Open, Distance, and Digital Education (ODDE): An Equity View

Abstract

Understanding how equity manifests in open, distance, and digital education (ODDE) requires us to grapple with several coexisting trends, including the changing forms of teaching and learning provision, the advent of a post-digital society and education, the datafication of education, inequality in society at large, and digital inequities. Most of these trends are social in nature, yet they shape, and are shaped by, the educational sector. It is at the intersection of these coexisting trends that equity issues in ODDE are raised and become apparent, reinforced by the uneven distribution of technology in society, and with deep roots in economic and social inequities. Current scholarship foregrounds these nested relationships and entanglements, as well as their intersection with power relations and contestations which play out across ODDE at macro, meso, and micro levels.