Open Educational Resources and the Question of Responsibility: An Indigenous Perspective

Open Educational Resources are often positioned as inherently good. They are described as tools that increase access, reduce costs, and democratize knowledge. Within many educational spaces, openness is framed as progress, as something that naturally moves us toward equity.

But from an Indigenous perspective, the conversation is not so simple.

Before we ask how to expand Open Educational Resources, we must first pause and ask what it means to make knowledge open, and at what cost. We must consider who benefits from openness and who may be placed at risk within it. These are not peripheral questions. They sit at the centre of how knowledge has historically been taken, circulated, and controlled.

When Openness Conflicts with Responsibility

In many Indigenous knowledge systems, knowledge is not a resource to be freely distributed. It is relational and held within specific responsibilities, contexts, and protocols. Knowledge is connected to people, to land, to language, and to lived experience. It is not separate from those relationships.

As Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us, research and knowledge-sharing have long been tied to colonial processes of extraction. Knowledge has been taken from Indigenous communities, reframed through Western lenses, and redistributed in ways that erase both context and accountability. Open Educational Resources, if approached without care, risk continuing this pattern under the language of openness.

Kim TallBear also challenges dominant assumptions about knowledge sharing, reminding us that knowledge exists within relationships of kinship and responsibility. From this perspective, the idea that knowledge should always be universally accessible does not hold. Instead, knowledge must be understood as something that is shared with intention, within relationships, and with an awareness of its impacts.

This creates a fundamental tension. Openness, as it is commonly understood in OER spaces, can come into direct conflict with Indigenous responsibilities to protect, contextualize, and care for knowledge.

The Risk of Digital Extraction

In digital environments, knowledge moves quickly. It can be uploaded, downloaded, adapted, and redistributed across platforms with very little friction. While this is often celebrated as a strength of Open Educational Resources, it also introduces significant risk.

Scholars such as Nick Couldry have written about the ways digital systems enable new forms of extraction, where information becomes a resource to be mined and circulated. When this logic is applied to Indigenous knowledge, it raises serious concerns.

Cultural teachings can be taken out of context and shared widely without permission. Stories that are meant to be held within relationship can become detached from the communities they come from. Knowledge that carries responsibility can be transformed into content that is consumed rather than respected.

These processes are not always intentional, but they are still harmful. They reflect a broader pattern in which digital systems prioritize circulation over care, and access over accountability.

Context, Meaning, and the Limits of Platforms

One of the most significant challenges with Open Educational Resources is the loss of context. When knowledge is removed from the relationships that give it meaning, it becomes vulnerable to misunderstanding and misuse.

Shawn Wilson reminds us that knowledge is relational. It exists within webs of connection that include people, land, language, and ceremony. When knowledge is separated from these relationships, it does not carry the same meaning.

A teaching that is grounded within a specific Nation or community cannot simply be transferred into a digital repository and expected to remain intact. Without the relationships that hold it, the knowledge changes. Sometimes it becomes flattened. Sometimes it becomes distorted. Sometimes it is used in ways that go against its original purpose.

Most OER platforms are not designed to hold this complexity. They are built to store and distribute information, not to maintain relationships or uphold cultural protocols. This creates a gap between how knowledge is understood within Indigenous frameworks and how it is managed within digital systems.

Consent and Control in Knowledge Sharing

Another critical issue is consent. Open Educational Resources often operate on the assumption that sharing is inherently beneficial. However, Indigenous approaches to knowledge emphasize that sharing must be grounded in consent, relationship, and responsibility.

Scholars such as Stephanie Russo Carroll have emphasized the importance of Indigenous data sovereignty, including the right of communities to control how their knowledge is collected, used, and shared. This work highlights that openness cannot be separated from governance.

When knowledge is made open without clear consent, it raises serious ethical concerns. Who decided that this knowledge should be shared. Were the communities involved in that decision. Do they have the ability to say no. Do they have ongoing control over how that knowledge is used or adapted.

Without these considerations, Open Educational Resources can unintentionally reproduce the same colonial dynamics they aim to disrupt. The language may shift, but the underlying structures of control and extraction can remain.

Trauma, Safety, and Digital Exposure

These concerns become even more complex when we consider trauma and safety within digital learning environments. In my own work, I focus on Indigenous women navigating online education, many of whom are also living with the impacts of gender-based violence.

For these learners, openness can carry additional risks.

Open platforms can expose learners to content that is triggering or harmful without warning. They can lack the relational supports needed to process difficult material. They can create environments where learners are expected to engage without consideration for their emotional or physical safety.

As Jenny Horsman has shown, trauma shapes how people learn, engage, and process information. When educational resources are designed without this understanding, they can create barriers rather than opportunities.

Open Educational Resources, in their current dominant forms, rarely account for these realities. They are often designed with an abstract learner in mind, rather than with attention to lived experience, safety, or relational care.

Rethinking OER Through Indigenous Frameworks

This does not mean that Open Educational Resources should be abandoned. It means that they must be approached differently.

Indigenous scholars and communities are already offering pathways that can guide this work. Frameworks such as OCAP and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance emphasize that knowledge must be governed in ways that respect community authority, consent, and responsibility.

These frameworks shift the conversation in important ways. They remind us that not all knowledge is meant to be open. They emphasize that access is something that is negotiated within relationships, not assumed as a default. They centre responsibility before distribution and ask us to consider the impacts of sharing before the act of sharing itself.

Within this reframing, Open Educational Resources are no longer simply about access. They become part of a broader conversation about how knowledge is held, shared, and protected.

Holding the Tension

There is a tension that cannot be resolved easily.

Open Educational Resources have the potential to increase access and disrupt exclusionary systems. At the same time, they can reproduce harm if they ignore the responsibilities that come with knowledge.

This tension must be held, not avoided.

It requires educators, researchers, and institutions to slow down. To ask deeper questions. To build relationships before creating or sharing resources. To recognize that openness is not always the goal, and that sometimes care requires limitation rather than expansion.

Closing: From Openness to Accountability

Open Educational Resources invite us to rethink education, but from an Indigenous perspective, the deeper invitation is to rethink our relationship to knowledge itself.

Openness, on its own, is not enough.

What matters is how knowledge is carried, who it is accountable to, and whether it is shared in ways that honour the relationships it comes from. This work asks us to move beyond access as the primary goal and toward accountability as the guiding principle.

If Open Educational Resources are to move forward in meaningful ways, they must be grounded in responsibility, consent, and care.

Only then can they begin to support learning environments that are not just open, but ethical, relational, and safe.