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OE Global - Women's Empowerment through OER and OEP
1. Women’s empowerment through openness:
OER, OEP and the Sustainable Development Goals
Dr Leigh-Anne Perryman
Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University UK
leigh.a.perryman@open.ac.uk, @laperryman
Dr Beatriz de los Arcos
Open Education Research Hub, The Open University UK
b.de-los-arcos@open.ac.uk @celtatis
Photo:UnitedNationsCC-BY-NC-ND
2. Sustainable Development Goal 5
Target 5b: ‘Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and
communications technology (ICTs), to promote the empowerment of women’
Photo credit: United Nations. Public Domain
6. The reality
Inequalities and Respective Barriers
Socio-Cultural (e.g. oppressing gender roles for women in male-
dominated societies; religious beliefs and practices, gender-unequal
social norms, lack of freedom to make decisions)
Economic (e.g. lack of economic opportunities, no employment,
inability to afford owning ICT equipment, high fees for Internet
access)
Demographic (e.g. lower caste, less education, dominance of English
on the Internet, illiteracy, lack of ICT skill)
Psychological (e.g., beliefs creating an inferiority complex among
women and lack of confidence)
Geographic (e.g. rural vs. urban location, poor transportation
infrastructure, long distance to ICT facilities, poor signal strength)
7. Analysis of
OERH
dataset
175 countries
N=7,700
76% from
Global North
24% from
Global South
N=7635 Global South 24% Global North 76%
Role
38% informal learners
29% formal learners
32% educators
45% informal learners
28.4% formal learners
23.2% educators
Gender
62% male
36.6% female
44% male
55% female
Age 28% 25-34 years-old 22.3% 25-34 years-old
Educational Qualification
38% postgraduate
32% undergraduate
34.5% postgraduate
26% undergraduate
Employment status
48.3% full-time
13% part-time
47.2% full-time
17.7% part-time
English native speakers 31% 75%
Internet Access
56% mobile
49% home broadband
70% mobile
89% home broadband
8. • To what extent are
women being empowered
in developing countries
through OER and OEP?
• What are the barriers to
women’s empowerment
in developing countries
through open educational
resources and practices?
• How might those barriers
be removed?
Research questions Photo: CCAFS CC-BY-NC-SA
9. Main reasons for
women using OER
Global
South
women
Global
North
women
Professional
development
68% 56%
Training
others at
work
22% 7%
Improving
non-native
language
skills
33% 15%
Improving
study skills
57% 48%
Photo: IICD CC-BY
10. Engagement with OER
GLOBAL NORTH GLOBAL SOUTH
Count % Count %
I have adapted open educational resources to fit
my needs
668 74.1 186 75.3
I have created open educational resources for
study or teaching
230 25.5 70 28.3
I have created resources myself and published
them on a CC license
78 8.6 16 6.5
“I have started
feeling that
there is no
harm in
sharing my
slides and
other study
material across
the globe…”
Photo: IT for Change CC-BY
13. GLOBAL SOUTH
FEMALE MALE
Count % Count %
I have broadened my coverage of the
curriculum
99 69.2 124 68.5
I use a broader range of teaching and
learning methods
107 74.3 111 63.8
I have improved my skills in information and
communication technologies
90 64.7 97 55.7
I make use of a wider range of multimedia 96 71.1 100 59.5
I make more use of culturally diverse
resources
65 51.6 82 50.6
I have a more up-to-date knowledge of my
subject area
101 73.2 108 63.2
I reflect more on the way that I teach 92 66.2 108 65.9
I more frequently compare my own teaching
with others
63 48.8 87 52.4
I now use OER study to develop my teaching 66 56.4 71 49.3
I collaborate more with colleagues 54 42.9 85 51.5
Impact of OER use on teaching - comparison
between female and male educators in the
Global South
14. Implications: Engagement with OER and
OEP, and women’s empowerment
• Financial power
& autonomy
through low
cost
professional
development.
• Informational
power.
• Associational
power through
communities.
Photo: DFID CC-BY-NC-SA
16. ‘In many countries of
the world there is
gendered access to
languages… Whereas
men and boys have
often had the
opportunity to learn
the language of power
at school, women may
only know how to
speak their mother
tongue’ (Robinson-
Pant, 2007).
Localise OER (including mother tongue
languages)
Image: Alberto Lucas Lopez (with permission)
17. Release OER in a variety of formats to
minimise the cost barrier
• OER don’t have
to be digital
• Hard copy
• SD card
• Radio
programmes
• Avoid big videos
& games Photo: DFID CC-BY-NC-SA
18. Develop and nurture communities of practice
• Peer-to-peer support & skills development around OER
use & open educational practices
• Crowd-sourced translation & localisation
Photo: Leigh-Anne Perryman CC-BY
Photo:CommonwealthofLearningCC-BY-SA
19. Thank you for listening
Dr Beatriz de los Arcos
Open Education Research Hub
The Open University UK
b.de-los-arcos@open.ac.uk
@celtatis
Dr Leigh-Anne Perryman
Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University UK
leigh.a.perryman@open.ac.uk
@laperryman Presentation: CC-BY
Photo:UnitedNationsCC-BY-NC-ND
Notes de l'éditeur
L-A
Thanks for coming to our session, in which we’ll be reporting on some research we’ve conducted, using Open Education Research Hub data, on the potential for openness to help increase women’s empowerment in the developing world.
Our full paper in Open Praxis gives much more detail about the findings so do check it out.
L-A
25 September, the 193 countries of the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Development Agenda, comprising an intergovernmental set of 17 aspirational Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with 169 targets.
Women’s empowerment is the focus of Goal 5, which includes amongst its targets one of only 4 references to ICT amongst the SDG: ‘Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology (ICTs), to promote the empowerment of women’ (Target 5b).
L-A
A recent report by the World Wide Web Foundation on women’s digital exclusion defines empowerment as the exercise of choice in social, cultural, organisational, economic and political domains.
The report gives a clear account of the potential of ICT to increase women’s capabilities (to draw on Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities’ approach) through the acquisition of: Informational power, communicative power, and associative power.
L-A
And access to ICT also means access to the benefits of open educational resources and practices.
L-A
However, the reality is a story of exclusion and deprivation in many cases.
A recent report by the World Wide Web foundation makes depressing reading regarding women’s digital exclusion in the developing world.
For example;
Women are about 50% less likely than men to use the internet in poor urban communities.
Across the 9 surveyed countries in Africa, Asia and South America, 37% of women were Internet users, in comparison with 59% of men.
It is clear that privilege leads to even more privilege in that women who are politically active offline are twice as likely to use the Internet, and access to higher education narrows the gender gap in Internet access.
L-A
In our full paper we go into detail about some of the reasons for this digital exclusion, which also prevents women in the developing world from realising the benefits of openness in education through OER and OEP. For now, I’ll just summarise…
B
Intro to OERH and open dataset.
Sample breakdown, especially gender in GN and GS.
B
3 research questions…
Photo: CCAFS CC-BY-NC-SA
B
When asked about their interest in using OER, a comparison between responses from women in developed and developing countries reveals that the latter give more importance to the role of open resources in their professional development (68.4% vs 56%), training others at work (22.2% vs 6.7%) and improving both their non-native language skills (32.7% vs 14.6%) and study skills (57.3% vs 47.7%). All these differences were found to be statistically significant (Table 4).
Bea
Engagement with OER is comparable with Global North, and greater in terms of creating OER for study or teaching.
Qualitative evidence of changed attitudes towards sharing resources.
B
Women’s engagement with OER & OEP in the Global South is particularly impressive considering the challenges they face in doing so, typically greater than women in the Global North.
Go through challenges…
Technology problems and finding relevant resources emerge as the biggest disparities between Global North and Global South.
B
Analysis of the OERH dataset in respect of educators’ use of OER, and the impact of this, also reveals disparities between Global North and South with the impact of OER on female teachers’ educational practices appearing considerably greater in the Global South.
Go through categories…
Bea
When comparing women and men in the global south, women still show greater impact of OER on their teaching than men, in most categories.
L-A Implications
OER/OEP can help achieve women’s empowerment through the development of:
Financial power & autonomy through low cost professional development
Informational power (health care, civic participation etc)
Associational power through communities
The level of engagement with OER & OEP is particularly impressive considering the challenges faced by the women surveyed.
BUT – our own research is limited to well-educated women already engaging online with an online survey and the real barriers are societal.
L-A
Our recommendations: We do acknowledge that the biggest barriers to women’s empowerment through openness and ICTs more generally are societal, cultural, and economic. However, we’ve limited our recommendations to those achievable by the open education community.
L-A
We also recommend that OER projects prioritise the localisation of existing and new OER, including translation into mother tongue languages – a common area of exclusion for women who’ve not had an education in English or other languages of power and can only speak their mother tongue.
L-A
Release OER in additional formats to minimise the cost barrier to engagement. (Tess-India; community radio/CoL)
L-A
Prioritise developing communities of practice for OER creation and OEP, including women at all stages of empowerment
Examples – VUSSC; Karnataka OER project and Subject Teachers’ Forum developed by the Bengalaru-based NGO IT for Change.
FINALLY, Go offline when researching ICTs and openness, and explore more diverse barriers to digital participation and engagement with openness
L
Our full paper in Open Praxis gives much more detail about the findings so do check it out.