Beyond textbooks: Why Wikipedia and other Open Educational Resources are the future for global knowledge

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recently adopted a new Recommendation — the highest level of international policy — about Open Education Resources (OERs) such as Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation’s Nichole Saad shares below why this is a milestone moment for the free knowledge movement around the world.

College textbooks. Photo by Inayaysad, CC BY-SA 4.0.

When I was in college, family members generously contributed to a fund to help me pay for textbooks. I was going to community college to try to make the cost of my education more affordable, but it was a huge financial burden to spend hundreds of dollars on required textbooks each term. I’m hardly the only person with this story. Publishing and providing educational resources is expensive, and the cost of these materials poses a barrier for students around the world to access quality education.

What would happen if this obstacle to education was removed? At the Wikimedia Foundation, we’re working to build a world where every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. I’ll say it again: Our mission is to make all knowledge available to everyone for free. So, when UNESCO asked for comments to establish a Recommendation about Open Educational Resources (also known as OERs) in 2018, our staff and global community of volunteers were thrilled to collaborate and share input.

“The cost of these materials poses a barrier for students around the world to access quality education.”

According to UNESCO, OERs are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium — digital or otherwise — that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”

If you’re familiar with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, you know they certainly fall under the scope of this definition. (If you’re not familiar, read this.) OERs such as Wikipedia reduce costs associated with delivering quality education and make it possible for educators and students to become not only consumers, but also contributors to open knowledge.

Now, two years after submitting our comment on the draft, the United Nations’ 193 member states have unanimously adopted the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation.

“OERs such as Wikipedia … make it possible for educators and students to become not only consumers, but also contributors to open knowledge.”

A Recommendation is a uniquely powerful piece of international legislation: It instructs UN member states how they should invest funds, develop national policy, and measure results in a certain area. The UNESCO OER Recommendation is aimed at achieving five objectives:

• Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, use, adapt and redistribute OER
• Developing supportive policy
• Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER
• Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER
• Facilitating international cooperation

The adoption of this Recommendation means big things for the future of the global free knowledge movement, which aims to open up information and educational resources to people like you. Here’s how:

1. Validating Wikipedia as an educational resource. With the adoption of the Recommendation, the use of Wikimedia projects in education as both sources of information and as tools for learning have the potential to be more legitimized at the national and international level. While Wikipedia is a verifiable encyclopedia created using reliable sources, many teachers still perceive it as a low-quality resource. This perception change won’t happen overnight, but an endorsement by UNESCO of OERs is a step in the right direction. Additionally, my team at Wikimedia is currently piloting an initiative called “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom,” helping teachers understand and leverage Wikipedia’s educational value, and helping students strengthen their information literacy skills.
2. Collaborating with international governments and educators. Now that it will be required for UNESCO member states to report on their compliance with the new Recommendation, there will be increased opportunity for the Wikimedia community to work with ministries of education, schools, and educators to help them use the Wikimedia projects as OERs. For example, Wikisource offers a digital platform where governments can publish resources such as CC licensed textbooks. Wikipedia and Wikibooks offer instructors a place to look for OERs they can use in their classrooms. Additionally, students and educators can use Wikimedia projects to produce OERs themselves, becoming content creators for a global audience.
3. Promoting knowledge equity. Wikimedia projects offer a model for global, collaborative efforts that result in more inclusive, diverse, and accessible OERs. There is a need for more OER creators to focus their efforts on communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege, and knowledge equity is a central pillar of the Wikimedia Movement’s 2030 strategy. Moreover, our projects engage both students and educators in the creation and curation of digital content — key 21st century skills. The new Recommendation on OERs will help bring more people and wider audiences into the free knowledge movement as readers, editors, and champions.

Thanks to UNESCO’s new Recommendation, global learners now have new avenues for accessing free, reliable, and high-quality information. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we know this makes the future of the free knowledge movement brighter. We were grateful to share our input with UNESCO two years ago — and now we’re eager to help achieve the goals of the Recommendation and make free information available to everyone, everywhere.

Nichole Saad is the senior program manager for education at the Wikimedia Foundation. You can follow her on Twitter at @nomadnichole.