Re-telling the Story of Open Educational Resources: From Pragmatic Success to Ideological Crisis

Open Educational Resources (OER) face a paradox. After more than two decades of sustained advocacy, policy adoption, and infrastructure development, the movement can claim significant achievements: UNESCO recommendations urging member states to support OER, thousands of openly licensed courses and textbooks, and digital platforms built explicitly to enable sharing and reuse. Yet precisely at the moment when OER might consolidate these gains, the ideological foundations on which the movement rested are under coordinated attack and the movement lacks the conceptual resources to respond. This background paper diagnoses the structural vulnerability of Open Education in the absence of ideological grounding, traces the rise of techno-authoritarianism as a coherent ideological project targeting democratic knowledge institutions, and proposes three guiding questions to initiate a structured dialogue within the OER community.