Adult Education and Open Educational Resources – new report by Sero for European Parliament

Adult Education and Open Educational Resources is a 140-page “Study”, written by Sero, released by the European Parliament research office on 15 October 2015.

It reviews the current use of Open Educational Resources in Adult Education in Europe (with a focus on Member States of the European Union – including the UK as one of the case study countries), assesses its potential and makes recommendations for policy interventions, taking account of the European Commission’s policy frameworks and those developed by the European Parliament and relevant European agencies. The majority of the research was carried out in the first five months of 2015.

There is an inevitable orientation to HE given the predominance of HE exemplars across Europe but we tried to cover the whole adult education space, digging deeply into IT aspects when we could find nothing on OER. The sponsors were looking for evidence, not for predictions.

The Study incorporates an Annex (starting on p. 77) including new research on over 12 Member States (with a focus on UK, France, Spain, Hungary, Sweden, Latvia, Germany and Romania), leveraging on a synthesis of existing research from a range of projects including POERUP (Policies for OER Uptake) and a 2014-15 study on Shared OER for the Joint Research Centre, augmented by more recent OER-related studies (D-TRANSFORM and SEQUENT) from Sero and others for the Joint Research Centre, Erasmus+ and the Lifelong Learning Programme. The work also was able to draw on some of the country reports for OERup!

The Study includes a Glossary (of over 80 items) and comprehensive bibliography (with over 410 entries) of papers and reports consulted.

The Executive Summary (pp. 7-9) gives a description of the report, the findings and a set of recommended policy interventions for the European Union and nearby countries.

The Study is available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?reference=IPOL_STU(2015)563397

The report was written by Sero with a team of advisors and country experts. Many others assisted the team in several ways – these are listed on p. 47. Within Sero, Paul Bacsich wrote the main report and Giles Pepler was overall Editor for the Annex – to which several country experts contributed. The UK case study (16 pp.) was written by Sara Frank Bristow.