Analysing the development of institutional policies for sustainability and quality of OERs with a focus on the Australian context

Abstract

Our contemporary society, including organisations and government bodies, higher education institutions, university teachers and learners, appears to be experiencing a growing awareness of the importance of education and its potential to overcome poverty and achieve sustainable development. This recognition has certainly contributed to the development and proliferation of Open Educational Resources (OERs) worldwide. Currently, more than 300 universities around the globe have launched OER projects. Millions of learners have benefited from learning through OER materials, and individual higher educational institutions, mostly distance education providers, have obtained significant rewards in terms of enhancing their reputations, increasing student enrolment and developing innovative ways to produce distance learning materials. Thus, the OER movement appears to have overcome some issues such as its resistance to giving away information and knowledge for "free", licensing, copyright and so forth. However, many questions still remain unanswered mostly those regarding the sustainability and quality of OERs. Based on the above assumption, this paper attempts to explore the existing guiding principles for sustainability and quality adopted to assure users that the OERs materials they are exploring have high-quality attributes. In addition, this paper discusses OER initiatives and policy development, with a focus on the Australian context. The issues that this paper outline are congruent with the current line of research that several organisations concerned with education, particularly with distance education worldwide, seem to follow. This is certainly the case of the DEHub, a research centre for innovation in distance education at the University of New England, Australia.