OER, Social Justice, and Online Professional Development to Enhance Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at a University

Until recently, it has commonly been assumed that open educational resources are inherently equitable due to their constitution toward accessibility. Recent literature, however, challenges the idea that access is synonymous with equity and social justice. While definitions of open education and openness vary from source to source, in general, traditionally, there is a focus on providing entry to educational materials to underprivileged populations in an effort to save money. Sarah Lambert, author of Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education, likens the phenomenon of assumed justice in OER to technological determinism, which she defines as “a problematic and ultimately ineffective approach to technology implementations, which assumes that the particular capabilities of new technologies will always improve the situations into which they are brought.”1 Similarly, openness determinism assumes that being open is intrinsically “good”—thus, open educational resources will naturally foster justice. Lambert argues that the open community should avoid openness determinism to reflect contributions to social justice and equity and instead consider how OER applies to redistributive justice, recognitive justice, and representational justice.