The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project aims to provide evidence-based research from a number of countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South / South East Asia. The primary objective of the programme is to improve educational policy, practice, and research in developing countries by better understanding the use and impact of OER.

Objectives

In order to address this objective, the specific objectives of the programme are to:

1. Build an empirical knowledge base on the adoption and impact of OER in education
2. Develop the capacity of OER researchers
3. Build a network of OER scholars
4. Communicate research to inform education policy and practice. To help meet these objectives, an implicit intent has been framed as an additional objective, namely to
5. Develop a strategic approach towards the curation, publication, and dissemination of research documents and data collected in the project.

As a number of philanthropic foundations and a few governments have already committed substantial funding to OER initiatives, it is necessary to search for evidence of how OER creation and use are influencing educational practices and policy in the Global South. This will help to ensure that education policy development initiatives and further expenditure by philanthropic foundations and governments are indeed achieving the outcomes of resourcing easily accessible, socially acceptable, high quality and affordable education in the Global South.

Research questions

The primary research question of the project asks:

Whether, how, for whom and under what circumstances can engagement with open educational practices and resources provide equitable access to relevant, high quality, affordable and sustainable education in the Global South?

The project is subdivided into 18 sub-projects, each headed by a research lead within the country or region to which the sub-project refers. These sub-projects will address specific objectives of the overall project, using methodologies appropriate to the subsidiary questions they will be interrogating.

Outcomes

The ROER4D project’s main research output comprises an edited volume entitled OER Adoption and Impact in the Global South. This will comprise 16 chapters and will be published in December 2017. Currently we are releasing chapters as part of our advanced publication strategy.