Articles and Updates

In early 2025, OER Africa launched the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Network, an initiative designed to connect higher education institutions across southern Africa in a shared effort to strengthen professional development for academic staff. Since its inception, the Network has convened seven times, bringing together representatives from five institutions.

As African universities increasingly adopt Open Educational Resources (OER), the need for robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) has never been greater. Effective M&E enables institutions to track progress, demonstrate impact, and ensure that OER initiatives genuinely advance access, equity, and quality in education. This communication explores practical approaches to monitoring and evaluating the implementation of OER at Universities.

OER Africa has developed a Toolkit for Developing Human Resources Policies and Supportive Institutional Environments in Higher Education, which provides a comprehensive, practical guide for higher education institutions to assess, improve, or establish effective HR policies and practices. It is positioned as an Open Education Resource (OER) and contributes to OER Africa’s broader mission to support sustainable education systems in Africa by empowering institutions to improve staff capacity, enhance organisational effectiveness, and create environments conducive to the adoption and integration of OER. It offers detailed guidance on core HR domains, including conditions of service, staff development, performance management, promotion, and codes of conduct, along with templates and openly licensed resources to facilitate policy development and implementation. It focuses particularly on helping institutions determine which HR processes and policies should be in place to support individuals within the work environment.

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. An institution, faculty, department or individual can decide on current needs and use the framework to structure and implement a flexible professional development plan.

The Botswana Open University (BOU) wanted to give lecturers and tutors at BOU an opportunity to gain skills for facilitating online learning. OER Africa adapted the OER Africa online tutorial for Facilitating Online Learning (FOL) for the context of staff development at BOU. When students arrive in a face to face class, when a lecturer or tutor arrives to teach them, there is an immediate connection, a presence. Online, we can lose the connections that allow us to learn with and from each other. The art of online facilitation helps to re-create those connections, to create a presence.