During Open Education Week 2025, CIDER hosted a special series of sessions to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL). Recordings of all three sessions are available.

March 3: Retrospective on Open Access Publishing
Rory McGreal

March 5: The Evolution of Open and Distributed Learning
Connie Blomgren and Terry Anderson

March 7: Emerging Technologies in International Education
Adnan Qayyum and Levina Yuen

Download the OE Week 2025 overview.

UNESCO has released its Dubai Declaration on Open Educational Resources: Digital Public Goods and Emerging Technologies for Equitable and Inclusive Access to Knowledge. from the 3rd World Open Educational Resources Congress held in Dubai, 2024. The Declaration's recommendations are:

Emerging technologies, including AI, provide opportunities to advance the 2019 Recommendation. Beyond the creation of new openly licensed content, potential applications include: facilitating the detection of existing openly licensed content online; developing techniques for effective OER curation; translating OER into multiple languages; and facilitating content indexing through the recommendation of descriptive metadata. Other emerging technologies, such as decentralized and secure digital ledger systems, could potentially ensure the provenance, integrity and lawful use of OER.

Legal frameworks are not up to date with technological advancements such as these. In the realm of intellectual property rights (IPR), the key to OER, this can lead to ambiguities on what constitutes legal use as well as issues regarding how exceptions and limitations to copyright law may be used even when a work is not openly licensed. Developing clear guidelines and policies that address these issues can help protect the rights of content creators, ensure proper attribution and create innovative technology spaces for the public good.

The Global Digital Compact and UNESCO’s ROAM-X principles, which are rights-based, open, accessible and promote multi-stakeholder participation based on cross-cutting principles, in particular gender equity, can inform policies for OER by providing a comprehensive framework that ensures inclusivity, equity and collaboration in the development and implementation of open educational resources.

These frameworks and principles, alongside the 2019 Recommendation, provide a robust foundation for developing OER. The stakeholders addressed in this document are those in the 2019 Recommendation 4. With regard to generative AI, it is important to underscore that these recommendations apply both to the inputs and outputs of large language models (LLMs). Furthermore, the principle of human-centred use of technology prevails in all recommendations. The principles of transparency and knowledge-sharing are fundamental for the implementation of these recommendations. The guidelines below aim to provide actions to harness the opportunities posed by emerging technologies, such as AI, for expanding knowledge-sharing and creation through the implementation of the 2019 Recommendation.

Download the full Declaration ...