Sustainable Societal Development with Open Educational Resourcesleveraging United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations have identified 17 sustainable development goals or SDGs with 169 associated targets for long term, inclusive and sustainable development of people and our planet in the 2015 summit in New York and SDG4 (Sustainable Development Goal 4) includes inclusive and equitable quality education for everyone and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. SDG4 comprises seven outcome-oriented targets to measure the success and emphasizes on three means of achieving the targets by building and upgrading inclusive schools, expanding the opportunities for higher education and fulfilling the demand for qualified teachers in developing countries. While the targets are plausible, it has its own challenges and the COVID-19 pandemic was the most recent threat for the inclusive and equitable access to education. There exist other barriers for inclusive education like reaching out to all learners in developing countries that majorly hinders the progress towards achieving the targets. Adult and lifelong learning face the situational and dispositional challenges that require a deeper intervention at the societal and educational level. Open educational resources surmount these challenges and provide an acceptable measure in tackling the challenges and also find an equitable way to engage leaners at different levels. This paper examines the different aspects of open educational resources and discusses the ways it can complement the goals of SDG4 and set out the paths for sustainable development of our society