Many practitioners are moving towards adopting OER for improving access and quality. This is particularly true in Asia where universities are reforming aiming to be so-called world-class universities. The shortcut to them seems to be importing ready-made courseware from the elite western universities as OER. However, we have yet to see clear research evidence in comparative studies on the improvements brought by using OER. We are also in danger of moving backwards to more teaching-centred practice. We should be wary too about some institutions and individuals simply dumping lessons onto the web and calling them free OER. We need to be very careful in what OER we adopt and how we adapt and re-use them. Certainly the efforts by the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO (2011) and the OPAL Project (2011) are to be supported - towards developing practices and pathways for learning. The key issue is to develop these learning pathways.

Keywords

distance education