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.

In developing a free Communication Skills textbook for the students and staff we had come across a serious difficulty in that the compilers preferred to use excerpts from old, out of print texts that they had used before and were familiar with. Prior to June a number of the staff had said that they felt the OER text would be inferior to the materials they had handed out previously because they were unconvinced the OER as sourced through repositories like OER Commons and elsewhere were of good enough quality. All too often on being frustrated by the limited materials identified by the public OER repositories they would use a Google to search for materials on reading, writing and study skills only to find out that what they liked and excited them were fully copyrighted. Consequently the project became somewhat mired and moved forward only slowly.

Recently on review of draft sections it became apparent that sections of copyrighted materials or parts where material was still needed could easily be filled by reworking various entries from Wikipedia. Its enormous content scope makes it an attractive source to supplement many of those difficult to find sections. We even found an entry on ‘dangling modifiers’!