WOCMES18 OpenMed

www.openMedproject.eu
Readiness to adopt Open Educational
Resources in the MENA region: the
OpenMed case
Isidro Maya-Jariego, Ahmed Almakari, Khalid Berrada, Daniel Burgos, Romina Cachia, Fabio
Nascimbeni, Cristina Stefanelli, Anita Tabacco, Daniel Villar-Onrubia, Katherine Wimpenny.

MEMBERS OF THE CONSORTIUM
www.OpenMedproject.eu
OVERALL GOAL
To raise awareness and facilitate the
adoption of Open Educational
Resources (OER) and Open
Educational Practices (OEP) in the
South-Mediterranean countries, with a
particular focus on higher education in
Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and
Palestine.
OPENING UP EDUCATION
IN SOUTH-MEDITERRANEAN COUNTRIES

OpenMed: key actions for opening up education in the MENA region
Twitter @openmedpro
Action Description Impact
Review of OEP in
the MENA region
Needs assessment and detection of
"best practices" of open education.
 Propose positive behaviour models.
 Detect key actors in the region.
 Adapt intervention strategies to the characteristics
of local contexts.
OER national
strategy forums
Institutional meetings, with
representatives of education and
OEP pioneers in each country
(Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and
Palestine).
 Promote awareness about open education in
each country.
 Start collaborative networks between universities
and other actors.
 Facilitate the institutional recognition of open
education.
 Participatory development of the project and the
actions to promote OER adoption.
OE capacity building
course
Design and implementation of a
course for trainers.
 Develop capacities to create and / or adopt OER.
 Develop educational materials on open education
adapted to the local cultural context.
 Create educational products through individual
and group projects.

Learning Circles
Map created with https://umap.openstreetmap.fr

Goals
• Reflect on the factors that influence readiness to adopt open
educational practices, in the context of the OpenMed project.
• To explore the opportunities offered by open education,
responding to the needs of higher education institutions.
• To describe barriers and difficulties in the implementation of
Open Educational Practices in the Middle East and North
Africa region.
• To examine the mediating role of internationalization and
cultural distance in the process of adopting open educational
practices.

Methods
• In-depth interviews to 7 experts on Open Education in the
Middle East: Egypt (2), Jordan (2), Lebanon (1), Palestine (2).
• Focus group with 8 participants: Egypt (2), Jordan (3),
Morocco (2), Palestine (1).
• Data set with transcripts of interviews and focus groups are
available in Zenodo:
• Cachia, Romina, & Maya-Jariego, Isidro. (2018). Opening
education in the MENA region: In-depth interviews and
Focus Group data with experts in open education in Egypt,
Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine. [Data set].
Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1283114

Findings

Opportunities offered by open education,
• Access to quality educational content from the
international academic community.
• Increase the visibility of research and teaching.
• Internationalize the university.
• Promote socio-cultural change.
… responding to the needs of the education system.
• Technical equipment and infrastructure.
• Massification, dispersion in the territory, mobility
problems.

Opportunities and needs
• Students all over the world, they look forward to having an opportunity to pursue part of their
post-graduate study abroad. To be competitive, to be a global graduate, they have to start using
OER very early, to have this experience with others and to see how other students are doing in
other universities. [E7, Egypt]
• We now have an online repository that all researchers need to put their scholar work on it and we
put all the university production, like thesis. The university is encouraging all scholars and faculties
member to put everything on the repository. [E5, Palestine]
• It is also worth mentioning that we are using the equipment that were partially purchased on the
OpenMed project. OpenMed dedicated some budget for each university to purchase equipment,
everything that you need to support the eLearning centre at our university and to present these
devices to the teachers and them on how to use them. [E2, Jordan]

Barriers and difficulties in the implementation of OEP…
• Low awareness.
• Perception that online courses are of lower quality.
• Institutional restrictions and norms.
• Use and economic relevance of textbooks.
• Scarcity of resources in Arabic Language.
… and during the implementation of the OpenMed project.
• Lack of time versus incentives.
• The usual processes of decline in motivation in online courses.
• Prevalence of local vs. international interaction.
• East versus Western Arabs.
• S-M countries versus Europe.

Barriers and difficulties
• Apart from technical issues and time, one of the main barriers is the personal opinion about this. Two of
the adopters who took the course… They are not convinced about OER at all. They studied it, they read
about it, but they are not convinced that it is a feasible model. [E2, Jordan]
• I see that the students are taking these international courses and participate in all kind of seminars,
webinars. But still, to get their official degree in Egypt or outside, they need to physically travel. Online
degree is not accepted in Egypt, especially for Masters and PhD. [E3, Egypt]
• In Jordan, the ministry of higher education allows for each course to be taken as a blended model with
25% of it to be online. [E2, Jordan]
• In Lebanon, and in other places, a major problem is that besides paying the tuition fees, because our
university is private, they have to buy the traditional textbooks for each course. We are talking
minimum about 200 – 300$ per semester. Imagine replacing those text books with OER. [E4, Lebanon]
• If you talk about OER, a lot of work has to be done for localization because we do not have a lot of
resources in the Arabic language. [E4, Lebanon]

Internationalization…
• Incoming students from Arab and African countries.
• Outgoing students to Europe and USA.
• Influence of French and English academic models, among others.
• Western versus East Arabic dialects.
• Teaching in English and international milieu.
… and readiness to adopt.
• A greater degree of internationalization predisposes
positively towards innovation and the adoption of OEP.

Internationalization
• Most of the incoming students come from Africa or Arab countries. Some of them, non-Arabic speaking
from Africa. This is one of the issues we need to deal with. Most of the people hired as Teaching Assistant
travel outside Egypt to get their PhDs and come back to the university. Mainly to Europe or US. [E3, Egypt]
• I felt the barriers between the eastern Arabs and western Arabs, that’s what we call each other. Jordanians
and Europeans cope really easily. I don’t know if it’s the mindset, or the type of didactical thinking. We
have a lot of commonalities, especially in the region around the Mediterranean Sea. There are some
barriers that I was surprised to experience by our Arabian colleagues. [E2, Jordan]
• I learnt a lot from visiting a university in United Kingdom, specifically in research. It was a wonderful
experience for me. Some of my colleagues had never left Palestine. It was an opportunity for them to
travel, not only for pleasure but also for culture orientation. [E5, Palestine]
• At my university, we use the English language (…). In other countries, may be people will have much harder
time to find the resources, localize and translate to the Arabic language. We do not have these issues at
my university, because it is a Lebanese University adopting the American system. [E4, Lebanon]

Collectivism and power distance.
• Face-to-face meetings are relevant for harmony in groups.
• Open style of communication.
• Expressive, cheerful, friendly, with personal contact and
frequent interruptions.
• Hierarchy and bureaucratic structure in universities.
Cultural distance in reuse of open contents.
• Cultural adaptation strategies facilitate the appropriation
of open practices in contexts of diversity and diversity of
contexts.

Collectivism and power distance
• Every now and then, we meet face-to-face, that does not mean that there is always resources and
funding to do that. Therefore, it is good to have continuous webinars, google hangout, which we did
by the way. But some of them were based on demand. (…) Most of the important decisions we took
were when we had the face-to-face meetings. [E2, Jordan]
• We are four professors and three administrations and two are from outside the university. (...) We
saw that administration with knowledge of ICT could help in creating OER in the future. [E3, Egypt]
• In my role as a facilitator, I try to facilitate and guide my learning circle, keeping in mind that they
are grown-up students. I cannot treat them as students and that is one of the cultural things that I
have to highlight. Some of them are technicians, doctors and professors, and even with a higher rank
than me. I treat them as partners. [E2, Jordan]

Conclusions

Organizational cultures and national cultures.
• The localization and dissemination of content involves a process
of translation and cultural adjustment.
• The movement to promote open education constitutes a
subculture that poses a challenge to traditional academic
culture.
Factors in readiness to adoption.
• Openness to organizational change (at the institutional level).
• Personal competences: flexibility, diversity awareness,
persistence and motivation for change (at the individual level).

Individualistic
national culture,
with low power
distance
Collectivistic
national culture,
with high power
distance
Open Education subculture
Traditional academic subculture

Table 1.
Factors in readiness to adoption.
Factors Description
 Infrastructure and technical equipment  It is a pre-requisite for OEP adoption
 Massification and geographical dispersion  OEP address institutional needs
 Teaching in English and academic
international exchange programs
 Internationalization facilitates OEP
adoption
 Previous international experience,
international background
 Face-to-face meetings  Facilitators of cultural adaptation and
institutional change Open communication style
 Openness to institutional change  Open education as new subculture

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
To cite this paper:
Isidro Maya Jariego, Ahmed Almakari, Khalid Berrada, Daniel Burgos, Romina Cachia, Fabio Nascimbeni,
Cristina Stefanelli, Anita Tabacco, Daniel Villar-Onrubia, Katherine Wimpenny. Readiness to adopt Open
Educational Resources in the MENA region: the OpenMed case. World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies
(WOCMES). Fundación Tres Culturas. Sevilla (Spain), 16-22 July 2018.

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Readiness to adopt Open Educational Resources in the MENA region: the OpenMed case.

WOCMES18 OpenMed

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