Open Educational Resources and their global needs, benefits and practices: The call for a future research agenda

This paper reports the global initiatives that advocate and promote open educational resources (OER) and focuses on the main benefits of OER for our global society. Comparing and integrating diverse publications and studies, 40 main benefits of OER can be identified in total, clustered in six categories, namely: character, financial, design, learners', organisational and social benefits. Being justified by the broad benefits of OER, this paper argues that there is a need for creating a future OER research agenda. Such a global research coordination is currently lacking. Through their identified diverse benefits, OER can support learning designers, educators, learning providers and educational systems. And OER can also contribute to improve education worldwide and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations, in particular, SDG No. 4 to "Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all". The UNESCO Recommendation on OER offers a new opportunity to annually report on OER status and progress. Therefore, this paper calls open education and OER advocates to take local actions so that we can collectively make a global impact.