The LOGIC of National Policies and Strategies for Open Educational Resources

In its first decade (2001-2010) the OER movement has been carried by numerous relevant and successful projects around the globe. These were sometimes large-scale but more often not, and they were primarily initiated by innovating educational institutions and explorative individual experts. What has remained, however, is the quest for a sustainable perspective, in spite of the many attempts in the OER community for clearcut solutions to the problem of sustainability. This is a major barrier for mainstreaming the OER approach in national educational systems. At the end of the first decade, and more so at the beginning of the second decade (20112020), we are witnessing in a few countries emerging efforts to develop and establish a national OER approach. That is required in order to break down the barrier for mainstreaming OER. Making the OER approach sustainable cannot be left to the educational institutions only, but should be facilitated in a national setting.


National Initiatives
India was the first country to adopt OER in its Report to the Nation 2007 and with its launch of the National E-content and Curriculum Initiative (National Knowledge Commission, 2007;Vijay Kumar, 2009) Wikiwijs is primarily created for and by educators (teachers and professors), although others (experts, practitioners, students, etc.) can use it and contribute as well. Therefore ownership of Wikiwijs lies in the educational field, that is, in the first place with users.
The five-year budget of 8 million euros does not allow Wikiwijs to make payments for the development of content/learning materials, purchasing licenses for software, or for support facilities and tools. The development of content itself is supposed to be done in general by the publicly funded educational institutions and organizations within their regular budgets. The Wikiwijs program is carried by the following areas of activity: content, professionalism, accessibility/technology, communities, research, communication, and program management (Mulder, 2009).
From 2009 until 2011 Wikiwijs was in its initial implementation stage with intense user evaluation, many committed stakeholders, and good progress, but there were also bottlenecks and lessons learned, which informed the Program Plan for the next stage towards a sustainable perspective . This stage is to be characterized by user participation, a differentiation from the generic approach into the specific educational sectors, and the establishment of firm ownership with relevant partners in those sectors. In Figure 1 we show a tree of objectives derived from the operation and evaluation of Wikiwijs 2009   "Knowledge is a Public Good" This almost trivial sounding notion is included as one of the concluding statements in a report published by the Taskforce on OER of the ICDE (International Council for Open and Distance Education). Sustainability should not be taken for granted -it requires public funding (Mulder & Rikers, 2008). Similar statements or implications related to the "knowledge is a public good" notion can be recorded from other sources including

Government's Responsibilities
John Daniel has referred to the iron triangle, spanned by three sides: one for access, one for quality, and one for cost. It is called an iron triangle because improvement of one of these three performance indicators will inevitably deteriorate one of the two or both other performance indicators if circumstances and conditions are not changed.
However, he claims that the use of technology could break down this impasse (Daniel, 2009).
In this paper we present a modification of this model, which is different in three ways.
1. The performance indicators are accessibility, quality, and efficiency. The first two correspond to the first two in the iron triangle, and for both, maximization is the target. As a third indicator we have chosen costefficiency rather than cost, giving the advantage that then for all three indicators maximization is the aim (and not -as with cost -minimization).
2. The intervention should not be the use of technology in general but more specifically the utilization of OER. This will reinforce the argument because there will be less doubt with respect to the effectiveness of any specific intervention with OER.
3. Instead of a planar (2-dimensional) triangle, a 3-dimensional representation better fits the modelling with three performance indicators.
Education Performance in 3D   In the first half of 2012 UNESCO sent an OER questionnaire to all UNESCO member countries, which was similar to the OECD OER questionnaire (a few questions were not included). This is important since it is therefore possible to link the data from both questionnaires. The results were presented at the World OER Congress in June and the UNESCO Declaration on OER was adopted at the World OER Congress.