# OER from the perspectives of world institutionalism and policy borrowing


In addition to [defining the concept of
OER](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/09/16/definition-of-open-educational-resources/),
and introducing [a taxonomy of OER projects based on their
purposes](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/09/17/categorizing-oer-based-on-four-purposes/),
I also introduce my theoretical framework from comparative education in
the literature review. I begin by describing how international the
OpenCourseWare concept has become:

> At the 2008 Open CourseWare Consortium conference in Dalian, China,
> representatives from universities in many different countries were
> gathered to report on the progress, and share their experiences with
> opening up access to their course materials. Chinese researchers
> shared statistics on how large a percentage of students were aware of
> OpenCourseWare, Japanese professors showcased their latest
> OpenCourseWare semantic search tool, and Mexican researchers from the
> Tecnologico de Monterey showcased applications for mobile learning.
> The concept of OpenCourseWare had decidedly gone global.

One way to see this, is that the world is becoming more and more
similar:

> This would seem to support the idea that national education systems
> are converging globally. The view that there is a clear trend towards
> increased similarity in values and system design as the result of
> worldwide emerging models is held by Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez
> (1997, 145), who state that
>
> worldwide models define and legitimate agendas for local action,
> shaping the structures and policies of nation-states and other
> national and local actors in virtually all of the domains of
> rationalized social life — business, politics, education, medicine,
> science, even the family and religion.
>
> Applied to higher education, world institutionalism predicts a growing
> trend towards isomorphism, rather than divergence, in higher
> educational systems (Meyer, Ramirez, Frank and Schofer 2006). This
> theory proposes that educational systems are not only converging in
> structure, organization and content, but also in such values of
> education as views of progress and social justice. The fact that 39
> countries are currently members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and
> have universities that publish courses openly and share teaching
> materials freely, could be seen as further proof that global values
> and institutions are converging (OpenCourseWare Consortium 2010a).

However, not everyone is convinced that it's so simple:

> However, this theory is not without critics. Anthropologist
> Anderson-Levitt (2003) criticizes convergence theories for taking
> global schooling models at face value, and Schriewer and Martinez
> (2004, 33) similarly believes that we have to look below the surface,
> and the terms employed, to see whether they are actually describing
> the same reality:
>
> There is a convergence of educational reforms, but perhaps it is only
> at the level of brand names, that is, in the language of reform. Once
> a discourse is transplanted from one context to another and
> subsequently enacted in practice, it changes meaning.
>
> They also differentiate between internationalization as a real
> process, and internationality as a semantic construct that can be
> referred to selectively, according to the “changing problem
> constructions internal to a given educational system” (Schriewer and
> Martinez 2004; Silova 2009). They show how policy borrowing does not
> happen systematically, for example following a simple centre-periphery
> model, but rather is structured by the needs and discourses in any
> relevant society. References to educational innovations in other
> nations are often employed as a rhetorical tool to promote change that
> is desirable by certain groups. To discover these processes, the
> multi-country statistical analysis often performed by the world
> institutionalist group has to be complemented by very fine-grained
> analyses of individual cases of educational borrowing, taking into
> account the local context, including culture, history, power
> structures and discourse.

I first learnt about the theories around policy borrowing from [a
book](http://www.amazon.ca/Educational-Encounters-Global-Forces-Mongolia/dp/140396811X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1285189636&sr=8-5)
by Gita Steiner-Khamsi on education in Mongolia. This books is
beautifully written, and worth reading even if I you never thought you'd
be interested in education in Mongolia. I first heard about it by a
coincidence. My friend Espen was beginning his MA in comparative
education at the university of Oslo, and since my classes had not yet
begun, I hung out in his classes instead. One teacher had the class read
a book review of this book, and write a summary, to practice writing. I
was intrigued by the book and when I got to Toronto, I got it at the
library, and enjoyed reading it. Later, I was lucky enough to attend a
talk by Steiner-Khamsi at University of Toronto, and although it was
intimidating being the only undergraduate in a room full of graduate
students, I was probably the only one who had actually read the book
before meeting her.

> In her book Educational import: local encounters with global forces in
> Mongolia, Steiner-Khamsi and Stolpe (2006) discuss global educational
> policy borrowing through the lens of Mongolia. They show how the
> government uses the language of modern Western innovations, but does
> not change its actual practices on the ground. This is similar to what
> Schriewer and Martinez (2004) describe as using “Ausland als
> Argument”. In many cases, the Mongolian government had to adopt the
> language of the donors, for example applying for funding for
> girl-child education, even if girls were far outperforming boys in
> school already. In other settings, a government will refer to external
> examples to lend legitimacy to their policy decisions, in some cases
> even “borrowing policy” even though the practices are already being
> carried out locally. In some cases, the terminology is adapted to lend
> credibility to desirable programs nationally, and in other cases, to
> receive funding from donors with specific priorities (Steiner-Khamsi
> 2004).

In my thesis, I then go on to describe in detail the Chinese Top Level
Courses, and then use this framework to look at whether what is
happening is in fact a global convergence of policies, or whether we
should, inspired by Steiner-Khamsi, look below the surface to understand
what is really happening.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis "The Chinese National Top
Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote
Quality in Undergraduate Teaching" by Stian Håklev, University of
Toronto 2010.

-   [Download the canonical PDF
  version](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses/Haklev_Stian_201009_MA_thesis.pdf)
-   [Central page collecting all blog posts, many different download
  formats, and supplementary
  material](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses)

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