Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational materials in the public domain, or released with an open license that allow users to legally and freely use, copy, adapt, combine and share.

OER offers the potential to provide broader and equal access to knowledge and educational opportunities by making quality and affordable educational resources widely available, at a time when education systems worldwide are facing growing challenges.

The growing demand for education and the ongoing rollout of ICT infrastructure have created unique challenges for education institutions. OER has the potential to play a pivotal and innovative role, in an era of often tight budgetary resources.

It has been observed that awareness of OER has spread faster than its implementation. Obstacles remain that hinder the mainstreaming of OER by the global educational community. The Paris OER Declaration 2012 highlighted these obstacles as areas that require further cooperation to address. While advances have been made in each of these five areas, increased efforts by the international community are still necessary. These obstacles are: 1) the capacity of users to access, re-use and share OER; 2) issues related to language and culture; 3) ensuring inclusive and equitable access to quality OER; 4) changing business models; 5) the development of supportive policy environments. The discussions at this session will focus on the above challenges, and are linked directly to the theme of the 2nd World OER Congress “OER for Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education: from Commitment to Action”, to be held 18 to 20 September 2017 in Ljubljana, Slovenia.