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My last week in Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City was markedly different from my week in Hanoi in ways I did not expect. A spirit of entrepreneurship and optimism about the future of education in Vietnam has been palpable. I met with several entrepreneurs in Ho Chi Minh City.

There is a lot of talk about education technology and open education resources having a big impact on learners in developing countries. This article offers a brief glimpse into education entrepreneurship in Vietnam. Vietnam Open Education Resources (VOER) has supposedly pushed Vietnam to have a more developed OER system than any other country other than the US. I would be curious to see how Thiem would measure this claim. Platforms built around OER have potential to lower costs of materials, but they rely heavily on an active base of creators and self-publishers. There may always be an incentive for creators of especially good content to offer it for a price. In addition, just as a movie benefits from the guidance of an experienced director, a textbook or etextbook or any other large-format education content benefits substantially from an experienced curator who could charge for his/her work. I don't see this going away any time soon.

I've been employing Mr Google to try to help me determine how much OER might be used in post-secondary institutions in Canada and came across this document, which I think might be a slide deck turned into a PDF and without the accompanying script it's a little cryptic. The title is misleading, as it's the view from Western Canada, BC in particular. Most of the main OER initiatives I've been hearing about are in the west, I posted links to the BC Open Textbook initiative and to a particular text previously. This particular document

The document consists of two parts; the first part is about Open Educational Resources: the challenges of teaching and learning in the Arab countries. the second part is about Open textbooks and Higher Education in the Arab States