OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
and educational opportunities across the world. The initiative targets educators, students, and self-learners worldwide. The impact on the developing world has been solid but modest with respect to the need. The scale of resources invested by Hewlett and others and the scale of pilot deployments, experimentation, and development of indigenous institutional participation in the OER movement, does not begin to match the scale of the unmet needs in the developing world for digital access, availability of high-quality educational content, or interactive (as opposed to rote learning) educational processes. The challenge here is immense, but so is the potential impact.
There are interesting questions as to the definition of “developing country” that may affect Hewlett’s future priorities. The real division is not country by country, but modern urban versus rural. Parts of China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and usually at least the capital city in most other developing countries have a modern urban core, where broadband and other business services are available, at a price, and where the small middle class and the technical elite can be found, at least during working hours. The rural areas of all these countries are still very poor, unconnected in any systematic way, and unprepared for being pushed into a cash-based global economy (although it’s happening anyway). Since substantially more than 50 percent of both China and India’s populations are rural and have incomes below $3 U. S. a day, they could be called developing countries—even if at the national governance level, these nations are quite powerful modern states. South Africa is similar.
Brazil and Mexico and Russia are tougher calls, because they are 70 percent or more urban and have higher average incomes, but the rural areas (and the urban slums) are still “developing.” Most of the development literature treats all of these countries as developing, even while acknowledging a growing modern urban core. It is the modern urban–rural disparity, in fact, that is the greatest source of potential social instability—and the governments know it.
There is hunger among ordinary people to learn English better, to improve their business skills, to learn how to do specific technical tasks that improve their employability—whether you call it an unmet need or an untapped market, it is substantial. An educational approach that is informal (outside of schools), self-paced, interactive, voluntary, group-based, and visual can fit into a long bus ride or standing in line or a slow day at the market stall—the real circumstances of people in developing markets.
We leave this topic with a startling set of observations by Sir John Daniels,[1] currently President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning in Canada, and formerly Vice-chancellor of the Open University, U. K.
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