Open Education 2015

Mainly considered a socio-economic, political and cultural divide, the disparity between the Global North and Global South is also evident in open education: established trends in OER research originate largely in the US and Europe (Trotter, 2015), while the provision of open content and pedagogy tend to be dominated by Western thinking (Albright, 2005).

Since 2013, the Hewlett-funded OER Research Hub Project (http://oerresearchhub.org) has collected approximately 7,500 valid responses from 180 countries in a world-wide survey designed to enhance our understanding of the use and impact of OER in teaching and learning (de los Arcos et al., 2014). In this presentation we will examine this survey data to explore the existence of a North/South divide in terms of the challenges and opportunities that open education affords educators, formal and informal learners, and put forward recommendations to reach across both worlds.