UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration
The UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration, otherwise known as the Paris declaration on Open Educational Resources, is a declaration urging governments to promote the use of open educational resources (OERs) and calling for publicly funded educational materials to be released in a freely reusable form. Creation. In June 2012, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) held a World OER Congress. This took place at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris with financial support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. At this point, the Open Educational Resources  (OER) movement was a decade old, the term having been coined in another meeting at UNESCO in 2002. The congress wrote and, on 22 June, formally adopted a ten-point declaration calling on states to realise the benefits of open education. Content. The declaration was influenced by article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which says that "Everyone has the right to education", and article 13.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which "recognize[s] the right of everyone to education". It defines open educational resources (OER) as: "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." It makes ten recommendations for governments relating to OER: Impact. In addition to the Paris declaration, UNESCO and COL have worked on regional and national projects to encourage governments around the world to adopt policies on open educational resources. A review published by UNESCO in 2015 describes the impact on government policies as "modest" while identifying some examples of success. The Scottish Open Education  Declaration, created in 2013 by a network of individuals from educational organisations in Scotland, is based on the Paris declaration.