Open Education in Latin America: A Regional Assessment of Open Educational Resources Initiatives

Open education has emerged as a key approach to promoting equitable access to knowledge, grounded in collaboration, content reuse, and the use of open licenses. Within this framework, Open Educational Resources (OER) represent a fundamental strategy for expanding learning opportunities in Latin America, particularly in contexts characterized by structural inequalities. Although numerous initiatives have emerged across the region, there remains a lack of a comprehensive regional diagnosis that would allow for an understanding of their distribution, characteristics, and stage of development. This study aimed to map and analyze the OER available on web platforms from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, considering variables such as resource type, educational level, institutional support, licensing, covered topics, and their degree of alignment with the strategic objectives outlined in UNESCO’s 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (UNESCO 2022). An exploratory, automated methodology was employed, combining web crawling tools (Netpeak Spider), scraping scripts in Python/Selenium, manual review, and expert validation. A total of 210 active websites offering open educational resources were identified. The findings reveal a strong emphasis on accessibility, with a notable concentration in higher and postgraduate education, primarily driven by universities. While the analysis shows that most initiatives align with UNESCO’s third strategic objective—ensuring inclusive and equitable access—other key areas such as regional cooperation, the development of sustainable models, and institutional capacity-building are less prominently represented. This situation highlights the need to move toward a more comprehensive approach that not only prioritizes access, but also fosters sustainable, collaborative, and legally sound open practices.