Access and equity in Open Education Resources: E-learning for girl and women in Bangladesh Open University

Abstract

Open Educational Resources are freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. E-learning is (website, e-books, cd, dvd etc) latest addition to OER which is accessible through internet and computing systems. Though these resources are ‘open’ to all for learning, but the socio economic situation of women and girls in Bangladesh is a challenge to take the advantage of e-learning systems. This research has been carried out to comprehend the situation of women and girls in Bangladesh in terms of E-learning, identify the challenges and opportunities of access to E-learning among women and girls and recommend about further improvement of those systems. The research had been consisted of several stages of analysis. Primarily different e-learning systems have been identified and later the contents have been analyzed to explore whether the topics and knowledge are relevant to women and girls. In the next stage, two groups of girls have been selected as respondent groups among which one group has been selected as user group who are currently using e-learning systems, and other group has non-users group. Comparison between these two groups has helped to identify the challenges that some girls face to use e-learning system and to recognize the factors that facilitated some girls to use the e-learning system. In further stage of analysis, information from user’s group has helped to explore about the contents that should be included in the e-learning systems especially for women education, which will ensure a gender balance to use the system. At the end, it is expected that the research can recommend two factors; firstly, how these e-learning system could be more accessible among girls/women through increasing knowledge about the systems, and; secondly, what is required to include in these system to ensure equity to use the system and to gain knowledge from it. // Paper ID: 234