AI and machine learning technologies to UNESCO ED and CI colleagues working in or interested in this field.

The presentation opened a longstanding debate on the use of AI in SDG 4 on education and specifically how could the wider business, research and technology community find a value in facilitate the adoption and mainstreaming OER.

Background

To make mainstreaming OER a reality, its impact needs to be of benefit to all, everywhere, a collective effort has to be made by all actors: UNESCO has the understanding of where the problems lay and what are the challenges.

Both UNESCO specialists and Knowledge 4 All network have a global understanding of the links between Education issues and enabling technologies and therefore the impact that progress in Education can have over the general UNESCO agenda.

Scientists have the understanding of the algorithms, technologies which are being deployed to day on smaller scales, in experimental settings or on altogether different problems, finally the industry has the capacity of deploying solutions. Companies and businesses have a strong interest in understanding how to find added value models on top of Openness and OER.

Opportunity

Business, Technology and Research in Artificial Intelligence are tightly connected, and can ultimately influence policies. This event will show that (i) basic and advanced technologies, that (ii) can ensure inclusive and equitable access to quality OER, and empower (iii) massive quantities of users to access, re-use and share massive amounts of OER, (iv) based on their respective language and culture needs and specifics, are already available and need only to be applied to OER, which will in return create a marketplace for (v) changing business models – this is only possible through (vi) a supportive policy environment.

Given the trends in education, technology, digital business models, and, most importantly, customer market power, the OER agenda must account and surmount the enormous business, technology, and political complexity.

Themes

Structure of the event: Providing answers to the main Congress theme “Challenges to mainstreaming OER practices”

1. Capacity of users to access, re-use and share OER: Artificial Intelligence is impacting today many sectors (Health, Security, Autonomous vehicles, smart cities, etc.), we believe it will have a profound impact on education. AI and machine learning (ML), which include technologies such as deep learning, neural networks and natural-language processing, can also encompass more advanced systems that analyse, learn, predict, adapt and potentially operate autonomously for learners’ benefits. Large systems can learn and change future behaviour, leading to the creation of more intelligent devices and programs.
2. Language and Culture: We want to demonstrate Machine Translation research and technologies available that can solve many of the detected OER adoption problems. Interdisciplinary work has led to a new paradigm in overcoming the language barrier and progressively, to reach high quality for all language combinations and translation directions, and cater for the most demanded text types and use contexts. Systems and solutions exist that are intended to overcome the language barriers, can deal with huge volumes, high variety of languages and text styles, and deliver results in reasonable time (in most cases, instantly). These methods require automatic learning from language resources, the availability and suitability of the latter need to be addressed.  We will present technologies for EU languages (both as source and target languages) that solved the issue of "fragmentary" or "weak/no" machine translation support and start the agenda on all other UNESCO Member States languages.
3. Ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality OER:Whereas OERs are being added in vast quantities by organisms and individuals, unless alternative governance tools are provided, it will be difficult for material prepared in less known institutions, using less spoken languages to emerge and be part of the educational offer. It is essential that these mechanisms, as discussed and encouraged at a political level, be supported by the right technologies.
4. Changing business models: The plan is to discuss potential new business models involving Artificial Intelligence in OER and Open education and present the business view of various stakeholders on OER. Increased cross-border availability and wider adoption of education technology products/services is generating new business opportunities for European and global providers and because the nature of OER is digital and falls into the broader area of open education, in terms of business it is becoming an interesting venue of exploration for IT and data companies. We want to showcase this new business arena, which is not directly connected to the publishing industry, and invite all Telecoms, Post offices, broadband providers and other open software based companies to join us at the congress and present their collaborative ideas. Established in 1874, the Universal Postal Union (link), with its headquarters in the Swiss capital Berne, is the second oldest international organization worldwide. With its 192 member countries, the UPU is the primary forum for cooperation between postal sector players. It helps to ensure a truly universal network of up-to-date products and services. In this way, the organization fulfils an advisory, mediating and liaison role, and provides technical assistance where needed.
5. Development of supportive policy environments: Current developments in particular in the policy adaptations shows that only policies alone are not enough to streamline OER and Open Education. This also includes the UNESCO policy process towards a “UNESCO Recommendation in OER” that is planned to last till 2019 with still unclear outcomes. This is why Slovenia has been approached by several countries to propose some concrete and joint actions towards implementation of OER and Open Learning. This will from one side support the UNESCO process, demonstrate effective OER use, and create a role model and exemplar for other countries to follow and/or be involved. We call this the “Dynamic Coalition of Member States in OER and Open Education”, which brings together Member States, companies, social partners, civil society, non-profit organisations, education providers, and activists, who take action to tackle the mainstreaming of OER globally. All organisations who take action to boost OER can become members of the Coalition by endorsing the objectives and principles of the Coalition as laid out in the members Charter or Roadmap (draft to be prepared).
6. Security and Privacy: Institutions currently issue records in a format that is not tamper proof, not recipient owned. A possible solution is to use blockchain for instant verification. This new technical infrastructure gives people the means to hold and share their records as they see fit. Advanced technologies are what makes a difference. This section begins with definitions and distinctions between privacy, confidentiality, and security. We will address the concerns about these concepts with regards to personal identity, learning certificates and general data information and more. We will discuss tools and approaches for protecting personal and educational information and content.

Knowledge 4 All Foundation Ltd is based in London (UK), and supports its 1000+ researchers and 62 member institutions is by co-funding more than 200+ events, 60+ machine learning challenges, 20.000+ academic video lectures and creating machine learning tools and software for open education. Two K4A trustees are also UNESCO Chairs in OER and directly involved in the organisation of the Congress.

Pošta Slovenije d.o.o. is national postal operator in Republic of Slovenia. Pošta Slovenije ensures development as well as high-quality, competitive and reliable provision of postal services, logistics services, secure electronic postal services, the services of the global postal information and communication network use and retail sales to domestic and international private and business customers.

X5GON project members: University College London, Institut Jozef Stefan, Knowledge 4 All Foundation, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Université de Nantes, Universitaet Osnabrueck, Slovenian Post, Ministry of Education of Slovenia.

In order to mark the 5th anniversary of the World OER Congress, which resulted in the Paris OER Declaration, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), in partnership with UNESCO and the Government of Slovenia are undertaking a survey of world governments and key stakeholders focused on OER for Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education: From Commitment to Action.

Survey

This survey is being conducted in advance of the 2nd World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress which will be held in Ljubljana on 18–20 September 2017. A series of regional consultations will also be held around the world from December 2017 until May 2017.

Questionnaires have been sent to sent to key stakeholders and government ministers, including the Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Education Mr John Swinney.

Other interested parties  are encouraged to contribute to the consultation by completing the non-governmental stakeholders’ questionnaire which is available here.

Date and Location

• Asia, Dec 1-2, 2016 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Hosted by Asia e University and facilitated by Dr. Sanjaya Mishra
• Europe, Feb 23-24, 2016 in Malta, Hosted by Malta Ministry for Education and Employment and facilitated by Dr. Venkataraman Balaji
• Middle East /North Africa, Feb 26-27, 2016 in Doha, Qatar and facilitated by Mr. John Lesperance
• Africa, 2-3 March, 2017 in Port Louis, Mauritious and facilitated by Dr. Sanjaya Mishra
• Americas, April 3-4, 2017 in Brasilia, Brazil, hosted by University of Campinas and facilitated by Dr. Ishan Abeywardena
• Pacific, 29-30 May, 2017 in Auckland, New Zealan and facilitated by Dr. K Balasubramanian

Aim of Consultations

• Raise regional awareness about the importance of OER and its relationship to SDG4;
• Provide a hands-on experience for all participants to establish personal OER knowledge
• Explore mechanisms to facilitate the mainstreaming of OER
• Identify strategies and solutions to overcome the challenges or barriers to mainstreaming OER
• Agree on inputs that factor into the planning of the 2nd World OER Congress

Links

• OER Regional Consultations
• Non-governmental Stakeholders’ Questionnaire
• Regional Consultations for the 2nd World OER Congress: Background Paper

In order to seize the moment and maximize impact it is of interest to create a set of thematically connected and focused events to the main sessions of the Congress. These will be mainly industry, research and capacity building events. The first set of identified events are the following:

Research track

Open Science for Open Learning and 3^rd Internet of Education Conference: This event will highlight that the OER challenge extends even further via open education into emerging approaches and real-life industrial/societal challenges including smart living environments, intelligent municipalities, cognitive cities, industry 4.0, combined with the needs of the digital learning ecosystem in making better use of educational cloud solutions, mobile technology, learning analytics and big data, and to facilitate the use, re-use and creation of OER and new ways to educate and learn online. It will be organised by the UNESCO Chairs in OER and trustees of the Knowledge 4 All Foundation.

Open Education European Commission funded projects 1^st Conference: This event will present H2020 Innovation and Research projects for ICT in Education. This follows the Digital Agenda for Europe stating "Member States to mainstream eLearning in national policies for the modernisation of education and training, including in curricula, assessment of learning outcomes and the professional development of teachers and trainers." The event will allow actors (teams, projects, and companies) currently involved in open education projects in Europe to present the results of their work.

Industry track

OER and businesses 1^st Global Forum: Increased cross-border availability and wider adoption of education technology products/services is generating new business opportunities for European and global providers and because the nature of OER is digital and falls into the broader area of open education, in terms of business it is becoming and interesting venue of exploration for IT and data companies. We want to showcase this new business arena, which is not directly connected to the publishing industry, and invite all Telecoms, broadband providers and other open software based companies to join us at the congress and present their collaborative ideas.

Governmental track

Open Government Partnership 1^st Regional Conference: With all current efforts to include OER in the National OGP Action Plans in an increasing number of countries we see a promising powerful additional road forward to mainstreaming OER. This event would explore the opportunity of a synergetic process between UNESCO and OGP (as with other partners that are already involved like COL, OEC, and CC) towards the same goal that is mainstreaming OER in all Education. The instruments will differ, and the routes and timelines will not be the same, but a synergetic friendship might be beneficial on both sides in terms of achieving the common goal.

Capacity Building and Awareness track

Open Educational Resources and Teachers (on all levels): As end users and also creators of OER are teachers, and digital technologies make creation and digestion easy, the advocacy and presentation of OER to all levels of teachers (kindergarten, primary, secondary) beyond HEI in important. What we would like to address here is the availability of new, open cloud-based components, tools and services for use in digital learning scenarios; present more efficient and effective learning, through mainstreaming new ways of learning with digital technologies and more efficient ways of assessing learning outcomes; and scalable solutions, capable of reaching very large numbers of schools and students, and deliver social innovation in education.

OpeningupBalkans 1^st Regional Conference: This goal of this event is to bring together practitioners, researchers and policy makers from the South-East Europe, to present methods for improving the effectiveness of online and open education but also promote discussion of the implications of OER and new EduTech trends for classical university education. The event will aim on presenting and directly influencing a new OpeningupMemberState initiative which is one of the goals of OpeningupSlovenia.

Exhibition track

MyMachine Global 1^st Global Conference and Exhibition: This event would feature the 1^st MyMachine Global Conference and Exhibition uniting the products of the MM methodology and making the case for an open pedagogy in STEM in practice. The event will be organised by MM Global presenting the products of children in elementary schools/kindergartens with students in higher education and pupils in technical middle- and high schools to collaborate as peers, in a unique ecology of talent, to materialize their own unexplored dream machine ideas.

The World OER Congress 2012, organized by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and UNESCO with the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (UNESCO Communication and Information, 2012), highlighted ways in which OER are serving as tools for collaboration and the creation of learning resources. The Congress resulted in the adoption of the Paris OER Declaration (Appendix A), which notably  encourages governments to openly license educational materials that are publicly funded.

As part of their joint project Fostering Governmental Support for Open Educational Resources Internationally, UNESCO and COL invited governments to provide information about their policies in relation to OER. Questionnaires were developed by UNESCO and COL, based on a simplified version of the OECD questionnaires, and was sent out to Commonwealth Governments, OECD Commonwealth countries and the governments of the provinces, states and territories of Australia and Canada in October 2011. The findings from this study (Hoosen, 2012) acted as a key input to the World OER Congress and ultimately the formulation of the Paris OER Declaration.

In the months leading up to the June 2012 Congress, COL and UNESCO organized 6 policy fora in the major regions of the world to continue to inform governments and educational leaders about the potential of OER and to invite them to participate in the drafting of the Paris Declaration. These Regional Policy Fora were organized in 2012, thanks to the support of the national authorities in the host countries. They were held in: Bridgetown, Barbados (Caribbean Regional Forum), 24-26 January 2012; Johannesburg, South Africa (Africa Regional Forum), 21-23 February; Sao Paolo, Brazil (Latin America Regional Forum), 28-29 March 2012; Cambridge, UK, (Europe Regional Forum), 17 April 2012; Bangkok, Thailand (Asia and the Pacific Regional Forum), 23 -24 April 2012; Muscat, Oman (Arab States Regional Forum), 7-8 May 2012. The recent William and Flora Hewlett Foundation evaluation of UNESCO and COL OER initiatives in 2015 recognized that these regional workshops served to lift up new voices, provide examples, and generate new champions. They also served as the basis for the establishment of advocacy, capacity building and policy work undertaken by UNESCO in the implementation of the Paris OER Declaration 2012 (UNESCO, 2016).

Following a proposal by the Government of Slovenia to the 199th Executive Board of UNESCO, World OER Congress 2 is scheduled to be held in Ljubljana on September 18-20, 2017 hosted by the Government of Slovenia. In the year leading up to this event, COL, in partnership with UNESCO and the Government of Slovenia, aims to conduct follow up surveys of world governments/key stakeholders and Regional Consolations with the objectives:

• Identify the current status vis-à-vis the recommendations made at the 1st World OER
  Congress among key stakeholders namely governments, policy makers, the OER
  community and the wider education community;
• Initiate discussions among the key stakeholders regarding the identified challenges to
  mainstreaming OER as highlighted in the outcome report of the OER Road Map meeting;
• Build awareness among key stakeholders about the objectives of the World OER
  Congress 2 and make recommendations for consideration;
• Encourage more governments to commit to the adoption of open licensing policies for
  teaching and learning materials developed with public funds.

In 2002, the term ‘Open Educational Resources’ (OER) was adopted at UNESCO’s Forum on Open Courseware to describe the phenomenon of openly sharing educational resources. In general, OER can include lecture notes, slides, lesson plans, textbooks, handouts given to
students, videos, online tutorials, podcasts, diagrams, entire courses, and any other material designed for use in teaching and learning. In 2012, The World OER Congress brought  together governments as well as educational and OER experts and emphasized using OER as a means of providing equal access to knowledge. It showcased innovative policies and initiatives that demonstrate the potential of OER to broaden access to inclusive and equitable quality education.

OER has the potential to make a significant contribution to SDG 4 ‘Quality Education’ which calls for ‘ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all’ with its key pillars of access, equity and inclusion. Several definitions of OER exists such as the first adopted in 2002 (UNESCO, 2002) and the one adopted during the World OER Congress 2012 (UNESCO, 2012). For the purposes of this document, the term OER is defined as:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any educational resource that may be freely accessed, copied, re-used, adapted and shared and which are available under an open license or are in the public domain for use without paying royalties / license fees

OER work from 2012 has focused on implementing the Paris OER Declaration 2012 with a view to making OER more widely used by educational stakeholders worldwide. The Education 2030 Agenda - SDG 4 (2015) reaffirms a political commitment, facilitating policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and standard setting. In this regard, as stated in the Qingdao Declaration (2015), OER provide educational stakeholders with opportunities to improve the quality and expand access to textbooks and other forms of learning content to catalyze the innovative use of content, and to foster knowledge creation. The Qingdao Declaration also calls for sector-wide strategies and capacity building programmes to fully realize the potential of OER to expand access to lifelong learning opportunities, achieve quality education and establish legal and political frameworks that promote, inter alia, coordinated partnerships.

Mainstreaming OER practices

Key Issues

The mainstreaming of OER by educational stakeholders worldwide entails key factors related to the recognition of the benefits of OER, the mobilization of educational stakeholders as well as issues related to financing and clarity on the issue of ‘open’ as it refers to OER.

Benefits

OER offers the potential to provide more equal access to knowledge and educational opportunities by making quality and affordable educational resources widely available at a time when education systems worldwide are facing growing challenges. Rapid growth in education enrollment, limited or no growth in financial resources available for education, and the ongoing rollout of enabling ICT infrastructure have made it increasingly important for educational systems to support - in a planned and deliberate manner - the development and improvement of quality teaching and learning materials, curricula, programmes and course design, the planning of effective contact with students, the design of effective assessment, and meeting the needs of a greater diversity of learners. These activities aim to  improve the teaching and learning environment while managing cost through increased use of resource-based learning. OER helps to manage this investment and the resulting copyright issues in a way that supports ongoing, cost effective improvements in the teaching and learning process.

Role of Educational Stakeholders

Governments have an interest in ensuring that public investments in education make a meaningful, cost-effective contribution to socio-economic development. The Paris OER Declaration calls for Governments to openly licensed resources funded by public funding. Sharing educational materials produced using public funding has significant potential to improve the quality and accessibility of educational delivery across national education systems by making OER more readily available for use by all education providers, not just the recipients of public funds (UNESCO and Commonwelath of Learning, 2011). As governments often play a key role in policy development and funding of educational institutions and as policies on education funding also indicate key priorities, they are ideally positioned to encourage or mandate institutions to release materials as OER and to license materials developed with public funding under an open license. Government can also use open licensing regimes to increase the leverage of public investments, by facilitating widespread re-use of those investments with minimal additional spending.

Governments, institutions, educators, and students need to make continuous investments in developing educational resources to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The most cost effective way to invest in materials design and development is to incorporate effective adaptation and use of OER, because this eliminates unnecessary duplication of effort by building on what already exists elsewhere, takes advantage of pooled alternative resources to meet accessibility obligations, removes costs of copyright negotiation and clearance, and can engage open communities of practice in ongoing quality improvement, quality assurance, and translation.

Financing: How ‘free’ are OER?

One of the key benefits of open content is that it is ‘free’ for the end user (i.e. it does not cost anything to download, leaving aside costs of bandwidth). However, OER does incur costs related to developing, adapting and/or remixing material. Historically, much of this has been supported by funding from donors. Whilst donor funding has been an essential component of initiating OER practices, in order for them to become sustainable and effectively used, governments and educational institutions need to invest systematically in programme, course, and materials development and acquisition. Costs include wages for the time of people in developing curricula and materials, adapting existing OER, dealing with copyright licensing (where materials are not openly licensed), and so on. They also include associated expenses such as ICT infrastructure (for authoring and content-sharing purposes), bandwidth, costs of running workshops and meetings when content development teams meet, and so on.

‘Open’ in OER

‘Open’ is a term which is loosely applied, and, having gained currency is now being appropriated in many different sectors, such as open government, open architecture, open society, open access to education materials, and open source software (Weller, 2011). In many cases, current discussions on educational reform, particularly in higher education, have moved from OER to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Both are related to general policies of open education and reform, but there are differences. In particular, most MOOCs allow users only fair-use rights or rights stated in specific licenses. Most cannot be legally copied, and users cannot update them or use them to create their own courses. They are therefore not OER.

OER, as stated above, must be available on an open license which allows users to legally use/reuse and modify them.

Challenges to mainstreaming OER practices

It has been observed that awareness of OER has spread faster than its implementation. There remain obstacles that hinder the mainstreaming of OER by the global educational community. The Paris OER Declaration 2012 highlighted these obstacles and had flagged them for  international cooperation. While advances have been made in each area, increased efforts by  the international community are still necessary. These obstacles are: 1) the capacity of users to access, re-use and share OER; 2) issues related to language and culture; 3) ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality OER; 4) changing business models; 5) the development of supportive policy environments.

Capacity of users to access, re-use and share OER

Capacity building for all education stakeholders

Harnessing OER requires leaders who are flexible, open to new ideas, and willing to make decisions. Thus there is a need to build capacity in leaders to ensure that leveraging OER is both a top-down and bottom-up process. This includes capacity building of educational stakeholders (policy makers, educators, students) to support capacity building to share materials created under an open license and the need to facilitate finding, retrieving and sharing of OER through the development of user-friendly tools to locate and retrieve OER that are specific and relevant to particular needs.

Skills development for OER use, re-use and sharing

In addition, building capacity requires relevant ongoing professional development activities to be made available to educators to enable them to acquire the skills and competencies necessary to use OER. There is also a need for necessary digital and media literacy skills to find, share, create, and re-mix OER effectively. As available OER may not always match methods or subject matter as taught locally, there is a need to train staff to source and adapt OER. Further skills required are the ability to 'see value' in someone else's work that could be used in a new context, technical skills to effect changes to the OER, translation skills, and the ability to distribute and share the new version of the OER to students and the open community.

There is also a need for capacity to focus on intellectual property rights issues, and developing a good understanding of open licenses, its implications, and understanding how these work in practice. Mechanisms to recognize the time, effort and skills required to develop and adapt OER by educational staff needs to be developed.

Simplifying and popularizing OER storage and retrieval systems (UNESCO, 2016) to have the necessary tools and information to develop OER is needed. Currently there are no standards for accessibility when accessing, using and re-using OER. Furthermore, the available tools to share resources are limited and there are a few options available, with current platforms often being difficult to use.

Language and Culture

This issue is related to the need to promote multilingual in cyberspace. The Internet which is the main medium through which OER are shared, provides opportunities to improve the free flow of ideas by word and image, it also presents challenges to ensuring the participation of all as the majority of the content is in English. Producing OER in local languages allows for increased diversity, quality, and relevance of the content.

Furthermore, there is a need to address cultural issues around attitudes to sharing. It is important to provide incentives to encourage or, where appropriate, require the use of OER in education institutions. As part of capacity building efforts, there is value in creating and sustaining effective communities of practice to foster sharing of information and collaboration. Such collaboration has additional potential side benefits of improving quality (through reviewing and vetting others’ materials), increasing access and reducing costs through sharing.

Ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality OER

This point relates to 2 concepts: accessibility of OER for persons with disabilities; supporting the use of OER in all ICT environments.

Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities

While OER includes an open licenses, it is not inherently technically accessible, and there is a need to ensure that accessibility issues are mainstreamed into all use of OER whether it be creating, sharing and / or re-mixing.  Approximately 15% of the population, representing some 1 billion people in the world, have a disability2. This figure is accelerating in line with the population increases, growing poverty, natural disasters, ongoing conflicts and an ageing populations. With such a large number of people living with a disability, it is vital that access to educational opportunities is made widely available.

Connectivity

Despite the great potential of OER, there are challenges in accessing OER, particularly in developing countries related to access to the Internet. Being able to access OER requires adequate ICT infrastructure. A robust and fast connection to the Internet, which is still lacking in many institutions, is also very useful. Furthermore, the high cost of bandwidth, coupled with students’ poor socio-economic situations in some contexts, means that many students are unable to access ICT the Internet and OER. In addition with the increased use of mobile technologies and networks to access the Internet in all parts of the world, particularly in developing countries, it is important that OER is mobile friendly both to share, create, and/ or re-mix, and easily downloadable so that it can be shared on networks ‘off line’ if necessary.

Quality Concerns

A common debate in OER focuses on concerns about the quality of OER. Proponents of OER point out that the transparency provided by OER (where resources produced by staff are shared openly) usually places social pressure on institutions and teaching staff to increase quality. Some institution-based providers use the brand or reputation of an institution to persuade the user that available materials on a website are high quality. If they are not, then the prestige of the institution is at risk. Another approach is to use peer review, one of the most commonly used quality assurance processes in academia. As more institutions around the world are, at different levels, requiring their educators to share more materials under open licenses, experiences clearly demonstrate that this opening of intellectual property to peer scrutiny is having the effect of improving quality of teaching and learning materials. This happens both because educators tend to invest time in improving their materials before sharing them openly and because the feedback they receive from peer and student scrutiny helps them to make further improvements. In the development of materials for K-12 education, and for teacher training , ensuring that mechanisms for the quality assurance mechanisms of content for non-OER materials is applied where possible has proven useful and should be further explored.

Changing business models

Globally, the traditional publishing business model has come under growing pressure as a consequence of technological development and the digitization of content. The changes experienced by the publishing industry are affecting its market paradigms and business models. Basic principles, such as economies of scale, which used to be a mantra for this sector, have become less significant. Digital books are usually sold at a lower price compared to physical books, and, as free public domain books increasingly becoming available, this availability may further threaten the traditional business model of the publishing industry.

The increasing demand for access to quality education, combined with rising education
enrolments, calls for more educational resources, particularly affordable textbooks.  However, textbook prices are soaring along with the rising cost of education resulting in the overall price of education to increase significantly. As textbook costs rise, there is a simultaneous move toward digital textbooks, due to the increasing availability of ICT. The potential of affordable electronic textbooks, combined with the potential of OER, is regarded as an option to mitigate the rising cost of textbooks, with several organizations and institutions making electronic textbooks available for free.

Such developments are forcing publishing industry actors to reassess their business models and redefine their products and services, in order to align them with changing conditions, needs, and requirements. A growing number of governments and institutions – from national to regional to local levels – require that all educational resources funded by taxpayers or public resources must be licensed as OER. At the same time, educational and academic publishers in these countries are undergoing a period of evolution and reflection regarding the future dynamic between traditional copyrighted publishers and publicly funded OER.

There is a need to identify innovative solutions to develop new business models, so that the interests of the OER community and educational publishers are addressed. Several  possibilities include: publishers providing customized education services, publishers concentrating on new subjects where OER do not yet exist; providing joint products (for example producing conventional textbooks while releasing other products such as educational games with an open license), publishers assembling OER, and developing hybrid models which allows for both OER and traditional copyrighted publications to co-exist, each meeting different audience needs (UNESCO, 2016).

Development of supportive policy environments

The Paris OER Declaration 2012 states that publicly funded educational resources should be
made available under an open license to the public. This creates a need to foster the creation, adoption, and implementation of policies supportive of effective OER practices. Governmental and institutional policy makers play a crucial role in setting policies that help to shape the direction of education systems, and these policies can accelerate or impede the adoption and creation of OER. Several countries have already adopted OER policies3, and the presence of country policies that are supportive of OER can be used as a gauge to determine levels of commitment to OER. The lack of such frameworks can limit and delay the process of adoption or may even discourage institutions from pursuing OER undertakings. Furthermore, commercial interests, lack of awareness, and absence of strong leadership may limit the development and implementation of supportive OER policies. Once governments and institutions have decided to adopt an open license policy (requiring the outputs of grants or contracts be openly licensed), it is also important to provide implementation guides and professional development for how to implement the open policy.

PC co-chairs

• Nader Bshouty,  Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
• Gilles Stoltz, Ecole normale supérieure

PC members

• Jake Abernethy, University of Pennsylvania
• András Antos, MTA SZTAKI
• Shai Ben-David, University of Waterloo
• Avrim Blum, Carnegie Mellon University
• Koby Crammer, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
• Sanjoy Dasgupta, UC San Diego
• Vitaly Feldman, IBM Research
• Claudio Gentile, Universita' dell'Insubria, Varese
• Timo Kötzing, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
• Wouter M. Koolen, Royal Holloway, University of London
• Phil Long, Google
• Claire Monteleoni, George Washington University
• Lev Reyzin, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Steven de Rooij, CWI Amsterdam
• Daniil Ryabko, INRIA
• Rocco Servedio, Columbia University
• Hans Ulrich Simon, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
• Frank Stephan, National University of Singapore
• Csaba Szepesvári, University of Alberta
• Eiji Takimoto, Kyushu University
• Ambuj Tewari, University of Texas at Austin
• Vladimir Vovk, Royal Holloway, University of London
• Bob Williamson, Australian National University
• Sandra Zilles, University of Regina

Annalisa Appice (Universita degli Studi di Bari)
Roberto Bayardo (Google)
Tanya Berger-Wolf (University of Illinois)
Hendrik Blockeel (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Francesco Bonchi (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)
Carla Brodley (Tuft University)
Carlotta Domeniconi (George Mason University)
Tina Eliassi-Rad (Rutgers University)
Charles Elkan (University of California San Diego)
Tapio Elomaa (Tampere University of Technology)
Wei Fan (IBM T.J.Watson Research)
Paolo Frasconi (Universita degli Studi di Firenze)
Joao Gama (University of Porto)
Gemma Garriga (INRIA Lille Nord Europe)
Claudio Gentile (Universita’ dell’Insubria)
Aristides Gionis (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)
Geoff Holmes (University of Waikato)
Eyke Hullermeier (Philipps-Universitat Marburg)
George Karypis (University of Minnesota)
Kristian Kersting (University of Bonn)
Joost Kok (University of Leiden)
James Kwok (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Bing Liu (University of Illinois)
Marie-Francine Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Alessandro Moschitti (University of Trento)
Mahesan Niranjan (University of Southampton)
Dino Pedreschi (Universita di Pisa)
Jian Pei (Simon Fraser University)
Bernhard Pfahringer (University of Waikato)
Teemu Roos (University of Helsinki)
Arno Siebes (University of Utrecht)
Myra Spiliopoulou (University of Magdeburg)
Hannu Toivonen (University of Helsinki)
Luis Torgo (University of Porto)
Jean-Philippe Vert (Mines ParisTech & Curie Institute)
Stefan Wrobel (University of Bonn & Fraunhofer)