The Role of OER Localisation in Building a Knowledge Partnership for Development: Insights from the TESSA and TESS-India Teacher Education Projects

Open educational resources (OER) continue to support the needs of educators and learners globally. However, it is clear that to maximise their potential more focus is needed on reuse and repurposing. Accordingly, adapting OER for local contexts remains one of the greatest challenges of the open education movement, with little written about how to support communities of users to adapt materials. This paper emerges from the ongoing debate around education quality in low income countries (LICs), taking as its focus two OER projects led by the Open University--TESSA and TESS-India. These projects have collaboratively developed core banks of OER for teacher education that respond to regional and national priorities and pedagogies. In this paper we explore how the projects have supported localisation of the OER and how processes of OER localisation can contribute to more equal knowledge partnerships in the pursuit of education quality. [This paper was presented at the 2014 OpenCourseWare Consortium Global Conference, held in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in April 23th-25th 2014 (http://conference.ocwconsortium.org/2014), with whom Open Praxis established a partnership. After a pre-selection by the Conference Programme Committee, the paper underwent the usual peer-review process in "Open Praxis."]