By Rabeb Ben Hadj Sayedi, University of Sousse, Tunisia

00  Preamble

The Rapport d’Etonnement is a structured document produced by a newcomer, capturing what surprised them — what did not match their expectations, what seemed contradictory, what appeared invisible to those who had grown accustomed to it. Its power lies precisely in its freshness. It does not pretend to know the answers. It only insists on naming what it sees.

This report was produced in the context of the UNOE Student Fellowship 2026, a programme designed to embed student researchers within global educational ecosystems and encourage critical, self-reflective engagement with questions of knowledge access and equity. The author entered this fellowship with a background in education studies and a working familiarity with open-access principles — but no deep prior engagement with the operational realities of Open Educational Resources at an institutional or international scale.

What follows is a record of what that encounter produced. It is deliberately incomplete. It asks more questions than it answers. And it makes no recommendations whatsoever.

Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research materials that are freely available for anyone to use, adapt, and redistribute. The term was coined at a UNESCO forum in 2002 and has since become a cornerstone of international discourse on educational equity, the democratisation of knowledge, and the sustainability of academic publishing.

The theoretical promise of OER is significant: they reduce cost barriers for learners, enable localisation and adaptation across cultural contexts, accelerate knowledge sharing between institutions and nations, and challenge the dominant model of for-profit academic publishing. Organisations including UNESCO, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Creative Commons, and a growing number of national governments have invested substantially in OER infrastructure over the past two decades.

The 2019 UNESCO Recommendation on OER established five areas of action: building stakeholder capacity, developing supportive policy, ensuring equitable access to quality OER, nurturing sustainability models, and promoting international cooperation. These form the backdrop against which the following observations were made.

Key figures:  OER coined in 2002  |  195 UNESCO member states  |  Less than 5% of educators use OER regularly

02  Observations — Part I: Visibility and Awareness

The first cluster of observations concerns how OER are perceived, known about, and encountered — or not — by the various actors who are, in theory, their primary beneficiaries and producers.

OBS. 01 — The Terminology Gap

The term ‘Open Educational Resources’ is almost entirely absent from conversations with students and most teaching faculty, even at institutions that officially declare a commitment to open education. Resources that would qualify as OER under the standard definition are used daily — but they are described as ‘free materials’, ‘online resources’, or ‘open-access articles’. The concept has a strong international architecture but almost no vernacular presence in the institutions observed.

OBS. 02 — Awareness Concentrated at the Top

Knowledge of OER as a formal concept appears to be highly concentrated among academic librarians, e-learning coordinators, and institutional policy staff. Among the front-line teachers and students who are supposed to be both the producers and consumers of OER, awareness is strikingly thin. A framework built on participation encounters a participation gap at its very base.

OBS. 03 — Invisible Licences

Creative Commons licences — the legal infrastructure that makes OER function — are almost universally misunderstood by end users. Materials carrying CC BY, CC BY-SA, or CC BY-NC designations are used as if they were simply ‘free to use for anything’. The distinction between different licence types and the obligations they create is absent from most faculty and student practice. The legal framework exists; it is functionally invisible.

OBS. 04 — The Wikipedia Paradox

Wikipedia — arguably the world’s largest and most accessed OER — is systematically discouraged as a source in academic work, while the open principles it embodies are simultaneously celebrated in open education policy. Students navigate this contradiction daily without institutional acknowledgment that a contradiction exists.

03  Observations — Part II: Production and Quality

A second set of observations concerns the creation of OER: who produces them, under what conditions, and how their quality is assessed and maintained over time.

OBS. 05 — The Invisible Labour of Openness

Creating a high-quality OER requires substantial time and expertise. This labour is almost never formally recognised in academic workload calculations, promotion criteria, or funding frameworks. The implicit model assumes that OER production happens on top of existing responsibilities, voluntarily, as a form of academic citizenship. The gap between the rhetoric of openness and the material conditions of those expected to produce open content is striking.

OBS. 06 — Quality Without a Referee

Traditional academic publishing has established quality-signalling mechanisms — peer review, journal impact factors, editorial boards. OER exist in a landscape where quality signals are far less standardised. Users have no reliable way to assess whether an openly available textbook or module is current, accurate, pedagogically sound, or appropriate for their context. Repositories exist, but curation and endorsement mechanisms are uneven and largely invisible to end users.

OBS. 07 — The Adaptation Paradox

One of the core promises of OER is adaptability: an open resource can be modified, localised, and improved. Yet in practice, the conditions required for meaningful adaptation — technical ability to edit source files, institutional time, linguistic capacity, pedagogical expertise — are unevenly distributed in precisely the ways that OER are supposed to address. Richer institutions are better positioned to adapt OER than the institutions in low-resource contexts for whom adaptability was most intended as a benefit.

OBS. 08 — Version Control and Decay

Open resources, once released, enter a world without maintenance guarantees. Broken links, outdated content, superseded references, and abandoned repositories are endemic to the OER landscape. A resource celebrated in 2015 may be inaccessible or misleading by 2026, with no formal mechanism for alerting users. The open model that enables free distribution does not automatically solve the problem of long-term stewardship.

04  Observations — Part III: Equity and Access

OER were conceived, in substantial part, as a tool for educational equity — a way to extend access to quality learning materials beyond the institutions and income levels that can afford proprietary content. The following observations engage with what this aspiration encounters in practice.

OBS. 09 — Digital Infrastructure as the Silent Gate

Access to OER requires, at minimum, a device and a reliable internet connection. In contexts where these conditions are not met — rural areas, low-income households, institutions in the Global South with inconsistent connectivity — the openness of a resource is functionally irrelevant. The digital infrastructure gap pre-empts the equity benefit before it can be realised. This is widely acknowledged in OER literature and largely unresolved in OER practice.

OBS. 10 — The Language of Openness

The dominant language of OER production, policy, and repository infrastructure is English. A substantial proportion of major OER repositories and institutional frameworks operate primarily or exclusively in English. The equity implications for learners and educators whose working language is Arabic, French, Swahili, or Portuguese are significant — the gap between the stated universalism of OER and its actual linguistic distribution is one of the most striking tensions observed.

OBS. 11 — Global South as Consumer, Global North as Producer

Despite the equity framing of OER initiatives, the pattern of production and consumption is asymmetric: institutions in high-income, well-resourced contexts produce the majority of widely disseminated OER content, while institutions in lower-resource contexts are positioned primarily as receivers and adapters. The structural reproduction of knowledge-production hierarchies within an ostensibly open framework is one of the more uncomfortable observations recorded here.

OBS. 12 — Accessibility Beyond Connectivity

Even when digital infrastructure is available, many OER are not accessible to learners with disabilities. Screen-reader compatibility, captioned video, alt-text for images, and adaptive formats are inconsistently implemented across open repositories. The discourse of openness rarely includes accessibility as a first-order concern alongside cost and licensing.

05  Observations — Part IV: Institutional Dynamics

A final cluster of observations concerns how institutions — universities, governments, international organisations — relate to the OER agenda: how they adopt it, adapt it, and occasionally instrumentalise it.

OBS. 13 — Policy as Performance

Several institutions encountered during the fellowship have formal OER policies — statements of commitment to open education, declared targets for open resource production, or official endorsement of the UNESCO 2019 Recommendation. The relationship between these policy documents and actual institutional practice is, in most cases observed, tenuous. Policy adoption and implementation are treated as the same act, when they are not.

OBS. 14 — OER as Branding, Not Practice

The language of openness has significant reputational value in contemporary higher education. Institutions use it in rankings submissions, funding applications, and public communications. This creates an incentive to adopt OER terminology without the structural changes — workload recognition, repository infrastructure, faculty training — that would make openness substantive. The symbol of openness circulates with greater velocity than the practice.

OBS. 15 — The Intellectual Property Fault Line

OER exist in permanent tension with the intellectual property frameworks that govern academic publishing and faculty employment contracts. Who owns an OER produced by a faculty member using institutional time and infrastructure? What happens when an institution’s IP policy conflicts with a Creative Commons licence? These questions are rarely resolved before they become disputes — and when they arise, they reveal that the legal architectures of academia were not designed with openness in mind.

06  Structural Tensions Observed

The table below maps the most persistent tensions encountered during the observation period. These are not presented as problems requiring solution — they are presented as structural realities that shape the OER landscape and that any honest account of it must acknowledge.

Expected / Assumed	Observed / Discovered
OER will democratise knowledge globally	Access depends on infrastructure, language, and capacity that are themselves unequal
Open licences empower educators to adapt materials	Most educators lack the time, tools, or training to adapt anything
International policy frameworks will drive adoption	Ground-level awareness of those frameworks is nearly zero
Openness eliminates the cost barrier to learning	Costs shift — to devices, connectivity, training, and maintenance
OER quality can be guaranteed through community curation	Curation requires sustained labour; most OER communities lack it
Universities are natural OER producers	University IP policies frequently conflict with open licensing
OER serve the Global South	Most OER are produced in, and shaped by, the Global North
Openness and quality are compatible goals	Incentive structures reward proprietary publication, not open sharing

07  Closing Reflection

Fifteen observations. Eight structural tensions. No solutions.

This is not a failure of the report — it is its purpose. The Rapport d’Etonnement has a specific and limited ambition: to describe what surprised a newcomer, faithfully, before familiarity erodes the capacity for surprise.

What strikes the author most, at the end of this observation period, is not that the OER agenda has failed. It has not failed. It has produced real repositories, real communities of practice, real policy frameworks, real licences that have enabled real sharing. These are not negligible achievements.

What is surprising — genuinely, persistently surprising — is the distance between the scale of the aspiration and the scale of the change. OER began with a vision of knowledge as a global public good, freely available to every learner on the planet regardless of their economic position, their language, their geography. That vision is present in every major policy document, every conference declaration, every UNESCO communique. And it is simultaneously absent from the daily practice of the overwhelming majority of educators and learners the vision was designed to serve.

The gap between vision and practice is not, itself, an observation unique to OER. It is the defining challenge of every transformative educational agenda. But the gap is worth naming. It is worth resisting the habituation that turns a genuine contradiction into an accepted background condition. The Rapport d’Etonnement exists to resist exactly that habituation.