Conference Papers and Presentations

This presentation makes the following case: that the world has changed over the past two decades, and while traditional tools of librarianship may have sufficed in the past, there is an urgent need for librarians to embrace open licences, open education resources, open access publications, open data, and open science. Each of these five major parts of the open ecosystem will be discussed, with a focus on how African librarians can learn about and adopt open practices for their own use and that of their clients.

The paper emphasises the need for professional development of librarians, and demonstrate ways in which individuals, groups and institutions can access free online open resources to empower themselves. The current collaboration between OER Africa and AfLIA includes reference to a continuous professional development (CPD) framework for academic librarians. Such a framework is an innovative planning guide for CPD that supports the career development of librarians, as an alternative to unplanned ad hoc development. The presentation will conclude with the draft professional development framework for academic librarians offered for comment.

How to build capacity in universities to harness open content effectively.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the importance of professional development on effective teaching and learning for university academics into sharp relief. As has been reported in numerous publications during 2020 to 2022, universities found themselves having to close their campuses and unable to teach their students face-toface. Whatever form the teaching has taken, academics have found that traditional lecturing has not been effective when implementing Emergency Remote Teaching or online teaching. The lecture mode of teaching has been regarded as inadequate for the last few decades (e.g. Jones, 2007; Khan, 1997), and the pandemic has brought this into sharp relief.

Traditional CPD has tended to focus on lecture-style inputs, and is regarded in the EU report as ineffective because there is often little relationship between the training and academics’ classrooms and students. One way to mitigate these challenges is to provide short, online tutorials that engage participants in authentic learning tasks that can be done individually or collaboratively in their own time, while they are in the workplace. This paper describes the development and piloting for three of OER Africa’s learning pathways: finding and adapting OER, and Open Access Publishing.

One of the main challenges faced in developing countries is that many children and youths are not in any form of education, employment or training. Unlike the developed world, these countries have young populations and are characterized by relatively high population growth rates. It is practically not feasible to accommodate the increasing number of children and youth in existing educational institutions, using the traditional methods of classroom education. There is the risk of keeping more children and youth out of education and by so doing, exposing them to all forms of social problems like alcohol and drug abuse. Unfortunately, even those learners that find themselves in school sometimes hardly realise significant educational achievements. This is mainly because many schools have crumbling infrastructure, overcrowded classrooms and poor educational outcomes.

The problem of poor educational outcomes in developing countries is exacerbated by occasional natural disasters like tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and pandemic outbreaks. As was witnessed with the Covid-19 pandemic, these disasters not only constrain the smooth-running of education systems, they also make educational provision more expensive. This further pushes more children out of school. It is clear from experience that education institutions need to build systems that provide more access at affordable cost and that are more resilient to the myriad of challenges that are posed by nature. The advent of technology provides a window of hope in this regard. Use of educational technology allows more people to participate in education, provides greater flexibility, and has immense potential to enhance the quality of education. This paper is a reflection of the contribution COL is making in supporting digitisation of the curriculum at the schooling level as a way of addressing the challenges of access, quality and resilience. The paper highlights the initiatives that were implemented, the methodology that has been used to collect data from various countries where COL supported technology enhanced learning, achievements that were made and challenges that were encountered. It also highlights emerging results of these interventions and surfaces their potential impact.

This presentation is used to help build capacity in writing funding proposals for education technology projects in Higher Education institutions

This presentation looks at the University's readiness to embark on an e-learning programme and where the various barriers to progress might exist.

This paper argues that the system of formal scholarly publication is entering its third phase of evolution. This phase has not yet taken full shape, but is characterised by a strong de-commodified core with only niches for commercial publishers - in contrast to phase 11 which was the age of increasing commodification. The main reasons for this development are economic, functional and ideational. The current economic crisis of academic publishing is driving academia to alternative models. From a functional perspective, the advent of ePublishing makes it possible that academia will take over most of what is currently done by the commercial publishers. Finally, the last decade has seen an increasing awareness of the research community that its products should not be treated as a commodity, but should instead be freely available to the whole community.

A presentation for the Learning Futures Festival Online 2010, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester. 

This presentation will argue that the key usefulness of OER in African context is that it creates an impetus for the discovery and sharing of high quality existing resources as OER that are otherwise unknown or simply the preserve of individual institutions or publishers. In contexts in which human and material resources are constrained, the existence of OER also stimulates collaborative course design in which there are opportunities for participants in communities of practice to develop the shared understanding that results in successful adaptation of OER for different contexts and programmes. In this way the OER are grown, rather than merely consumed. Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation.

This paper is a report on the findings of a literature review and an expert survey conducted in December 2010 with a self-selected panel. The findings depict current issues for debate, pinpoint potential obstacles and benefits of OER.

The first part of the paper reports on the outcomes of a joint UNESCO-COL project Taking OERs beyond the OER Community: Policy and Capacity. Its purpose was to expand understanding of the potential of OERs among university leaders and quality assurance officials in Africa and Asia, who have low awareness of this phenomenon. The project concluded with an intergovernmental policy forum where participants enjoined UNESCO to lead a global campaign to encourage governments and institutions to foster the development and use of OER and, more widely, to make documents of educational value created with public funds available under open licenses. The second part of the paper draws on the experience of creating and using OERs to explore how far open educational practices can take us towards more cost-effective higher education systems. The authors argue that openness has to be balanced against the requirements of certification, accreditation and quality assurance. An important function of OER is to provide a route for potential students and teachers to move from the informal cloud of learning to a more formal engagement with education and training.

This symposium stems from a long-time work group on Technology and Education. It was born out of a set of concerns on how OER can be accessed, reused, revised, remixed, and distributed effectively. The concerns are mostly based in two fields: first, a technical concern in the infrastructures necessary to produce and disseminate ever more flexible resources; second, cultural concern with the possibilities that are made available by technical 'openness: but nonetheless exclude the non-target audience from making use of these quality resources

Presentation by Neil Butcher at the Open University of Sudan on Creative Commons licencing.

Presentation by Tessa Welch at the Unisa Teaching and Learning Festival 1 - 9 September 2011.

This presentation by Tessa Welch to the Unisa Teaching and Learning Festival provides an overview of OER, copyright matters and on how to find OER.

Presentation by Tessa Welch to Unisa on 28 March 2012.

Part One of an online presentation introducing Open Education Resources and what they can do for education. The session is part of the 4C Initiative and is presented by Neil Butcher of OER Africa. To watch this video click: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8xYUgL487I

Part Two of an online presentation introducing Open Education Resources and what they can do for education. The session is part of the 4C Initiative. To watch this video click: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_KDr5NAd6g

Cathy Casserly (Creative Commons) asks the critical questions: What are the core elements of OER infrastructure? What are the gaps? What are examples of supportive OER policies? What research is needed in each of the three pillars? Where are there opportunities for innovation?

Presentation by Catherine Ngugi and Neil Butcher at the African Education Week, Sandton Convention Centre, 2nd - 4th July 2012

This OER Africa presentation, made at the ALARA 9th Action Learning Research Congress in November 2015, discusses the participatory action research approach that is being used at the Africa Nazarene University (ANU).