Keywords

Introduction

This chapter will look at the link between international organizations (IOs) and developments in the field of open, distance, and digital education (ODDE). Certainly, IOs such as UNESCO or the World Bank are key actors in our globalized world. But they are also struggling to remain relevant. As a recent book diagnosed, IOs were created in a world dominated by administrative processes and political protocols. Bjola and Zaiotti (2020, p. 33) explain: “IOs were designed and tuned by their political masters to respond to the exigencies of the industrial age that worked like a CLOCK – Complicated, Logical, Ordered, Closed, and Kinetic. They have struggled to adapt to the digital reality, which is Complex, Large, Open, Unpredictable, and Dynamic (CLOUD)” (p. 33). They propose that IOs should focus on “a networked redesign, an innovative outreach, interoperable processes, and value-creating visibility” (p. 35). For experts and organizations from the field of ODDE, this provides opportunities to harness and utilize the insights from IOs to improve the quality of discussions and implemented practice concerning open, distance, and digital education.

As Parag Khanna wrote in his manifesto for “mega-diplomacy,” the only appropriate response to our interconnected world is “… global governance… a bricolage of movements, governance arrangements, networks, soft law codes, and other systems at the local, regional and global level” (Khanna, 2011, p. 2) – and this is certainly the purpose of IOs. In today’s interconnected world, many countries, regions, institutions, and individuals are dealing with the same challenges and finding solutions, as interconnectedness has led in part to a similarity of environmental conditions. Indeed, it is this assumption that the United Nations 17 sustainable development goals (SDG) are built on, and we see these goals being applied globally, regionally, and institutionally in the public and the private sectors as a reference framework. Moreover, the SDG framework is a good example of the mandate and legitimacy of IOs – they fulfill their mandate, when they bring together multiple actors for collaborative discussion and exchange, and foster solutions on how to collectively solve some of the world’s greatest problems.

It follows that Abbott, Genschel, Snidal, and Zangl describe IOs as “orchestrators of change” (2015). They co-design responses and common activities by providing stakeholders with ideational and material support. That is to say that they are acting carefully and diplomatically, but ultimately as the “entrepreneurs” of policy change – this is the concept of ideation as a strategy (Swinkels, 2020). From a legitimacy perspective, this also means, however, that while they encourage preferential solutions to particular policy problems, they usually lack the mandate to enact them. In this way they work indirectly, as they are dependent on intermediaries to implement these solutions, and using a form of soft governance, as they are unable to force compliance.

So what type of impact might IOs have on education and in particular ODDE? There has been a long tradition of IOs both promoting digital learning as solution (we term this “ideation”), but also in setting up coalitions for implementing international collaborative operations around these ideas (in the broadest sense, we might call these “technologies”). In both cases, this has been based on a set of assumptions about distance solutions in education. The problems ODDE is expected to address and the technology solutions proposed will be elaborated in this chapter.

But first, it is necessary to start out with a brief definition of distance education and a brief description of its scope, as already expressed in the term “open distance and digital education.” In his analysis of common definitions, Saykılı (2018) proposes the following to encapsulate the main elements of distance education as it is viewed today:

Distance education is a form of education which brings together the physically-distant learner(s) and the facilitator(s) of the learning activity around planned and structured learning experiences via various two or multi-way mediated media channels that allow interactions between/among learners, facilitators as well as between learners and educational resources. (p. 5)

This definition already highlights some of the main aspects of distance education that make it attractive to international organizations and multilateral actors:

  • providing learning opportunities irrespective of physical distance,

  • learning is supported through “facilitators” and through interactions between learners, between learners and facilitators, and between learners and learning content.

In this way, education can be offered in a more flexible format, as it is not dependent on physical nearness. In the past much of this learning was provided through paper correspondence that was sent by post to the learner. However, the internet and digital connectivity has supercharged flexibility of delivery, so that digital and more interactive media enable access and learning opportunity delivery very quickly (depending on the connectivity limitations of the learners). This is also one meaning of “open” within the term “open distance and digital education” – that is, access to provision is not dependent on specific “opening times.”

Furthermore, ODDE is not dependent on teachers to drive and manage the interaction in the learning space. This is why the definition talks of “facilitators” and includes various facilitators of learning including teachers, but also other learners and also interactive content – very much following the Miyazoe and Anderson’s “interaction equivalency theorem” (Miyazoe & Anderson, 2010, 2013) which argues that a good quality learning arrangement is dependent on the strength of two of these interactions – between teachers and learners, between learners, and between learners and content. Not all three. This is a second meaning of “open,” as a more open framework is expected to enable more inclusive learning environments.

Finally, the definition speaks of “learning” and not “education” thereby emphasizing the trend in distance education to encompass learning formats outside of the formal education system, again in the hope of becoming more inclusive to different learning formats and to different interests of learners. Indeed, to be more learner-focused.

What the definition does not mention (but this is dealt with in the cited article from Saykılı) is the importance of the concept of “open educational resources” (OER) to ODDE. This is perhaps because OER describe instead a characteristic of the content used in the learning arrangement, not the learning arrangement itself. The term “open” in OER refers to openly licensing learning content to facilitate adaptation of learning content developed for one specific context to better fit the objectives and purpose of a new context (Orr, Rimini, & van Damme, 2015). In a digital setting, where good content is key to a good learning environment, easing the preconditions of adaptation to a new context is both efficient (under the slogan: re-use first) and effective (as it can be adapted to better fit the needs of a new learner group).

It is clear that all these elements will be attractive to international and multilateral organizations keen to facilitate the improvement of learning opportunities in countries or regions. Harnessing ODDE could be described as a “light-footed solution” and discussing and ideating around ODDE can be achieved without directly coming into conflict with the political and regulatory framework conditions of a specific country or region that formal educational systems and their institutions are usually entrenched in. Of course, this does not guarantee final implementation of solutions or indeed implementation in the way initially conceived. But seen from a legitimacy perspective, one would anyway expect global blueprints for ODDE to be implemented with specificity in their final context.

Current Challenges En Route to a Learning Society

Even before our highly interconnected digital society, there were strong arguments to view educational practice as an international playing field, where practices and norms are being discussed and renegotiated in a global setting. This argument was put most prominently in the “world polity” theory initiated by John W. Meyer, who saw the emergence of a kind of standard model for schooling, for universities and even for the organization of science (Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985). Rather fittingly, this theory itself has also been criticized for not being so much a “disinterested theory,” but indeed promoting norms and ways of thinking about education as a set of norms and values, which perhaps accounts for its popularity within the field of IOs (Carney, Rappleye, & Silova, 2012). This process of isomorphism, but also of more direct agenda setting, has certainly been promoted through the influence of IOs and international publications like the OECD’s annual publication “Education at a Glance” (OECD, 2020) and UNESCO’s “Global Education Monitoring Report” (UNESCO, 2020b).

A common focus of this global debate has been how to help countries and regions become a learning society, when access to formal education is a scarcity and often only accessible to a person during an initial period of their life. So, the two main discourses around this are access for all (which is a challenge in low-income countries with low capacity in formal education and growing youth populations, but also in other countries where access is still determined by socioeconomic characteristics), and huge changes in the labor market or in our societies (e.g., in the context of digital transformation). In both cases, there tends to be agreement on these challenges whether argued from an economic or social justice position.

It is about helping people attain their highest potential, gain better lives, and contribute to their local communities. Nevertheless, this formulation does not remain uncontested: in a critique of this stance as expressed in documents on lifelong learning from the OECD, Walker (2009) criticizes what she calls “inclusive liberalism,” which she aligned to the OECD goals focusing on a liberal market view and aiming to produce the “worthy citizen,” capable of contributing to economic prosperity. But at the latest by 2018, the OECD was also talking about transforming education and learning for “growth and well-being” (OECD, 2018).

This broad concept has been elaborated on by UNESCO as follows:

Lifelong education should be seen, today, as one of the preconditions for development conceived as an ability for adaptation and autonomy, as well as a means for ensuring the sharing and flow of knowledge worldwide. Lifelong education can provide a response to the growing job volatility that most forecasters predict. Increasingly, people will be changing jobs several times in a lifetime, and education can no longer be limited to offering a single specialization, but must develop each person’s ability to change course during his or her lifetime, and to cope with economic and social change. (…) Lifelong learning is a process that should ideally be meaningful at three levels (…): personal and cultural development – the meaning a person gives to his or her life; social development – one’s place in a community, citizenship, political participation and living together in society; and, lastly, professional development – stable quality employment and its links with production, job satisfaction and material well-being. (Bindé, 2005, pp. 77–78)

This expectation for a learning society can be linked to the objectives of the UN Sustainable development Goal 4: “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” Still, in the recent UN progress reports (2019, 2020 – see https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4 for all data referenced below), the authors state very clearly that the goal of SDG 4 will not be reached by 2030, unless innovative solutions are sought. And a juxtaposition of the education data (SDG4) with the innovation data (SDG 9) spells out the challenge – limitations in educational provision, on the one hand, and demands for higher skill levels for career development, on the other:

Referring to SDG4 – Education:

  • In 2018, some 773 million adults, two-thirds of them women, remained illiterate in terms of reading and writing skills. The global adult literacy rate, for the population 15 years of age and older, was 86% in 2018, while the youth literacy rate, for the population 15–24 years of age, was 92%. Southern Asia is home to nearly half of the global illiterate population, and sub-Saharan Africa is home to a further quarter. Globally, if more adults are literate today than they were, it is mostly because more adults went to school when they were young rather than because adults who did not go to school had a second chance to learn.

  • Based on data from 129 countries, the percentage of primary school teachers receiving the minimum pedagogical training according to national standards throughout the world has stagnated at 85% since 2015. The percentage is lowest in sub-Saharan Africa (64%) and Southern Asia (72%).

Referring to SDG9 – Industry, innovation, and infrastructure:

  • In 2016, medium-high and high-tech sectors accounted for 48%of the global manufacturing value added. Medium-high and high-tech products continued to dominate manufacturing production in Northern America and Europe, reaching 47% of the manufacturing value added in 2016 compared with 10% in least developed countries.

  • Almost all people around the world now live within range of a mobile-cellular network signal, with 90% living within range of a 3G-quality or higher network. This evolution of the mobile network, however, is growing more rapidly than the percentage of the population using the Internet.

These issues are not at all specific to low-income countries nor to the United Nation’s reporting, and similar reports can be found from the World Bank and from the OECD. The difference in middle- to high-income countries is that the challenges are not felt by the majority of a population as in low-income countries, but by those from the lower socioeconomic groups in society.

This main narrative of IOs can be linked to an assumption that digital technologies (or – as often described in UN documents – “Information and Communication Technologies”) can make a significant impact on the achievement of these goals. In 2015, the Qingdao Declaration from UNESCO, entitled “Leveraging Information and Communication Technologies to Achieve the Post-2015 Education Goal” was signed at the close of an international conference attended by over 500 people from 100 countries, including both public and private sector representatives. It picked up the topic of inclusion and lifelong learning, attesting a high potential to online and distance learning technologies (UNESCO, 2015, p. 5):

Inclusive and relevant lifelong learning: On this theme, participants reached the consensus that skills development and lifelong learning are among the post-2015 education priorities, and that the omnipresent digital devices and online content are powerful levers to: (1) expand access to both formal and non-formal learning opportunities in order to reach out to more learners; (2) multiply learning pathways and diversify learning approaches through various platforms and resources to attend to different teaching and learning needs; and (3) enable blended learning and learning in changing environments.

This commitment was echoed in the Qingdao Statement from 2017 (UNESCO, 2017). Although neither distance education nor online learning was mentioned explicitly as terms, “fostering digital innovations for education” was.

A new dynamic was given to this discussion and to the expectation of digital learning by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this case, online learning was really seen as the only game in town. Organizations in public and private sectors alike switched where possible to online delivery of services and thereby accelerated any debates on the use of digital technologies. This was equally the case in education and learning and was seen as a way to fast-track digital technologies as part of the “new normal” for learning delivery. In the rush for solutions, however, it was noted in various reports that it was important for the public sector to play a key role in service delivery and the formation of digital learning as a public good, and not only leave this up to private players in the market (UNESCO, 2020a).

In sum, this short review has aimed to show that there is a common discourse among IOs around the challenges that online and distance education should be taking on and an expectation that digital solutions can contribute to addressing these challenges. Against this backdrop, various multilateral and individual initiatives from IOs have been launched. Their common shape and purpose will be reviewed in the following section. It should be noted already, however, that IOs work on setting agendas and norms. This leaves a huge gap that should be filled by research, which really does look into “what works,” but also why certain configurations around ODDE work in certain settings. We will return to this situation later in the chapter.

A Review of the Shape of IO Activities and Their Significance for the Field of ODDE

So, while IOs promote the idea of using digital learning in white papers and policy blueprints, how can they hope to achieve an impact in practice? This chapter presents some key examples of measures that have been undertaken by IOs. For ease of recognition, they have been structured around these methods of influence:

  1. 1.

    Ideation: IOs aim to stimulate national or regional initiatives through ideation and policy exchange.

  2. 2.

    Digital infrastructure projects: IOs contribute to the development of digital solutions, which are by their nature global, but can be harnessed in a local setting.

  3. 3.

    Multi-stakeholder networks: IOs orchestrate a mixture between local and global solutions through international partnerships, while encouraging local adaptations.

Ideation Through Guidelines and Consultancy Work

In the first instance, the ultimate expectation is a sort of “flat world” approach, that is, the assumption that there is a good solution to a problem and it can be implemented within any national or regional settings through providing enough information about these solutions and supporting implementation (Friedman, 2007). Ideation work includes giving examples, recommendations and consulting on national or regional policy papers or master plans. This is a common approach for IOs, especially in connection with in-situ consultancy, where a consultant or a group of consultants is asked to review the context in a particular country or region and make recommendations on possible reform steps. One illustration of the type of key document used is the UNESCO “Guidelines for Open Education Resources Policies” published in 2019 in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Learning (Miao, Mishra, Orr, & Janssen, 2019). This publication is a typical example of an IO promoting ideation around a particular idea for educational reform. This publication presents a seven-step process to policy development with a focus on OER and while it does not specifically promote ODDE, it does argue for digital learning provision to be a key element to any OER policy: “OER should be used to provide new educational content to learners in a digital online format that can be accessed online. Additionally, it will also be important to consider how learning acquired in a non-formal or informal setting through OER materials can be accredited and recognised for future formal learning pathways” (Miao et al., 2019, p. 23).

The purpose of this publication is to make a link between general global policy work promoted by UNESCO, for example, with its recommendation on OER and the associated action plan, and the specific work of UNESCO and NGOs in countries to support policy work, which includes OER as part of the solution to educational reform. As stated in the introduction by Assistant Director-General for Education UNESCO, Ms. Stefani Giannini:

UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning have been working directly with governmental agencies and institutions to support the development of national and institutional OER policies. This publication, Guidelines on the Development of Open Educational Resources Policies, is the culmination of this. It is meant to be referenced as a hands-on plan to develop subject-matter knowledge for policy makers on OER and a framework to provoke critical thinking on how OER should be leveraged to address challenges in achieving the targets of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) in different local contexts. More specifically, it can be used as a literal step-by-step guidebook on how to develop an OER policy from conception to implementation. (Miao et al., 2019, p. 4)

The first chapter describes this link, while the subsequent chapters delineate an idealized policy development process and end in each case with questions that could stimulate the formulation of an OER policy appropriate to the specific context. It has been published in English, French, and Spanish and is itself openly licensed – all of this motivated by the wish for it to be as accessible a resource as possible.

The weakness of such an initiative from the IO perspective is that this can only provide a framework for implementation. The implementation remains with the actors within countries and regions, who have the mandate and the resources to implement them. Naturally, if used by teams of external consultants from an IO like UNESCO, who are charged with supporting policymaking processes in a specific country or region, this can help to ensure that OER policies become part of new educational practices.

Digital Infrastructure Projects

A more direct version of influence in the field of ODDE is implementation of a solution in a new setting, based on the knowledge that it has worked in other settings. Two examples will be presented for illustration here:

  • The African Virtual University, established in 1997 through a world bank grant and newly re-formed and launched as the Pan-Africa Virtual and E-University in December 2019 (Sawahel, 2020).

  • The atingi digital learning platform, established by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in December 2019 (full disclosure: the author is part of the management team of atingi).

The African Virtual University

The original idea of the African Virtual University (AVU) was to confront the problems of access to high quality learning in higher education through harnessing new technologies of learning design and delivery (Prakash, 2003). The AVU project was built on the use of information and communication technologies, initially enabling students in six African countries to take courses and seminars taught by professors from universities outside of Africa (AVU, 2015; Missen, 2001; Munene, 2007; Nafukho & Muyia, 2013).

In the initial stages, instructors delivered their lectures in front of television cameras in their own classrooms, and the video was routed to an uplink in Washington, DC, which then beamed it via satellite to centers of learning in Africa. Over time, more interactive technologies were utilized. However, the basic premise remained: students of AVU would be supported in their development through access to high quality learning from scholars in the USA and other “developed” countries. The AVU was coordinated from Washington in the first phase, but in 2002 it was re-established as an NGO in Kenya. Despite this, the initiative has struggled to become the distance learning institution for Africans from Africa through most of its lifecycle. There have been various analyses of the AVU which generally criticize the “foreignness” of the initiative, which was not built in Africa as a partnership, but as a shell-solution implanted in a new context.

In the most recent publicly available strategic plan, AVU confronts some of these problems head on. It states that it now has a stronger focus on content from partners in the region and on regional needs: “The AVU has phased out its academic programs (certificate, diploma and degree) brokered from foreign universities. AVU is now collaborating with a wide number of partners, including governments, universities, development partners and the private sector to offer new programs and courses designed to respond to the demand of the African labour market” (AVU, 2015, p. 15).

And the most recent development has been the merger of AVU with the Pan-African University (another donor country initiative, which was indeed lacking a digital learning arm) as part of the African Union’s strategy 2063 in 2019 (Sawahel, 2020). The newly formed Pan African Virtual and E-University (PAVEU) now hopes to truly become the distance learning institution for Africans from Africa, and has a fitting vision and mission to express this (see http://paveu.africa-union.org/about-us/):

  • Vision: “To be a leading centre of excellence in providing open access to online higher education and research for the advancement of Africa.”

  • Mission: “To provide world class inclusive quality-assured and relevant education to Africans anytime and anywhere and to conduct innovative research to catalyse the African Union’s Agenda 2063.”

This impulse from the IO World Bank can certainly be criticized for its naivety and lack of local embeddedness. In the meantime, the AVU has cut itself free from the baggage of “foreignness“in the original inception and from the pure focus on university processes, which severely limited the attractiveness of its offer for target groups other than existing students in Africa. The sustainability remains an open question, but a stronger focus on creating a network of partners could help here, as the new AVU will then no longer be competing, but collaborating with other providers.

Atingi Digital Learning Platform

Digital learning platforms are proliferating among IOs. Examples of United Nations initiatives are the International Telecommunications Academy (ITU Academy), the Learning and Knowledge Development Facility of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), and indeed the United Nations System Staff College (UNSSC), which is beginning to open up its courses to the general public. The main example from the World Bank is the Open Learning Campus (OLC).

In each of these cases, the IOs are using their digital learning platforms to reach more people and to better fulfill their objective of encouraging change and improvement through knowledge proliferation and knowledge exchange. The example to be elaborated on below is not in fact from an IO, but from a national ministry, but it is fully based on partnering with IOs and national and local partners.

The atingi digital learning platform was initiated by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in December 2019 with the goal of facilitating access to knowledge and exchange through digital and blended learning across the globe (Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung, 2021, p. 120). This is expressed in the mission of atingi: “Our vision is a world in which digital learning is inclusive, accessible, relevant, safe and secure for all” (see www.atingi.org). This goal is coupled with very ambitious quantitative goals for the platform, which in its current – inception – phase reached well over 400,000 registered learners and 120,000 completed learning units by December 2021. Currently it has a focus on Africa and around two-thirds of learners come from the African continent.

Similar to the United Nations initiatives and the World Bank platform, atingi is also explicitly following two additional internal goals for the platform which serve to help the German government reach its own goals:

  • to fully integrate digital learning into the international capacity development work of the German government, and,

  • to showcase how scaling of international development work can be facilitated through digital solutions.

This means that atingi is not simply a learning platform launched into the world in the hope that it might solve the problems of scarcity of learning opportunities in general, but it is specifically being used within the context of German development work and to support the over one hundred new capacity-building projects across the world being implemented by the Ministry and its operational agency, the GIZ, annually. This should ensure that it is an initiative fully integrated into the work of German development across the world. It certainly presents a qualitative difference to the way that AVU was launched by the World Bank, as an external solution “for” Africa.

There are two big differences between AVU and atingi at their inception points, although the current discussions concerning AVU suggest that their positions are nearing:

  • atingi has always been focused on nonformal learning first; this is largely to do with the fact that the German development work which it should be amplifying and strengthening is usually about capacity-building as part of societal and economic transformation processes, and is not simply focused on formal education provision. Nevertheless, this leaves atingi with the challenge of how to ensure learning on the platform is recognized by third parties (e.g., employers) and is therefore ultimately “valuable” and even “transactional” for the learner.

  • atingi is being developed at a time where digital technology is more focused on open source solutions and international technical standards, which facilitate links between platforms and help avoid the so-called “walled garden approach,” where a learner’s activity on one platform cannot be transferred to another platform (think: what you do on LinkedIn, Facebook, or TripAdvisor can only be viewed on these platforms). However, this leaves atingi with the challenge of how to be both a member of greater ecosystems and retain its own identity and coherence.

In both cases, atingi and any other initiatives following similar strategies will have to work against the common “isomorphisms” or “world polity“of educational provision, which assumes the norms of formal education to be the ultimate reference, and the norms of market competition to be the ultimate markers of success. These are issues the AVU has struggled with (as well documented in the respective literature – see above) and are key points of contention for ODDE as a whole.

Multi-stakeholder Networks

A third way in which IOs can impact on ODDE is through creating multi-stakeholder networks for certain topic areas. This is a way of bringing together both the ideation component of work by IOs with the chance to offer solutions, which can be used or replicated in different settings. Perhaps most important is that IOs can really harness their “orchestration” characteristics by bringing these components together in a manner not normally possible within a national or regional setting.

In some cases, these networks are set up by IOs, in others they are set up by international membership organizations, but with patronage from IOs such as UNESCO.

UN-Based Networks and Coalitions

A first example is around digital capacities needed to support digital transformation across the world. The initiative for digital capacity set up by the United Nations Secretary General’s Envoy on Technology, along with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), has set up a multi-stakeholder network to forge a concerted effort at scaling up digital capacity building solutions. It has a website, which went live in April 2021. It was initiated on the back of recognition that:

...a large part of digital capacity-building has been supply-driven as opposed to needs-based. Insufficient investment also remains a significant limiting factor. Moreover, digital capacity-building has to be tailored to individual and national circumstances. Given variances within and among countries and regions, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and better evidence is therefore needed of which capacity-building approaches are most effective, considering political, economic and social contexts. To overcome these challenges, two aspects are central: greater coherence and coordination in capacity-building efforts; and a concerted effort at scaling up solutions. (United Nations, 2020)

The initiative is working with external partners and NGOs to build a database of existing digital skills training, to support the matching of demand for these trainings to suppliers of them, and to convene a multi-stakeholder network promoting an more holistic and inclusive approach to digital capacity development. This means in terms of ODDE, the website will be an aggregator platform, linking out to relevant learning materials and learning opportunities on partners’ websites.

A similar example is the Global Skills Academy, set up by UNESCO in 2020 as part of its Covid-19 response under the umbrella initiative entitled “Global Education Coalition” (UNESCO, 2021). This initiative also aims to curate and link out to learning resources, but with a focus on technical and vocational training and employment-ready skills for recovery. Again, it brings together partners from different United Nations agencies, the private sector and NGOs. Through harnessing huge network structures and partnerships, the Global Skills Academy is able to follow ambitious goals. It plans to “help one million young people build skills for employability and resilience between 2020 and 2021” (see website: https://globaleducationcoalition.unesco.org/global-skills-academy), and furthermore aims to foster common innovations in education between the partnering organizations, such as common digital credentials.

This means that such initiatives can galvanize concerted efforts to support global goals, and even to promote common innovations through building on common interests. However, in contrast to the initiatives of AVU and atingi, described above, what they cannot do is fully develop the actual solution being implemented.

International Networks Endorsed by IOs

As mentioned above, a further form of interaction of IOs is when these endorse or support networks from independent organizations. There are many such networks familiar to the ODDE scene. Examples are the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) and Open Education Global (OE Global), both with endorsements from UNESCO.

Such efforts are particularly interesting from an IO perspective in the sense of what Carayaniss and Weiss call the “Third UN” with reference to United Nations structures (Carayannis & Weiss, 2021). This concept recognizes the limitations of what IOs can actually do and what they tend to think, as they are constrained by rules, regulations, and common reference points. Their structures can bring governments together and forge alliances (the authors call this the “First UN”), their staff can bring prepare white papers and analyses (the staff are called the “Second UN”), but for this work to remain relevant and to keep in touch with real challenges, they need links to the outside word, to real practice, and to discussions in the field. Thus, Carayaniss and Weiss refer to intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media as the “Third UN”:

The Third UN’s roles include research, policy analysis, idea mongering, advocacy, and public education. Its various components put forward new information and ideas, push for alternative policies, and mobilize public opinion around UN deliberations and projects. (ibid).

This gives multilateral organizations that are not governmental bodies (e.g., ICDE, OE Global) a very important role in the field of ODDE. They have the chance, but also the obligation to shape the ideation of IOs, by bringing in new ideas and exchanging critical knowledge on what works in practice. They can do this through joining larger multi-stakeholder initiatives such as the Global Education Coalition or through introducing IOs to their own working groups and events.

Conclusion: Suggestions for ODDE and IOs

This chapter has highlighted the fact that key narratives of IOs in education give ODDE a major role in providing appropriate solutions to the problems of access to high quality learning opportunities and skills development for decent work, well-being, and community development. It has also argued that IOs are themselves confronted with the challenge of having an impact on solving these problems, and if they do not manage this well, they will lose relevance and legitimacy (Bjola & Zaiotti, 2020).

The chapter shows that there is a productive dependency between IOs and experts, specialists, and institutions from the ODDE field in the following ways.

Representatives of the ODDE field can make reference to IOs’ major narratives to strengthen arguments for the key role which ODDE can play in today’s education systems. Certainly, this is a strategy that would be suggested by the policy theory of John Kingdon – who sees such actions as creating productive “policy windows” (Kingdon, 1993). This helps representatives of the ODDE field to gain support for their work in national and regional settings, where debates and developments might be more determined through national politics than through meeting today’s grand challenges.

Furthermore, representatives of the ODDE field can make use of policy frameworks or discussion forums set up by IOs to learn from other cases around the world. This helps to ensure that individual practices of ODDE are informed and stimulated through lessons learned and encourages review of current strategies and practice. Here there also appears to be a stronger mandate for ODDE research than is reflected in some of the recent research reviews (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020; Zawacki-Richter & Anderson, 2014), where there is a preference for discussing ODDE in the context of higher education (even when it is discussed in the framework of “opening up” higher education). Non-formal learning is no longer simply learning that needs policy to become recognized as formal learning, but it is an opportunity to strengthen, enrich, and extend learning pathways (Latchem, 2018). All of which are relevant to IOs. Linking ODDE research to previous ideas of “learning in the wild,” that is, also outside of formal settings (“Learning in the wild,” 2010), will better reflect both the reality of learners in today’s digital world, and provide a better foundation for contributing to better IO policies and practices.

For their part, IOs need to be closely linked to representatives of the ODDE field, in order to avoid naive solutionism, such as planting solutions in a new context without due respect to local conditions, systems, and networks. There is a particularly strong tendency for this with digital solutions, where the whole debate about “appropriate technology” that started in the 1970s is experiencing new interest – see the recently translated book on “low tech” from the French author Philippe Bihouix (2020). This role – which requires new and directed contributions from ODDE researchers – was argued above under the rubric of the “Third UN.” Such a tight linkage can help IOs remain relevant and help to maintain the legitimacy of their expertise for ideation processes. We already see evidence of IOs creating inclusive processes through multi-stakeholder networks to bring together expertise from consultants, think tanks and NGOs, but it is important that research can inform such debates beyond norms and agenda – and beyond what Zawacki-Richter et al. (2020) call “lip-service.” So, it is of great benefit to the ODDE field to get involved and indeed will help progress in the field. Digital formats for communication can be used by IOs to ensure that participation is not solely dependent on the ability to travel to physical meetings and to widen the group of stakeholders participating in such processes.

Achieving a positive impact of IOs on ODDE is therefore dependent on both sides opening up channels for discussion and change, and depends on ODDE taking up the research challenges facing IOs in their work to set agendas and frameworks and to launch specific initiatives. The circumstances are ripe for such interaction and this chapter recommends fully exploiting these opportunities to ensure ODDE is an integral part of the solution to make learning opportunities accessible and valuable for all.