Image courtesy of Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0
There is strong evidence that professional development is more effective when it is intentionally planned by higher education institutions (Özgenel et al. 2024; Solomon et al. 2023). OER Africa has developed two frameworks for continuous professional development (CPD): one for academics and one for academic and research librarians. The purpose of the frameworks is to capacitate higher education professionals to work innovatively in the modern world by making use of affordances such as open educational resources (OER), open pedagogies and digital technologies. Unless academics engage in high quality teaching and learning practices, innovative ways of working are unlikely to have the beneficial effects intended: improved student success. The CPD frameworks provide a structured scaffold for professional development, outlining domains and capability descriptors, together with sets of curated openly licensed resources that than be used to develop expertise depending on the context. An institution, faculty, department or individual can decide on current needs and use the framework to structure, implement, and evaluate a flexible professional development plan (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Suggested way in which how to use a framework can be used
The frameworks were published on the OER Africa website in 2024. We are pleased to see that the frameworks and the associated CPD open educational resources are being downloaded. Table 1 shows the downloads during 2025, while the top downloads of CPD OER are shown in Table 2.
Table 1: Resource downloads in 2025
| CPD Framework | Jan-25 | Feb-25 | Mar-25 | Apr-25 | May-25 | Total |
| Academics | 121 | 134 | 183 | 195 | 261 | 894 |
| Academic and Research Librarians | 35 | 159 | 215 | 352 | 309 | 1070 |
Table 2: Downloads of CPD OER January to May 2025
OER Africa now wants to carry out further monitoring and evaluation by monitoring resource uptake, obtaining feedback from participants regarding usefulness of the resources, and identifying adoption of resources at partner institutions, as well as possible associated changes in teaching practices of academics. Given that barriers to participation in CPD are persistent, we need to investigate those barriers to determine how CPD can be more generally encouraged in African Higher Education Institutions.
Any university department or professional who has openly licensed resources they believe would be useful to add to the existing sets on our website should please contact us at info
oerafrica [dot] org (info[at]oerafrica[dot]org)
Özgenel, M., Brown, M., Hara, J. O., & Özkan, M. (2024). Redefining the impact of professional development in education with ProDES (Professional Development Evaluation Scale). International Journal of Assessment Tools in Education, 11(4), 733-757.
Solomon, M. A., Gebremedhin, A. A., & Tigistu, K. W. (2023). Continuous professional development in higher education: A systematic review of its conceptualizations, trends and challenges (2011-2020). Bahir Dar Journal of Education, 23(1), 21-39.
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