The Institute of Educational Development's deputy director, Stavros Xanthopoylos, participated, between January 20-26, in a meeting that brought together education officials in Jakarta, Indonesia, to discuss research projects on the impacts and benefits of open educational resources (OERs) in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

The meeting is part of the Research into Open Educational Resources for Development in Post-Secondary Education in the Global South (ROER4D), which is supported by the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC) and other partner institutions. During the event, the committee, consisting of members from institutions in the southern hemisphere, selected 11 research projects, which will have a budget of one million Canadian dollars (approximately R$ 2 million). Cape Town University, in South Africa, will manage the funds.

Among the selected proposals, there's a study by FGV Online about the social and educational impacts of its participation in the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC), a consortium which the institution has been a member of since 2008, and a project of USP, Ribeirão Preto, on open educational resource development in 40 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

The idea behind this initiative is to globally research open educational resources in the Southern hemisphere. The meeting in Jakarta was useful to analyze proposals from all continents - from which 11 were selected - and identify the synergies among the projects, besides the focus and scope of each one of them, and determine the outlines of the projects that will go ahead, explains Xanthopoylos, who is the representative of the initiative for Latin America.

The meeting in Jakarta also counted on the presence of representatives of open universities in Asia and Africa and the responsible for UNESCO's Open Educational Resources, Abel Caine, who participated as an observer.

The event marked the first stage of the initiative, which will receive the final versions of the projects selected by February 20.

*In the photo, representatives of open universities in the Southern hemisphere, Europe and IDRC meet in Jakarta, Indonesia.