Using OER in Asia: Factors, Reforms and Possibilities

Open Educational Resources (OER) are frequently advocated as an educational panacea, an educational technology that can be transported and transferred, reused and revised, to address the global shortage of high-quality online material. This paper explores that scenario by looking at the factors that might promote or inhibit the transfer and re-use of OER into Asian higher education and particularly focuses on the issue of language and culture. The paper identifies culture, as the underpinning of pedagogy, as a significant and unacknowledged determinant of success and proposes culture, as calibrated by the work of Hofstede and comparable thinkers, as a possible addition to OER metadata.