Featured image: “Housing Is A Human Right“ by Nikita Abuya for Fine Acts remixed by the UNESCO RELIA Chair licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0.
👤 Mpine Makoe is a distinguished scholar in technology-enhanced and open learning and is the Executive Dean of the College of Education and a National Research Foundation (NRF)–rated research professor at the University of South Africa. She is also the Commonwealth of Learning Chair in Open Education Resources, Practices and Research, and an OER Ambassador of the International Council of Distance Education (ICDE).
👤 Darrion Letendre is the Land-Based Learning Specialist at NorQuest College. He is an advocate for Indigenous education and revitalizing cultural knowledge through Western education systems. He has been a member of the Open Education Steering Committee, providing strategic guidance and wisdom as it relates to Indigenous Peoples’ ways of knowing.
👤 Robert Lawson is an Educational Developer at NorQuest College in Edmonton, Canada. He has been actively promoting open education at the college since 2016 and is a member of the college’s Open Education Steering Committee. He is also a member of the Board of Directors for OE Global.
Together we share our thoughts on colonialism and open education
Mpine
Opening up an education system that has been closed for centuries is a tall order that requires a complete overhaul of the current education system as we know it. As long as open education is operating within this higher education system—one that was created to undermine, exclude, and marginalise other knowledges, cultures, and values—open education will never achieve its goal of removing barriers to equitable access to education.
Despite the benefits of open education and its potential to challenge and transform the dominance of Global North education systems, it has not been successful in institutionalising the democratisation of knowledges in higher education. Part of the reason is that open education is operating within the systems, structures, and practices that were designed to subjugate, dominate, and marginalise other people’s knowledges, cultures, languages, and values.
This deeply ingrained higher education system, defined and described by Global North hegemony, has made it very difficult for any local and Indigenous education system to survive. Hence, open education, which operates within these systems, is perceived as part of the Global North hegemony that ignores knowledges from other communities.
For instance, most Open Educational Resources are developed in the Global North and shared openly without acknowledging their biases. Even when open licensing is used, there is very little, if any, mention of how the sharing of knowledges is handled in Indigenous communities of the Global South. What this means is that Global North communities are positioned as producers of knowledge to be consumed by Indigenous peoples, who are implied to have nothing to share in the epistemic world.
Therefore, sharing in this context is not reciprocal and, in the process, undermines the importance of the principle of reciprocity grounded in the philosophy of “Ubuntu,” meaning “I am because we are,” a principle that can also be found in many other communities around the world.
Darrion
Colonialism is a belief rooted in theft, and it has robbed many people of the most valuable things we possess: knowledge, belief, and cultures, to name a few. This has been a problem for many generations—an expansion that is unwarranted and unneeded, yet nevertheless continues to plague our world. Colonialism itself is an obstacle that many are struggling to overcome, and it shows itself to us as violence, racism, indignation, competition, and private property, to name a few.
Colonialism is an attitude: the belief that you are better than me, and because of that, you have the divine right to control. Colonialism is a problem because its very foundations inherently contradict what open education strives to be: inclusive, communal, accessible, openly licensed, and easily adaptable.
When we share freely, we express love and gratitude that transcend time and space—something we have all practiced in some way at one time or another. As a nehiyaw-Métis man, I know knowledge to be a gift, passed down by Elders and knowledge-keepers—educators who know that to build brighter futures, we must teach our people in good ways, open ways. Therein lies one potential solution: traditional Indigenous knowledge.
Robert
“Open Education is colonization.” This concept would never have occurred to me ten years ago when I first became involved in the open community. I was focused on what seemed like a wonderful approach to improving our college’s goals of providing learners with accessible and inclusive education. However, the same free exchange and manipulation of information enabled through open licences has worked to the detriment of Indigenous peoples in Canada. In this country, there is a long history of stealing information, culture, and knowledge without permission.
During the organization of OE Global 2023, I came to the uncomfortable realization that I was a colonizer. In seeking conference program feedback from an Indigenous relative, I proceeded in a very extractive manner—using their information without reciprocity, without keeping them in the circle of relations and decision-making, and without inviting them to join the committee.
Thankfully, I had a great teacher in Darrion Letendre, who taught me about Wahkohtowin, Cree natural law based on the importance of relationality—how everything around us, animate and inanimate, is related. As Mpine points out, this concept is similar to Ubuntu, “I am because we are,” a Southern African philosophy rooted in interconnectedness. These perspectives promote communal well-being over individualism, which is rooted in colonialism. Decolonization is an ongoing process for me.
To borrow Elder Albert Marshall’s concept about combining Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to science, we need to apply the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing to open education: encouraging the accessible public sharing of information and knowledge while being mindful of the harmful impacts of colonization. “Open as possible, closed as necessary” should be our mantra.
✍ The series of articles. This article is part of the series “Sharing is a challenge”, published throughout March 2026, in collaboration with the UNESCO RELIA Chair and the UNITWIN-UNOE network.
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🖼️ Featured image. The original artistic intent remains that of the artist and may differ from the editorial intent of our remix. We thank Nikita Abuya for sharing their work on Fine Acts under the open licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
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