3 Framework: Why a blueprint for the role of OER in advancing equity?

As a collaborative, DOERS3 works to position its members and other higher educators to realize the promise of high-quality, accessible, and sustainable OER implementation to achieve equity and student success at scale. In recognition that equity requires intentionality of purpose and action, the DOERS3 Equity Work Group was convened to develop a blueprint identifying the equity dimensions of higher education engagement with OER, and to foreground the role of OER in closing equity gaps.

Attending to equity has always been implicit in OER. Globally, equity has been a stated goal of OER expansion across all educational sectors exemplified in UNESCO’s commitment to Open Education and the 2007 Capetown Open Education Declaration. Higher educators focused on building engagement with OER across all types of institutions name equity as a primary motivation.

The OER Equity Blueprint goes beyond naming and explicitly binds equity outcomes to OER. In addition to elevating the multiple dimensions of equity, the Blueprint seeks to identify institutional players’ roles and responsibilities, and propose levels of engagement, action, and assessment designed to aid OER in fulfilling their promise. Building engagement with OER in higher education is about leveling the playing field for students by making college more affordable and inclusive, leading to improved student success. Course materials that are openly licensed allow higher educators to improve OER with attention to quality, cultural relevance, and responsiveness. In addition, a focus on equitable and equity-centered educational environments requires attention to a level playing field for OER agents, including faculty, staff, and administrative leadership.

In a global environment of rising income inequality–much of which is race-based–increasing the students’ social mobility serves as a driver of OER adoption and expansion. With this equity motivation at the heart of OER, other dimensions of equity must also be attended to, including ability, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, geography, and digital and technological capital. Because inequities are historically rooted in income inequality and structural racism, closing equity gaps requires acknowledgement of—and confrontation with—those two barriers.

The DOERS3 Equity Work Group has been motivated by the work of many higher education leaders, both individuals and organizations. For example, the work group believes that “students’ cognitive, cultural and interdisciplinary diversity” (Ladson-Billings, 1994), should be included in any understanding of equity. The work group also views OER as a critical means to commit to and take action on inclusive excellence, as articulated by the Association of American Colleges and Universities:

The vision and practice of inclusive excellence…calls for higher education to address diversity, inclusion, and equity as critical to the well-being of democratic culture. …The action of making excellence inclusive requires that we uncover inequities in student success, identify effective educational practice, and build such practices organically for sustained institutional change. (AAC&U, n.d.)

Equally critical is the insistence that the adoption and expansion of OER requires equity-mindedness to engender analysis of policy and practice to address “the distribution of power, access to resources and knowledge, and the reproduction of social stratification” (Bensimon, 2009).

Finally, Sarah Lambert’s work to reclaim the social justice dimensions of Open Education deepens and broadens the motivation at the heart of OER engagement and expansion. Without using the word “equity,” she provides a definition of Open Education grounded in redistributive, recognitive, and representational justice that is all about equity:

Open Education is the development of free digitally enabled learning materials and experiences primarily by and for the benefit and empowerment of non-privileged learners who may be under-represented in education systems or marginalized in their global context. Success of social justice aligned programs can be measured not by any particular technical feature or format, but instead by the extent to which they enact redistributive justice, recognitive justice and/or representational justice. (Lambert, 2018)

With equity-mindedness and social justice as guideposts, this Blueprint serves to guide Open Education leaders in institutions, systems, and state-wide organizations in implementing and assessing this core equity within their Open Education and affordability programs.