A Comparative Study of National Infrastructures for Digital (Open) Educational Resources in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project “Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures–EduArc”, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed within the digital transformation of ten different Higher Education (HE) systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States). Following a comparative case study approach, we investigated issues related to the existence of policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures for the promotion of change in supporting infrastructure development for (O)ER at the national level in HE in the different countries. The results of this mainly documentary research highlight differences and similarities, which are largely due to variations in these countries’ political structure organisation. The discussion and conclusion point at the importance of understanding each country’s context and culture, in order to understand the differences between them, as well as the challenges they face.

Quality Assurance of Open Educational Resources

“…This international comparison covered the macro (national and regional context), meso (institutional context), and micro levels (teaching and learning) across ten countries (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and the United States). One of the main issues addressed in this comparative case study was the quality of OER, especially referring to national standards for the creation, dissemination, and quality assurance of OER at the macro level (Marín et al, 2020). In the meso level, the aim was to observe the development of institutional measures for the creation, dissemination, and quality assurance of OER across countries (Marín et al, under review).…”

Online Infrastructures for Open Educational Resources

“…National MOOC platforms are especially popular in the eastern region of Asia (China, Japan, South Korea) (Marín et al 2020a)…”

“…Edraak [https://www.edraak.org/] is a nonprofit MOOC platform launched in 2013 based in Jordan but targeted at the whole Arab-speaking world for schools and CE (Wimpenny et al 2016). Several institutional MOOC platforms in Turkey (e.g., AKADEMA by Anadolu University or Atademix by Erzurum Ataturk University) (Marín et al 2020a) and the discontinued Turkish HE ROER initiative, which started in 2007 "National Open Course Materials" (Tisoglu et al 2020)…”

Open Educational Resources in German Higher Education – An International Perspective

“…Contextual factors to understand national OER infrastructures, policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures to promote change that were identified in the study were: each country's population, number of HE students, number of HE institutions, the balance between private and public HE system, the ICT development and the digital readiness. As a cornerstone element, the level of political structure centralisation impacted the four elements studied (Marín et al, 2020).…”

“…As in Germany, education is a mandate of provinces or states, resulting rather in underdeveloped or non-existent OER infrastructures on the national level, and rather non-binding recommendations published by different actors concerning policy. For all countries, change happens mostly in the form of national funding initiatives and national digital strategies; despite this, change was reported to happen mostly at the meso or micro level in the majority of countries (Marín et al, 2020).…”