Technical Vocational Education and Training: the ‘dark continent’ in OER

Over the past decade, more and more studies have been published about OER adoptionby educators and educational institutions. The largest part of these studies is about OER in Higher Education and a growing amount is about OER and open textbooks in K-12 education. In addition, according to De Olivereira Netoet al (2017), most studies are focused on the Global North where education instructors “enjoy comparatively higher levels of economic development, educational provision, policy elaboration, and technological access than those in the Global South. This means that less is known about educators’ OER-related practices in the regionwhere OER is touted as having its potentially greatest impact”(De Olivereira Netoet al,2017:2-3).Despite the steadily growing number of studies on the use of OER by educators, there is part of the realm of education that still is ‘a dark continent’ for OER and OER studies, namely Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET). As an indicator, we have analyzed the database from the OER Knowledgecloud1, considered representative for the current state of international OER research, being available as Open Access. With a total of 1638 items in the database (27 October, 9:35 CEST), searching on “technical AND vocational” only gave 2 results (dating from 2011 and 2012).The research presented in this paperprovides the results of a systematic international literature review with the aim of localizing relevant studies on the potentialities and use of OER in TVET. The information from this literature review has been complemented by data from an international quantitative survey taken by members of an UNESCO TVET forum, and from semi-structured interviews with international TVET experts