Abstract

Open Educational Resources have transformed access to educational materials. An educator no longer necessarily needs permission, a publishing contract, or a large budget to take an existing textbook and use it with their students. But being able to access a resource is not the same as having a resource that works for you.
A statistics textbook may be freely available, but still assume access to particular software, reliable internet, examples or datasets from unfamiliar contexts, or a level of mathematical background that does not match its intended audience. It may also be written in the wrong language, follow a different curriculum, or teach statistics through a pedagogical approach that does not fit the local setting. Open licensing gives educators permission to change these things. In practice, however, making and maintaining those changes can require substantial time, expertise and resources.
This matters particularly in under-resourced settings. Too often, educational innovation travels in one direction, resources are created for one context and simply ‘adopted’ by others. Yet educators and institutions know their own students, curricula, and contexts. They have the expertise to know what should change, we want them to benefit from work already done elsewhere while ‘adapting’ to their local context.
This talk explores how reusable variants of Open Educational Resources could change the textbook paradigm from ‘adoption’ to true ‘adaptation’.
Rather than thinking of an open textbook as a finished resource that can subsequently be edited, we can think of it as something designed from the outset to have many legitimate forms. A resource might exist in R and Python; in English, French, and Kiswahili; with examples from health, agriculture, or climate; for different curricula, audiences, or levels of mathematical background. Communities can create the versions they need without each adaptation becoming an isolated resource that must subsequently be maintained alone.
This has implications beyond making textbook production more efficient. It offers a different model of ownership. An educator adapting a resource for students in Kenya, Zambia, or Niger is not simply receiving educational content created elsewhere. They can make substantive decisions about examples, language, pedagogy, and assessment, while remaining connected to a wider community improving shared material. Improvements can also travel in multiple directions: an innovation developed for one local variant may prove valuable to many others, including the resource from which it originated.
The opportunity is therefore to build a whole ecosystem where textbook curation, adaptation and maintenance are achievable under a distributed ownership model without neglecting expert accreditation and opinion.
Drawing on IDEMS International’s experience developing statistical education and capacity in varied contexts, I will discuss what this could mean for statistics education globally. If we can reduce the technical and practical cost of adaptation while retaining local educational ownership, OER can move beyond providing access to resources. It can provide communities with the foundations from which to build, adapt, contribute and ultimately own the education they want to deliver.