An exploration of agency in the localisation of open educational resources for teacher development

This study examines the practice of adaptation and translation (localisation) of Open Educational Resources (OER). It employs a sociocultural perspective to focus on the experiences of practitioners (localisers) who undertook the localisation of a suite of 125 OER created as part of a teacher professional development programme in India. This localisation process generated eight unique versions of the OER in five languages. Drawing on project reports, practitioner interviews and analysis of the adapted OER, the study explores how localisers created meaning for the task, the situational and linguistic factors that influenced and mediated their decisions to adapt the materials – or not – and the skills and experiences that emerged through the process. Although the findings revealed that changes to the materials were limited, suggesting that enacting localisation is more difficult than perhaps suggested by OER proponents, the analysis indicated forms of localisers’ emerging professional agency through this endeavour.

Publisher: Routledge _eprint: https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1628046 Extra URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1628046