Access and Equity in Global Distance Education

The use of Open Education Resources (OER) activities and initiatives does not promote equity in global education and is not accessible to all. In fact, OER is accessible to those of means and promotes a digital divide. A digital divide separates groups of people due to a variety of factors including differences in: income, education, race, gender, language, and people with impairments (Sachdeva, Tuikka, Kimppa, Suomi, 2015). Quite simply, the use of OER’s excludes the accessibility of education and promotes social exclusion.

OER does not address regional or remote requirements of education creating a barrier for those learners who may not have access to technology, have connectivity issues, or power limitations. As a result remote learners are simply excluded from this type of learning.

Regional learners can be excluded due to language barriers. Although OER may be customized or translated, often these customizations require training and additional skillsets which local educators often lack in these geographic areas. If unable to customize, one must question the quality and relevance of these learning resources. As Bossu and Willelms (2012), point out, “access and technological skills do not necessarily translate into effective learning” (p.193).

The internet is predominantly English and western bias (Amiel, 2013). Although the majority of learners worldwide come from non-English speaking backgrounds, the majority of OER sources are in English (Bossu & Willelms, 2012). One needs not to look any further than an OER source we are all familiar with: Wikipedia. The two top languages in this source are English and French; there are approximately 3.8 million English articles compared to 1.2 million French articles (Bossu & Willelms, 2012). How can these resources be accessible and equitable when not offered in multi languages?