Some Very Bad News about the UNESCO OER Recommendation

The tl;dr I recently wrote a brief essay about the wonderful new UNESCO OER Recommendation. That piece was based on the text of the most recent public draft (which I will call the “public draft” below), which many of us believed to be the document the 40th Congress unanimously approved. However, a number of extraordinarily … Read more

Some Thoughts on the UNESCO OER Recommendation

I’m leaving this post online solely for historical / archive purposes. See this updated post instead. There’s great news out of the recent UNESCO meeting in Paris, where member states unanimously adopted the draft Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER). I want to highlight some of the parts of the Recommendation that caught my eye, … Read more

Why We Should Expand Our OER Advocacy to Commercial Publishers

"Our difference don't have to divide us"

Preface Here’s a trivia question for you: which American organization has produced the largest number of open textbooks? Here’s a hint: they’ve produced more than double the number of books created by the next largest producer. Here’s another hint: they haven’t created a new open textbook since 2012. You may have thought the answer was … Read more