To facilitate broad take-up and use of the concept of OER in Africa’s education systems, our approach is to build relationships with existing networks of educational organizations and/or individuals and provide support of different kinds both to the networks and to individual organizations participating in them. We offer such networks / institutions three main forms of support in the field of OER, each of which is designed to reinforce the other activities:

1. Policy Engagement

Successful and sustainable use of OER is predicated upon meaningful integration into institutional or systemic processes. Accordingly, OER Africa offers interested organizations practical assistance to help create environments that support extended development, adaptation, and use of OER as one of many strategies to improve educational quality and ensure cost-effective operations.
For example, we review their existing policies (whether these be national or institutional) with regard to issues such as intellectual property rights or remuneration/recognition for materials development. We then facilitate the adaptation of such policies into an over-arching OER policy framework that, in accordance with their particular circumstances, will support and sustain development and use of OER in education systems in Africa.

2. Development/adaptation of OER for education programmes and courses

A key area of operation for OER Africa is to provide support to educators, as well as education organizations and systems, to meet teaching and learning needs cost-effectively, in order to model how such resources can serve simultaneously to improve the quality of education programmes and to manage delivery costs of those programmes more effectively. This is an area in which Saide, through its prior work in supporting materials development processes for distance education programmes has accumulated a diverse and extensive range and depth of knowledge and expertise.
We are currently engaged in a variety of activities in this area, ranging from small proof-of-concept pilots to demonstrate the potential of OER by creating materials for a single module within a programme to engagement in processes aimed at producing comprehensive sets of OER for entire programmes. In general, our support is focussed on:

1. Supporting initial design and planning of the proposed development process;

2. Assisting organizations to complete audits of their materials in order to catalogue their intellectual property and the copyright conditions governing those materials;

3. Providing ongoing guidance regarding licensing issues;

4. Searching global repositories and other appropriate sources for potentially relevant materials once the curriculum focus for the project is defined;

5. Targeting the global OER ‘movement’ to make requests for materials to broaden the above searches on behalf of African education organizations;

6. Facilitating materials development/adaptation processes, where required, in order to ensure high quality of the resulting materials;

7. Providing course design expertise to support the process as appropriate;

8. Providing management support to materials development processes where this is required (most often found to be useful when such processes involve collaboration between two or more organizations);

9. Assisting with generation of meta-data for OER produced (whether new or adapted);

10. Using the OER Africa platform – www.oerafrica.org – to make OER produced in Africa accessible to the global OER community, across a range of educational sub-sectors; and

11. Identifying high quality, available educational content produced in Africa in our key thematic areas of focus (Health, Teacher Education, Agriculture, and Foundation Programmes) and working with the producers of that content to facilitate its release as OER, via www.oerafrica.org

3. Support to collaborative networks

Finally, we have become increasingly engaged in providing support of different kinds to nascent or existing collaborative networks, in line with the vision outlined in this policy. Whilst the particular services provided in this area are obviously highly dependent on the needs of a particular network and its current status, the kinds of support that OER Africa provides might include:

1. Assisting to convene the network (particularly in instances where a need for collaboration has been identified, but no functioning network yet exists);

2. Facilitating processes to design collaborative projects for such networks;

3. Supporting development of funding proposals for the network (particularly important as much collaboration is undermined by the limits of available funds to allow institutions to dedicate human capacity to collaborative activities);

4. Managing collaborative projects in the field of OER, where this is requested by the network;

5. Providing online tools for collaboration and sharing through the OER Africa website; and

6. Providing other forms of support as appropriate to help to ensure the success and sustainability of the network.