TESSA project developed OERs for teacher education in Sub-Saharan Africa, with local contributors developing the material. The LatIN project is developing open textbooks for Latin America using local professors and authors, thus combating both the problems of cost and relevancy. Similarly, Siyavula in South Africa have developed open textbooks which are distributed nationally to all schools in key subjects. There are OER projects in most major countries, as the model of openness is seen as a means of addressing specific local needs.
Some of the response to these concerns, then, is that it is a developing picture, and it is unrealistic to expect an immediate resolution to problems of access that have plagued traditional education for a long time. The open education movement is being adapted and modified to meet the demands of local contexts. However, the learner profile is a concern, and the experience of open universities over the past 40 years has been that open entry students require a good deal of support. The ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy of some open education projects is unlikely to be sufficient in overcoming the barriers to participation for many learners. This emphasises the importance of maintaining a diversity of interpretations of openness and avoiding the simplistic ‘open = free’ definition, as open entry to learning may require different models of support.
A related aspect is the relatively low rates of reuse and adaptation of open content. Much is made of the 4 Rs of Reuse which we encountered in Chapter 2, but in reality only the first of these (the right to reuse something) is widely implemented. The others, revise, remix and redistribute, remain something of a minority interest. For instance, the OpenLearn team found that reversioning was rare, and users tended to take and deploy units wholesale. They found that repurposing material
