Lessons Learned About Coordinating Academic Partnerships from an International Network for Health Education
There is a growing trend of academic partnerships between U.S., Canadian, and European health science institutions and academic health centers in low- and middle-income countries. These partnerships often encounter challenges such as resource disparities and power differentials, which affect the motivations, expectations, balance of benefits, and results of the joint projects. Little has... more
OER Adaptation and Reuse Across Cultural Contexts in Sub Saharan Africa: Lessons from TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa)
Over a period of three years a number of International and African based institutionscollaborated to design and create a set of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to support school based teacher education as part of the TESSA project. Writing the materials drew on case studies, experiences and existing resources from across the region using a highly structured template. These TESSA OERs were... more
Access to Open Educational Resources: Report of a UNESCO OER Community Discussion
UNESCO's international Community on Open Educational Resources has been active since 2005. It connects some 900 individuals in 109 countries to share information and discuss issues surrounding the production and use of Open Educational Resources ? web-based materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research. The community returned to the issue of access... more
Building Open Educational Resources from the Ground Up: South Africa's Free High School Science Texts
Partly because the development of open educational resources (OER) is a relatively new field that is just now receiving more widespread attention and study, there have been few opportunities to share knowledge across program, organizational and national boundaries. This paper presents a study of the OER project Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) as the first of a series of steps meant to... more
'Communities of Practice' and the Social Process of Knowledge Creation: Towards a New Vocabularly for Making Sense of Organizational Learning
The idea of knowledge as the source of competitive advantage has been celebrated in the management literature for some time. However, our understanding of how knowledge emerges and develops in the actual work practices is still relatively limited. The argument of this paper is that an approach called ‘communities of practice’ offers a relatively coherent view of the social processes of... more
