1. Case Study of the Dominican Republic and their
development and use of OER
Presentation of Prelim Abstract
Some Background Information on OER
Alfonso Sintjago – April 15

2. CIES – ICT4D SIG
 THE FUTURE OF COMPARATIVE AND INTERNATIONAL
EDUCATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD - DAVID N. WILSON
 “In my 1994 CIES presidential address I posed another
“perplexing question” about “when comparative and
international education will achieve recognition as something
more than an ‘amorphous’ field” (Wilson 1994: 485).I believe
that the answer is that globalisation has given comparative and
international education increased recognition, and that ICTs
have provided the communications tools to reach wider
audiences. I urge all comparative and international educators to
use this recognition wisely by doing their utmost to
communicate effectively the results of the academic and field-
based research and insights to policy-makers, educational
reformers and practitioners”

4. Broader Academia
 “My view is that in the open-access movement, we are
seeing the early emergence of a meta-university—a
transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic,
communally constructed framework of open materials
and platforms on which much of higher education
worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.” – Charles
Vest 2006

5. What are OER?
 “open educational resources are digitised materials
offered freely and openly for educators, students and
self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning
and research”
 Term was first coined at a UNESCO meeting – 2002
 OECD - the concept of “open educational resources” is
both broad and vague.

6. Conceptual Map

8. Who is Involved?
 Over 3 000 open access courses (opencourseware) are currently available from
over 300 universities.
 In the United States 1 700 courses have been made available by university-
based projects at MIT (see Box 3.1), Rice University, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University,
University of Notre Dame, and Utah State University. In October 2006 Yale
announced that it will launch an OER initiative in autumn 2007.
 In China 750 courses have been made available by 222 university members of
the China Open Resources for Education (CORE) consortium.
 In Japan more than 400 courses have been made available by the Japanese
OCW Consortium, whose members have grown from seven in May 2005 to 19
in October 2006.
 In France the 800 educational resources from around 100 teaching units that
have been made available by 11 member universities of the ParisTech OCW
project are expected to double during 2007.

9. Major OER Initiatives
 Wikieducators.org
 Free Textbook Movement
 Connexions Consortium
 OpenCourseWare Consortium
 Community Colleges Consortium for Open Education
Resources
 UNESCO Support for the OERU Initiative

10. Who Uses MIT OCW and OER? (2005)
OCW is accessed by a broadly
international population of
educators and learners.
• 61% of OCW traffic is non-US; East Asia-
22%, Western Europe-
15%, South Asia-6%, Latin America-5%,
other regions-13%
• 49% of visitors are self learners, 32%
students, 16% educators
The OCW site is being successfully used by educators,
Source: students and self learners for wide range of purposes.
MIT OpenCourseWare • Educator uses: planning a course (26%), preparing to teach
Evaluation – 2005 a class (22%), enhancing personal knowledge (19%)
• Student uses: complementing a course (38%), enhancing
personal knowledge (34%), planning course of study (16%)
• Self learner uses: enhancing personal knowledge (56%),
keeping current in field (16%), planning future study (14%)
• 41% are completely successful; 51% are somewhat successful

12. Creative Commons Licenses
 As of June 2006, the use of the different license options
had the following distribution:
 Attribution (BY) is used by 96.6% of all licensors.
 Non-commercial option (NC) 67.5%.
 Share Alike (SA) 45.4%.
 No derivatives (ND) 24.3%.