Group Admins
Description
Session Description
As Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are an essential tool for the dissemination of information worldwide, for the Latin American region, approaches exclusively focused on providing access to infrastructure do not suffice anymore. Currently, the need for LatAm public policies which target the availability of technology for educational purposes has grown towards digital literacy in order to achieve ICT ownership and sustainability. Although it is expected that on a regional level similar issues around educational demands for professionals are faced, each territory presents its own challenges and priorities when it comes to facing Open Education Resources Repositories as a lifelong learning strategy. In the context of this presentation, we aim to address sustainability of an open education initiative by the mapping of Open Educational Resources (OER) Public Policies within the Latin American territory and demonstrate the case study of Mercosur’s OER repositories present in the Pan American Health Organization’s (PAHO) Open Educational Repositories Network to study the influence of the region’s policies that foster or guide the development of these resources and their respective platforms. Through an exploratory study supported by bibliographic research and data collection, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed the repositories of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay to understand trends in the use of OER-based Digital Repositories and the impact of public policies on them. In order to do so, an Evaluation Matrix was created based on the metrics and indicators from the region’s policies and used to assess PAHO’a OER Repositories Network. We identified that, although all countries from Mercosur guarantee open licenses within their repositories, Brazil has produced, since 2018, 60 times the total amount of resources from the other countries combined, demonstrating a highly significant discrepancy when providing a regional analysis. Finally, we propose recommendations for platform sustainability in the face of regional challenges arising from the digital divide: strategies for professional training; promotion of initiatives; institutional partnerships; public and institutional policies and continued education.
References
Cabrera, K. (2015). Comparative analysis of public policies in open access models in Latin America: Brazil and Argentina cases. Universities And Knowledge Society Journal, 12(1), pp.15-24.
Toledo, A. (2017). Open Access and OER in Latin America: a survey of the policy landscape in Chile, Colombia and Uruguay. In: C. Hodgkinson-Williams and P. Arinto, ed., Adoption and impact of OER in the Global South. Cape Town: African Minds.
Survey on Governments’ Open Educational Resources (OER) Policies. (2012). Commonwealth of Learning, UNESCO.
Wiley, D. (2002). The Instructional Use of Learning Objects: online version.
