Media and digital literacies in Canadian teacher educators’ open educational practices: A post-intentional phenomenology

OER Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) are free, openly accessible, openly licensed educational materials (text, media, and digital assets) that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes (UNESCO, 2002; UNESCO, 2019). The term OER encompassed publicly accessible materials available to anyone to reuse, remix, revise, improve and redistribute (McGreal, 2017; Wiley & Hilton, 2018) under license formats that frequently included Creative Commons licensing frameworks. The use and application of OER has transformative potential when the benefits of sharing across institutions and countries were fully realized (McGreal, 2017). OER application and production relied on individuals in educational settings to become open in the ways “they produce and share knowledge, in the way they teach and assess students, and in collaborating with others” (Inamorato dos Santos, 2019, p. 7). 

          Since the Cape Town Open Education Declaration in 2007 and 2012 Paris OER Declaration (UNESCO, 2012a), the United Nations and UNESCO have advocated and promoted the use and creation of OER (Hodgkinson-Williams & Gray, 2009) to uphold open education initiatives in support of the SDGs in education (UNESCO, 2012b). The Ljubljana Action Plan (UNESCO, 2017) provided direction in building capacity, ensuring inclusive and equitable access, and developing sustainability models for the development of policy and environments for OER (Jožef Stefan Institute Centre for Knowledge Transfer in Information Technologies, 2020). These directions coincide with UNESCO's plan for sustainable development goals specific to education (CICAN, 2020).

          In 2019, the UN General Conference adopted a recommendation that outlined five areas of action for OER to: a) build capacity to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER; b) foster supporting policies; c) inspire inclusive, accessible, and equitable OER; d) develop models to sustain OER; and e) accelerate international teamwork (UNESCO, 2019a). This determined a global direction for OER to be recognized and supported as an area for growth within each country. Here in Canada, the development of OER and open education relied on provincially funded educational initiatives. Pan-Canadian organizations helped to open up the traditionally siloed educational K-20+ sector (“Canada’s Open Education Initiatives,” n.d.). Networks of educators built collaborative OER as part of course work, with students as active agents of information generation (Brown et al., 2021; O'Byrne et al., 2014; Robertson et al., 2012). For this research, the primary focus was not on the production of OER but rather the shift in teaching practices occurred when TEds included the use, creation, or assessment of OER.
 

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