Research Reports

The study investigated whether the collaborative redesigning of existing materials can enhance quality while containing time and resource costs and whether such collaboration encourages buy-in to the use of OER by teacher educators and students.

The case studies and reflections in this book cover OER practice and policy in a diverse range of contexts, with a strong focus on events in developing countries. In J. Glennie, Harley, K., Butcher, N., and van Wyk, T. (Eds.), Perspectives on Open and Distance Learning: Open Educational Resources and Change in Higher Education: Reflections from Practice (pp. 75-90).

This paper is a reflective report on the Saide ACEMaths project,which piloted a collaborative approach to the sourcing, adaptation and publication as Open Educational Resources (OERs) of existing suitable materials for use in a variety of teacher education programmes.

The Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) is a consortium of education ministries, policy-makers and researchers who, in conjunction with UNESCO?s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), aims to improve the research capacity and technical skills of educational planners (Ross et al., 2005).

The Open University developed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to support teacher educator professional development. The purpose of this paper is to present the TESSA strategy for 2016-2019 and to draw on data from the TESS-India. In 3rd International Conference of the African Virtual University, 6?8 July 2016. Nairobi, Kenya.

This paper describes how the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) consortium is working within institutional and national policy systems to support school-based teacher professional development.

This Pyramid was developed in the course of a research paper focusing on why South African academics adopt OER or not. We understood that numerous factors shaped their choices, but it became apparent that some factors were "essential" to OER activity while others were merely "influential". To clarify which factors were required for any type of OER activity, we developed the OER Adoption Pyramid, which consolidates the factors into six hierarchically related categories: access, permission, awareness, capacity, availability and volition. In Proceedings of Open Education Global 2016, 12?14 April 2016. Krakow, Poland.

e two questions driving SCAP?s research were:
1. What is the current state of scholarly communication in (Southern) African universities?
2. How can the use of ICTs, technology platforms and open access publishing models contribute to the improvement of strategic scholarly communication, and what institutional structures are needed to support such an approach?

This paper reports on a survey of 358 respondents across 25 African countries into their usage of learning management systems. It concludes that while there are some enthusiastic advocates of such systems, the reality is that most African educators as yet have little knowledge about, or interest in, their usage.

The study concludes that for the university to retain its relevance in an evolving educational landscape, it should create a framework that will not only create space for OER projects but should also address the very human need for recognition and acknowledgement that developers of free and open content have. International Business & Economics Research Journal, 12(9), 1119?1129.

The paper starts by discussing the different contexts wherein two institutions operate and the inequalities that exist between them. One institution is a university based in South Africa and the other is a college located in the United Kingdom. Both institutions, however, deliver distance-learning courses. The second part of the paper discusses preliminary findings when OERs are considered for tertiary education at these two institutions. The findings emphasise some of the opportunities and challenges that exist if these two institutions adopt OERs.

This article builds on existing information and communication technology (ICT) implementation plans in Africa and on the experiences of organizations and initiatives such as the African Virtual University (AVU), OER Africa, the South African Institute of Distance Education (SAIDE), and the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) Project, to present one view of the benefits, challenges, and steps that could be taken to realize the potential of OERs in sub-Saharan Africa. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(2), 181-220.

The purpose of the AgSgare convening was to provide an opportunity for project teams:

• Makerere College of Communication and Information Science (CoCIS) – Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge
• Makerere College of Veterinary Medicine, Animal Resources and Biosecurity (COVAB) – Dairy Hygiene
• Haramaya Department of Agricultural Information and Communication Management (AICM)- Enhancing Agricultural information through mobile technology
• Haramaya Department of Agricultural Economics – Marketing of agricultural products
• Mekelle College of Water Resources and Irrigation Management – Water and soil conservation

to share experiences on progress made so far on the AgShare II project. At the same time, the convening offered an opportunity for project teams to plan for the remaining part of the project with support from the three partner institutions, namely Saide, MSU and RUFORUM. The specific objectives of the convening were:

• To identify progress made by institutions to date and challenges being experienced, and share experiences with a view to overcoming some of these challenges.
• To facilitate planning that enhances the timely completion of high quality products.

Jika iMfundo - a NECT funded pilot to improve education outcomes in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa studied how classrooms, schools and districts have changed; what has been learned from previous initiatives; and needs to be done to improve interventions in the future.

This research report is an Evaluation of B.A. (Hum) Programme being an analysis of learners' opnion about various activities from programme publicity till result declaration. The purpose of this research was to make the programme more learner friendly by seeking their opinion about various activities and make necessary changes wherever possible and found fit and proper. These distance learners live isolated at different places of Swaziland and have very few occasions for a face to face contact with Academic counsellors. They need guidance about how to study in an isolated situation, write good quality assignemtns, prepare a project report and appear for final examination. The analysis of their views made recommendations for putting sample assignments and sample project reports on University of Swaziland website and the students' handbook must have information about how to study in an isolated situation. Learner orientation and workshops for their teachers about how to deal with distance learners was part of recommendations. This project report opens the doors for similar exercise for other programmes.

This research report is a critical analysis of opinion gathered through an opinion scale among 540 school teachers of Swaziland regarding staff development for Effective Classroom Management using distance education mode. The opinions were regarding Orientation, Session, two days contact session, various 17 units of self instructional materials and a 3 month interaction with peers and resource persons using a variety of media. It revealed some fruitful guidelines useful for organising thie programme in the future for other teachers. This project is a landmark effort in the direction of making this staff development programme learner friendly among school teachers of Swaziland. An acceptance and implementation of the findings may enhance the quality of this programme. The purpose of publishing these results in book form is to appraise the outcomes among all programme organisers for staff development among school teachers using distance education mode.

We introduce Content Addressable Resources for Education (CARE) as a method for addressing issues of scale, access, management and distribution that currently exist for open educational resources (OER) as they are currently developed in higher education. CARE is based on the concept of the distributed web (dweb) and, using (for example) the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) provides a means to distributed OER in such a way that they cannot be blocked or paywalled, can be associated with each other (for example, as links in a single site, or as newer versions of existing resources) creating what is essentially an open resource graph (ORG), and when accessed through applications such as Beaker Browser, can be cloned and edited by any user to create and share new resources.

This paper demonstrates how the features and affordances of open learning have been developed in new and productive ways to provide school-based continuing professional development for teachers in Zambia. It presents and critically reviews data from 200 teachers who have taken part in phase 1 of the Zambian Education School-based Training (ZEST) – a project which, over the next three years, will be scaled-up across Zambia. The project is underpinned by the belief that knowledge about teaching is co-constructed through participation in, and reflection on, practice. Thus, the emphasis is on empowering teachers to work together to develop practices appropriate to their context – open practices. In the study, we describe an on-going process of realist evaluation which enables us to establish at an early stage what works in which contexts and informs on-going project planning. It concludes that this approach to evaluation has the potential to be helpful in understanding open practices and how they can be developed.

Openness in education is an evolving concept which is shaped by the changing needs of societies, cultures, geographies, and economies, thus, it does not have a precise definition. By focusing on four sets of generic keywords - open education, open learning, open educational resources (OERs), and open educational practices (OEPs) - this paper examines research in openness in education through a systematic review of peer reviewed literature. In doing so, the researchers sought to draw attention to existing trends and patterns and possible future trajectories of openness in education. Content analysis, social network analysis, and text-mining are the methods used for data collection and analysis. Findings show that there has been growing interest on openness in education, particularly on OERs, across different fields. Findings also point to OEPs as an emerging area of study, which offers a fertile ground for future research. However, on closer inspection, a divide can be observed between the global north and global south in terms of research output.