In June 2009 Wikipedia adopted an open license for its content. All text contained within the collaborative encyclopaedia can be used as stipulated by the Creative Commons license: Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA). In terms of adapting OER content for our SADC IADP project at Bunda College of Agriculture in Malawi this has occurred at a most welcome juncture of our project.

I recently made a presentation on OER in the Health sector for the South African Association of Health Educators. Here, I am trying to argue the case for using OER as a catalyst to return to a few fundamental principles in education, rather than allowing it to be coopted as just another fad in a long line of educational jargon. I hope it makes for interesting reading.

The nurses at Kamuzu College of Nursing want it all! They have embarked on an ambitious project that incorporates three new elements not really tried out before in Lilongwe or Blantyre. They are ...

• Using an e-learning platform

• Teaching using a Problem Based Learning (PBL) methodology

• Accessing and adapting Open Education Resources (OER)

While it might sound very ambitious the nurses preparing a certificate course in midwifery seem undaunted. IADP and OER Africa have joined forces to provide them with training and exposure they need to master these new components.

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I was asked to write this paper as an opinion piece - it will be published later this year. I hope it is a provocative effort to re-think why we are engaging with ICT in education and what we hope it will do for education.

At Bunda College of Agriculture we are in the process of creating a standardised text for the Communication Skills module. Currently there is no such textbook. A prescribed book list, yes, but can you actually access any of these texts? Not so easy.

At Chancellor College in Zomba, Malawi the SADC IADP project is setting up a pilot to see if an online library system can add value to teaching and learning at the institution. Ten machines positioned in the central library access the IADP's online library of copyrighted e-books. During a visit this month the system was tested and while not perfect on its first trial, it does work. Individual pages from the books are delivered to the terminals for perusal by the reader one at a time.

In March I visited Malawi to conduct a workshop for a group of nursing educators from the Kamuzu College of Nursing. The March workshop was the first step in a three months training intervention which aims to build the capacity of the nursing team to source, use, remix and adapt OER to suit their needs. 

I am scheduled to do a presentation at eLearning Africa in May, 2009. In this blog posting, I am sharing my extended abstract. I would love to hear any thoughts or comments on the abstract as it currently stands. In large part, it is taken from our OER Africa value proposition, so reflects much of the central thinking that Catherine and I have been doing in the past six months.