Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been increasingly utilized by higher education institutions worldwide for developing course material, delivering and sharing content, communication between learners and teachers, creation and delivery of presentations and lectures, academic research, etc. The use of open and distance learning (ODL) expands access to education. Since 2002 UNESCO has been promoting the initiative for free educational resources (OER) on the Internet, which are critically important for ensuring wide access to quality higher education and life-long learning in developing countries and full participation of universities in these countries in the rapidly developing world of higher education system (Forum on Open Courseware for Developing Countries, UNESCO, Paris, 1-3 July, 2002). Since then a consensus within the relevant community has been achieved on the approaches to be used in producing virtual repositories of learning materials. Dozens of large-scale repositories have been complied, updated and used.

The importance of OER for the world education community has been stressed in the Communiqué of the World Conference on Higher Education: The New Dynamics of Higher Education and Research for Societal Change and Development as "ODL approaches and ICTs present opportunities to widen access to quality education, particularly when Open Educational Resources are readily shared by many countries and higher education institutions" (UNESCO, Paris, 5-8 July 2009).

The IITE OER project is aimed at exploring, identifying and capacity-building in the use of OER in CIS countries. The implementation modality of the project will include the following components:

Analytical component

• Surveying OER state-of-the-art in CIS countries: basic principles and technologies, IPR issues for OER, best practices;
• Study aimed at identification of country-based needs and opportunities for OER;
• Expert roundtable discussions: presentation of the results of the analytical study and development of recommendations for the portal;
• Development of recommendations for establishing analogous OER portals in other developing countries (upon piloting of the portal).

Capacity-building and networking component

• Raising awareness on OER in the target countries;
• Increasing literacy in copyright and open content licensing issues;
• Networking at regional and sub-regional level;
• Training of trainers for resource users and producers.

IT component and establishment of a Web-portal

• Multi-lingual platform (Russian, national languages, English) to account for the diversity of languages existing in the region;
• Russian-language OER;
• Guidance on English-language OER;
• Developing technical guidelines for resource users and producers and for potential establishment of similar portals in developing countries;
• Development of opportunities for feeding OER in national languages in the future.