What's Happening in OER in Africa

This section provides latest updates to news and events relating to OER in African higher education and will include notices to new policies, research, events/conferences.

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Do you want to communicate your research more widely?

January, 19, 2021

Most research is only seen by a small number of specialists. Would you like to share your research with those who can use it directly? They can be teachers, policy makers, other stakeholders, or the media. In this post, we explore how you can make your work accessible to a wider audience and release it under an open licence.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Most research is only seen by a small number of specialists. Would you like to share your research with those who can use it directly? They can be teachers, policy makers, other stakeholders, or the media. OER Africa has created a practical guide to communicating your research findings to a wider audience. In this post, we explore how you can make your work accessible to a wider audience and release it under an open licence.

The need to share scholarship openly

Most academics think that their research is important. Although they publish it in journals for others to read and build on, the reality is that academic journals are aimed at a specialised audience. Journal publication is important, but not necessarily sufficient. If you can find different ways to make your findings available, your research might be of value to a much wider variety of people, including local communities, who could use it to improve their lives, and policy makers, for whom it might provide useful evidence to inform their decisions. You could also help to generate trust in researchers, encourage public participation in important issues, and improve your own communication skills in the process. Professor Jerry John Nutor believes that:

Research is meant to benefit society by raising public awareness and creating products and innovations that enhance development. For research to serve its full purpose, the results must leave the confines of research laboratories and academic journals.

If you find Nutor’s argument compelling, why not think about ways to make your research available and accessible beyond journal publication? In addition, when communicating your research, applying an open licence helps others to disseminate it further, without the need for permission from you.

Becoming a communicator of your research

Most research can and should be communicated to audiences beyond academia. One area of research communication which is developing into a field in its own right is that of science communication, and all researchers can learn from some of the methods that science communicators use to disseminate their research. SciDev.netexplains why accurately and clearly communicating science during the COVID-19 pandemic is essential.

Here are some suggestions to consider:

Identify the potential audiences for your research and the formats that they are likely to find most accessible. Producing a pamphlet for teachers to use in the classroom would look very different from making a short video for farmers to try out a new technique. Once you have identified your audience, you can plan how best to summarise your findings for them.
Decide on your key message/s. You are not writing a research paper; you need to decide what you want to tell your audience, and ensure that the message gets across to them early on in your communication. Using a message template can help you; tell your audience:
Here’s what we know.
Here’s what’s new.
Here’s why it matters.
Use plain language to write your blog, pamphlet, or other communication. Your audience will not want to read jargon or academic writing; it will want to understand your research quickly and easily. Good advice about writing in plain language can be found here.
Apply an open licence to the new communication you have developed to make it easier for others to share and use. The advantages and types of Creative Commons open licences are explained here.
Depending on your audience, you may want to translate your new communication into another language.
Decide where to disseminate the communication you have developed.

Where can you publish your communication?

It is best to start with familiar, local possibilities. These might include a website or newsletter of your own research group, department, or faculty. You could also contact NGOs or local community organisations related to your research to see if they would like to publish your piece. Your institution may have a communications department with which you could work to write a press release or similar. You can also approach your radio stations or newspapers, particularly those that broadcast or publish in local languages that reach a broad audience.

Further afield, there is no one-stop-shop for finding examples of good research communication, but the following sites provide examples of research transformed for non-academic audiences. They are all openly licenced or have an option to publish with a Creative Commons licence. For these sites, you will need to learn how to pitch a story to the editors (i.e. ‘sell your story idea’) before you write it. For any of these, you can also publicise your piece using social media.

The Conversation is a good example of a forum that many academics use to publish their research for non-specialists to read. The site includes opinion pieces and other issues as well as research findings, and is available in English and French.
Although it is more journalism-focused, you can contact SciDev.net to pitch a piece of research reformulated as a story.
You can also create an entry (or edit an existing one) on Wikipedia once you register as an editor. It is available in several languages.
You can create a channel on YouTube, develop your own videos, and upload them as OER.

In summary, developing the skills of sharing your research more widely than traditional academia is well worth pursuing: it gets you more widely known as a researcher, while also enabling your findings to be used by practitioners, educators, and the general public.

With thanks to Dr Marina Joubert (Stellenbosch University) for advice on dissemination.

For more articles in this series, click on the links below.

How can you get involved in the Open COVID Pledge for Education?

December, 9, 2020

In August, OER Africa introduced the Open COVID Pledge for Education, which was launched at the OER20 Conference earlier that month. OER Africa is proud to be a founding signatory of this Pledge, which encourages individuals and organisations to make their intellectual property available through open licensing arrangements to support educators, learners and decision-makers and assist educational organisations.

What is the Open COVID Pledge for Education?

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, millions of learners and educational institutions globally have had to place greater reliance on digital communication and media in teaching and learning. The long-term effects of such shifts have yet to be seen, but there is no doubt that those most negatively affected will be learners in under-resourced environments, where access to high-quality educational resources, ICT, and learner support is often limited.

Developed by the Open COVID Coalition and hosted by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), the Open COVID Pledge for Education responds to this context by drawing from principles highlighted in the UNESCO Recommendation on OER (2019) and building on the Open Education values outlined in the Cape Town Declaration. It has been signed by representatives of many global Open Education Open Education bodies and professional organisations, universities, and individual researchers.

The Pledge asks that signatories commit to sharing Open Educational Resources (OER) for educators to support teaching and learning over the course of the pandemic. It also asks that signatories share practice and policy lessons, such as how individuals or organisations are responding to COVID-19 and what they are learning. In addition, the Pledge encourages signatories to share the following:

Open data, e.g. from surveys;
Open access research;
Unpublished research, organisational research, action research; and
Open source applications to support open education.

What has happened since the Pledge was launched?

Since its launch, two planning meetings were held online in September and October. These meetings produced an email discussion list, the Twitter account and hashtag, and an informative slide deck and logo. The team also conducted an open webinar in collaboration with the Open Education Special Interest Group to promote the Pledge.

UK-based members of the Open COVID Pledge for Education are currently developing two organisational case studies – one on University College London and the other on the University of Edinburgh – to showcase how they have released OER for educators as well as policy and research purposes under the Pledge. A keynote panel will be held on 15 December 2020 as part of the ALT winter conference, where the two case studies will be launched.

To date, there are 60 organisational signatories and 121 individual signatories and the project team welcomes new signatories.

How can I get involved?

The Open COVID Pledge ultimately aims to build a fairer and more resilient education system. It has been promoted using the @Covid_education Twitter account and #OpenCovid4Ed hashtag; through blog posts on the ALT blog; and on a public email list. You can become involved in the Pledge in various ways:

Sign the pledge as an individual or organisation
Upload your logo
Blog about it, and share using #OpenCovid4Ed
Join the discussion list by emailing OPEN-COVID-ED@jiscmail.ac.uk
Spread the word with the Pledge’s Twitter handle and hashtag
Download the logo here to add to your own websites

For more articles by OER Africa, click on the links below.

How can governments and institutions operationalize the OER Recommendation?

November, 17, 2020

The Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) (40 C/32) was adopted at the 40th UNESCO General Conference in Paris on 25th November 2019 as the culmination of a long process of UNESCO engagement with the concept of OER. Now that it is adopted and a UNESCO Dynamic Coalition has been discussing the next steps (download workshop report here), this raises the practical question of what steps government and educational institutions at all levels can do to help to operationalize the OER Recommendation.

Image courtesy of opensource.com, Flickr

The Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) (40 C/32) was adopted at the 40^th UNESCO General Conference in Paris on 25^th November, 2019 as the culmination of a long process of UNESCO engagement with the concept of OER. Now that it is adopted and a UNESCO Dynamic Coalition has been discussing the next steps (download workshop report here), this raises the practical question of what steps government and educational institutions at all levels can do to operationalize the OER Recommendation.

To help to unpack the possibilities, OER Africa has been facilitating a process to support UNESCO and its stakeholders to consider what actions they might take in each of the four key areas of the Recommendation:

Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER;
Developing supportive policy;
Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER; and
Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER.

This work is being done with support and input from a Network of Open Organizations established by Open Education Global. Discussions are in very early phases but has so far led to development of a very detailed Matrix of possible actions to operationalize the OER Recommendation. The draft Matrix considers in detail all the Actions identified for each Area of Action in the OER Recommendation and lists possible initiatives that governments and institutions might take (analysed separately for each stakeholder group). It is a work in progress. A Working Draft of the OER Recommendation Actions Matrix can be downloaded as a PDF file here.

As OER Africa is committed to ensuring that the impact of the OER Recommendation is maximized for African governments, networks, institutions, and other stakeholders, we encourage you to review the draft Matrix and add your ideas and comments (editable version can be found here).

Additional suggestions of how African governments and institutions can be supported in adopting the Recommendations are most welcome. Please add these to the editable version.

Your feedback and suggestions will make the draft Matrix much stronger and useful to others. We anticipate that it might be used, amongst other purposes, to:

Develop a catalogue of freely available online resources for each Area of Action that governments, networks, institutions, and other stakeholders can draw on for support.
Create communications and advocacy resources, drilling into detail on specific aspects of the OER Recommendation to provide ideas on possible activities.
Repackage content for governments and other audiences to explore possible actions and policy reforms that governments might consider when implementing the OER Recommendation.

We hope the draft Matrix is already a useful contribution to implementing the OER Recommendation. We will keep the document open for editing until 30^th November, 2020.

For more articles in this series, click on the links below.

How can you use MOOCs in your teaching?

October, 21, 2020

A few years ago, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were touted as “the next big thing”. They have developed since then and are part of the current education landscape. Who are they aimed at? Can university faculty members take an existing MOOC and use it in their own courses? How open are MOOCs? Where can you find them?

Image courtesy of Mathieu Plourde, Wikimedia Commons

What are MOOCs?

A MOOC is a course (teaching a specific subject or topic) available online via the Internet, aimed at unlimited participation (hence massive) and open in so far as anyone can enrol (no formal admission process and normally no charge). They are produced by universities, companies (Microsoft, Linux, Canvas, Blackboard) and non-profit initiatives (edX), and are aimed at anyone who wishes to learn about the subjects covered. Most MOOCs are distributed via course providers such as Coursera and Udacity. The extent to which they are considered ‘open’ has changed over time, but also depends on how they are presented online. When they first emerged, MOOCs were typically open in two ways: in enrolment and the fact that their constituent materials were openly licensed. By about 2012, many MOOCs no longer had openly licensed materials available, so their open-ness had diminished (Vollmer, 2012). As most MOOCs available now are not openly licensed, you cannot simply take one (or part of it) and use it in your own course. We suggest other ways in which you might use MOOCs below.

In a previous post, we discussed OpenCourseWare (OCW) as a ‘subset’ of Open Educational Resources (OER). We contrasted OCW with MOOCs, and here we provide a table showing the differences between these two educational tools:

Adapted from Martinez, 2014

A common criticism of MOOCs is their very low completion rate: often as low as 5 to 15%. Critics suggest that such a low rate indicates that learning from MOOCs is usually minimal. However, some specialists are beginning to refer to MOOCs as one of many forms of digital content, proposing that they should be compared with podcasts or educational news sites on the Internet instead of facilitated educational experiences similar to university courses (Ahearn, 2018). Other educationists note that MOOCs could help to widen global access to higher education, but they need careful research to assess the learning experiences that MOOCs can offer (Laurillard & Kennedy, 2017).

How can academic staff best use MOOCs?

Despite being not fully open, university academics can still make use of MOOCs as part of an interactive mix of educational experiences. They can be useful in various ways:

As professional development for you: you might find that enrolling on a MOOC provides you with recent developments in your own field, which you can later incorporate into your courses.
As a refresher for your own courses: High quality MOOCs often include recent research or cover topics in innovative ways. By enrolling on a MOOC, you can rethink your own courses, making them more relevant and enriching for your students.
As a supplement to student learning: You can review MOOCs in your subject areas, and encourage your students to enrol, even if it’s only for a section of the course. You can get them to engage fully and critique the MOOC as part of the learning experience.

The open access article Twelve tips for integrating massive open online course content into classroom teaching suggests various innovative ways in which you might incorporate MOOCs into your teaching.

Where can you find MOOCs?

MOOCs in English are produced mostly by universities in the US, Europe, and Australia. They can be found on some university websites, but the better place to search is through course providers, which collaborate with universities and other organisations. These providers are now marketing themselves as online learning platforms, and some of them charge for the courses – this is another way in which the open-ness of MOOCs has changed. Examples of such platforms are Coursera, edX, and Udacity. If you want to find a MOOC relevant to one of your own courses, the best way is to use a browser and enter “MOOCs in <subject>”. You can then choose from your search results to examine them further.

Relatively few universities in Africa run MOOCs. Exceptions to this include the University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand, and the African Leadership Institution. More institutions are likely to run courses as MOOCs or using online learning platforms in the future. The OER Africa website hosts some MOOC-related resources, such as:

In summary, MOOCs appear to have become less open since their original inception before 2012. They can be used by academics in higher education as a form of professional development, and as a supplement to the courses they offer. MOOCs can also assist students wishing to access courses within higher education that otherwise might not be available to them.

References

Ahearn, A. (2018). Stop Asking About Completion Rates: Better Questions to Ask About MOOCs in 2019. Available online at https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-11-28-stop-asking-about-completion-rates-better-questions-to-ask-about-moocs-in-2019

de Jong, P., Pickering, J., Hendriks, R., Swinnerton, B., Goshtasbpour, F. & Reinders, M. (2020) Twelve tips for integrating massive open online course content into classroom teaching, Medical Teacher, 42:4, 393-397, DOI: 10.1080/0142159X.2019.1571569 (Open Access)

Laurillard, D., & Kennedy, E. (2017). The potential of MOOCs for learning at scale in the Global South. Centre for Global Higher Education, working paper series, Lancaster, UK, 42.

Martinez, S. (2014). OCW (OpenCourseWare) and MOOC (Open Course Where?). In Proceedings of OpenCourseWare Consortium Global 2014: Open Education for a Multicultural World.

Vollmer, T. (2012). Keeping MOOCs Open. Available online at https://creativecommons.org/2012/11/01/keeping-moocs-open/

For more articles in this series, click on the links below.

Online assessment: How do we know if students are learning successfully?

September, 16, 2020

You have been teaching, but what have you been assessing? Can assessment also be about teaching? How do you know students have learned? It is easy to forget that instead of being separate processes, teaching and assessment have a close relationship

Image courtesy of CC-0 Source: pxhere.com

You have been teaching, but what have you been assessing? Can assessment also be about teaching? How do you know students have learned?

It is easy to forget that instead of being separate processes, teaching and assessment have a close relationship – they complement one another and comprise a holistic educational process. COVID-19 has prompted an increase in online interactions with our students. As a result, many educators have had to adjust their teaching and assessment strategies. In this article, we explore online activity-based assessment to support teaching and learning.

Assessment and Feedback

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of distance learning and emergency remote teaching during COVID-19 has been the aspect of assessment. In addition to putting your course materials online, you may have been anxious to confirm what students know, and demonstrate whether or not they have met curriculum outcomes. In other words your focus may have been on assessment of learning rather than assessment for learning. We have heard of cases, for example, where students have been allowed back onto campus to do exams, with little or no support for learning in preparation for those exams. It is certainly not fair, reliable, or valid assessment practice to expect students to come and write an exam when they have not had the opportunity and support to work through the activities and content leading up to that exam. Some institutions have managed to implement some form of online learning. Often, however, this has taken the form of asking students to read a textbook and submit an assignment. This is not necessarily very helpful for students struggling in this environment.

If learning is reduced and less meaningful, what are you assessing?

Stop worrying about testing and start thinking about learning

In a post on Inside Higher Ed, in response to the pandemic, Jody Greene writes:

'By attempting to replicate in-person assessments in online settings, we fail to recognize that a change of medium may require a change of design. Especially if your instruction is interrupted close to the time of finals … don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that you can or should just “put the final exam online.” Sorting students and rigorously determining what deserves an A-minus as opposed to a B-plus may not be the most urgent business in the face of a global pandemic. … Think outside the parameters of your original assessments and ask the question, what can we do here that keeps learning happening? What if our first priority in an emergency is not completing testing but giving an opportunity for students to integrate and demonstrate their learning? ... Consult your campus disability resource center to make sure you maintain accessibility and equity.'

Challenge yourself to think about assessment differently. But how do you do that? There are two important considerations.

Learning is more important than assessing in this context.
Students need support and feedback

Support Learning

Give students something meaningful to do, preferably supported by communication with their peers and yourself as educator. Primarily the challenge is to find ways of introducing activities into the design of your materials. Rather than just reading text books, lecture notes, and PowerPoint presentations, ask students to critically engage with a reading, analyse case studies, create diagrams, tables or summaries, or conduct observations and interviews.

Students can also support each other. Encourage them to set up their own study groups, if necessary via WhatsApp or email. Build some kind of collaboration into the activities you set, creating and sharing the products of their studies, reflecting together and giving each other feedback.

Be there for students. Write your voice into the materials and engage in a written conversation with them. Ask questions and challenge students to respond in a variety of ways. Try to set times when students can contact you to ask questions and feel your presence, and clarify how they should do so. If you ask them to send you WhatsApp messages, make sure the messages come through, if you give them the option to email make sure you respond to the emails within the agreed turnaround time. It is frustrating for students to send messages or emails to which they never get responses.

Understand the value of formative assessment

Usually the focus is on summative assessment. This often takes the form of an assignment or a written exam after students have completed a section of work. Traditional summative assignments may be more challenging for online students, particularly. Online learning and assessment require more self-direction and self-motivation. Many students are still developing skills like time management. Most institutions have a Learning Management System (LMS), but, if your students only have intermittent access to the internet, they will not necessarily be able to do assessments online on your institution’s LMS.

Formative assessment is an activity, or set of activities, designed to support and enhance learning. It requires ongoing feedback to allow students to see their mistakes and fix them with guidance. This supports cognitive development. Once you have integrated activities into students’ learning, you have already begun to shift the focus to more formative kinds of assessment. An activity such as a quiz can be designed in a way that students engage with a base reading, do the quiz alone, and then compare their thinking with the feedback you provide. Provide written commentary on the activities against which students can check their own understanding. This can be followed up with a conversation between students about their responses. In this way, there is individual study, self-assessment, peer collaboration and formative assessment all built into one activity. This is learning and assessment.

As an exercise for yourself, consider each of the following statements. Are they true or false, in your view?

Note: Scroll down within the block below to complete all eight questions

All these strategies encourage communication, negotiation, and collaboration. Students use feedback they receive on their formative assessments to understand how well they have learned and where they need to focus to prepare for summative assessments. They are also motivated to continue engaging with the course.

Consider integrated summative assessment

In a context where students are not face to face with you or each other, and do not have a reliable connection to the internet, traditional summative assessments can be more challenging.

Summative assessment does not have to be an exam. The formative assessment activities that you have built into your design can form an important part of an integrated summative assessment strategy. Rather than a single exam, consider an assessment strategy that consists of four tasks that build up to a final product, for example, each building on the previous one, improving each time based on the feedback you have provided in between.

This site offers some ideas for thinking about alternative assessment strategies that might suit your context.

Use feedback to build communication and collaboration into assessment

Feedback is probably the most important aspect of assessment in any teaching and learning situation. Feedback can help a student to feel more ‘present’ in a course, and to feel the presence of others more strongly.

Provide feedback that is useful, timely and helps a student to reflect and assess themselves, and is useful for improvement. Encourage students to reflect on each others’ work by inviting comment or asking a question in a chat forum or WhatsApp group, or by sharing their work and requesting an evaluation against agreed criteria. The University of British Columbia in Canada has developed a series of workshops for online teaching. They talk about what makes feedback effective and describe ideas for communicating feedback online. For a useful article giving ideas about the nature and extent of constructive feedback, go to the OER Africa website.

Additional Resources

For alternative assessment ideas in higher education:

Access more of our recent content below:

UNESCO’s OER Recommendation Dynamic Coalition Consultations: The way forward

August, 26, 2020

Image courtesy of Markus Büsges Wikimedia Deutschland.

UNESCO recently hosted a set of worldwide public consultations from 22-24 July 2020, the aim being to expand and consolidate commitments to actions and strategies as well as reinforce international cooperation among all stakeholders. As we noted in a recent blog post, OER Africa provided support to UNESCO Dynamic Coalition Working Group Consultation on the OER Recommendation. We are pleased to report that the final report from those consultation sessions is now available for download here. That report also summarizes data collected through the online surveys that led up to the consultation sessions.

The purpose of the three-day consultation process was to:

Further clarify the priority areas of action per Working Group
Identify activities and issues related to the establishment of an electronic tool for information sharing and collaboration on the activities of participating organizations.

The consultations provided a platform for rich conversation between a diverse group of participants. Thanks to the efforts of the organizers, facilitators and participants, valuable insights were collected across all four thematic Working Groups, as well as for the themes of the transversal Working Groups, as illustrated below.

While highlighting pertinent challenges and lessons, the discussions also provided insight into the countless OER-related activities occurring around the world. This speaks to the multifaceted network of individuals, Member States, organizations, institutions, and other stakeholders who can draw from one another in advancing the goals of the UNESCO OER Recommendation.

Notwithstanding challenges in connecting across time zones, the consultations illustrated that there is a strong network of people and organizations keen to support UNESCO in ensuring success in adoption of the OER Recommendation by Member States. Likewise, consultations yielded information on many resources and portals available online that can be harnessed by both Member States and institutions seeking to give practical expression to the OER Recommendation. It was heartening to see how much the OER Community has grown and how this has translated into growing access to openly accessibly resources. A major challenge here, though, remains a need to have materials available in a variety of languages other than English, although there are encouraging signs of diversification over time.

The highest priority moving forward will be to make strong connections with Member States to support their efforts to operationalize the OER Recommendation at national level. Across all Working Group areas and particularly in the Dynamic Coalition Communication Strategy, it will be important to focus on reaching out to and building working relationships with OER champions in government.

Linked to the above, effective communication will be critical to taking forward the OER Recommendation and the work of the Dynamic Coalition. Consequently, the Dynamic Coalition is considering how to develop an electronic tool which will be a means:

For the community to communicate with one another within and across projects;
To provide public information on the Coalition’s activities; and
For stakeholders to collaborate on common projects and activities.

At OER Africa, we are proud to be supporting the work of UNESCO’s Dynamic Coalition and excited to see the process moving forward. We look forward to more widespread operationalization of the OER Recommendation at national and institutional levels over the coming years as these efforts start to bear fruit.

Access more of our recent content below:

The Open COVID Pledge for Education

August, 12, 2020

The Open COVID Pledge was launched on 12 August 2020. Within the context of COVID-19, the Pledge encourages individuals and organizations to make their intellectual property available to support educators, students and decision-makers; assist educational organizations; and build a fairer and more resilient education system.

The Open COVID Pledge was launched on 12 August 2020. Within the context of COVID-19, the Pledge encourages individuals and organizations to make their intellectual property available to:

support educators, students and decision-makers;
assist educational organizations; and
build a fairer and more resilient education system.

Developed by the Open COVID Coalition with the support of the Association for Learning Technology, the Pledge has been signed by representatives of many global open education initiatives. OER Africa is proud to be a founding signatory of this Pledge.

Details about the Pledge can be found below.

As we begin to imagine - and to shape - the ‘new normal’ in education, we need every opportunity to learn from each other.

Today, with the support of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), we are proud to launch the Open COVID Pledge for Education, covering all forms of research, data and know-how that can support the COVID-19 response in education around the world.

Since the start of the pandemic, researchers in medicine and healthcare have openly released their findings to build a shared knowledge base and save lives. Thousands have signed up to the Open COVID Pledge, hosted by Creative Commons: millions of valuable patents and datasets have been put into the public domain. An equivalent pledge for research and know-how in education could have a similar impact - and researchers in digital, open and online education could lead the way.

During lockdown, Open Education Resources (OER) have been critical for keeping students in touch with their learning. There are already several global initiatives to boost OER access and development, like the Open Door initiative hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning, and the OER Dynamic Coalition, launched by UNESCO in March.

But we need more than shared content: we also need credible evidence on which to base day-to-day decisions in practice and policy. We need urgent research into the experiences of teachers and learners. We need shared know-how, especially from experienced online and distance educators and learning technology specialists. (This summer has seen a generous flowering of blog posts, webinars, infographics and how-to courses – but more will be needed as the ‘new normal’ takes root.)

Education globally faces many challenges, not only for the people who work and learn in the sector but for whole organisations and modes of learning. Societies depend on education to improve lives, widen economic participation, and support civic life. Education will be critical to the long-term response to the pandemic crisis.

A recent UNESCO report, Education in a post-COVID world, compared public education explicitly with public health in this respect: “the focus must be on cooperation not competition. We are safe when everybody is safe; we flourish when everybody flourishes”.

The Open COVID Pledge for Education commits people and organisations to sharing what they know, to support the world-wide educational response. Not all research will be shareable as open data. But whether fully open, redacted, anonymised, synthesised or combined with other datasets, data should be shared whenever possible. Not all evidence will look like formal research. But outcomes should be available to everyone who can use them – educators and students around the world, trade unions and stakeholder bodies, funders and policy makers. This is true of organisational research and evidence from practice as well as research that is funded and published more formally.

The Pledge has been signed by representatives of many global open education initiatives. Thanks to them, much of the hard work of building open principles and processes has been done. But the hard work of understanding education in a time of pandemic is still ahead.

Right now, we have a chance to make ‘open’ the default for that work – to make this moment an ‘open’ pivot rather than just an ‘online’ one. Please sign the Pledge here, and persuade other people in your organisation to do the same. With a shared commitment to open knowledge, we can build back education to be more sustainable, more accessible, and fairer for all.

Helen Beetham and Maren Deepwell

Open Covid Coalition

Taking forward the work of UNESCO’s OER Recommendation through the Dynamic Coalition

July, 29, 2020

During the week of 20th July, 2020, OER Africa was privileged to be able to participate in, and provide administrative support to, the work of UNESCO’s Dynamic Coalition as its Working Groups convened in virtual consultations to begin preparing plans to support governments around the world in operationalizing the OER Recommendation.

During the week of 20^th July, 2020, OER Africa was privileged to be able to participate in, and provide administrative support to, the work of UNESCO’s Dynamic Coalition as its Working Groups convened in virtual consultations to begin preparing plans to support governments around the world in operationalizing the OER Recommendation. This article provides an update on the latest activities of the Dynamic Coalition and offers links to the various resources that are being shared.

The Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) (40 C/32) was adopted at the 40^th UNESCO General Conference in Paris on 25^th November 2019 as the culmination of a long process of UNESCO engagement with the concept of OER. Following adoption of the OER Recommendation, UNESCO launched the OER Dynamic Coalition on 2 March 2020 to support its widespread adoption. OER Africa has been actively involved in all the processes that led to adoption of the OER Recommendation and continues to support UNESCO in this important work through its engagement in the activities of the Dynamic Coalition. This includes, amongst other activities, chairing the Working Group on Communications as the Dynamic Coalition consults stakeholders to prepare implementation plans.

The multi-stakeholder Coalition aims to expand and consolidate commitments to actions and strategies, as well as reinforce international cooperation among all stakeholders in the four areas of the Recommendation:

Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER;
Developing supportive policy;
Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER; and
Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER.

The Coalition’s webpage is accessible here and the final report is available here.

UNESCO hosted a set of worldwide public consultations from 22-24 July 2020, the aim being to expand and consolidate commitments to actions and strategies as well as reinforce international cooperation among all stakeholders in these four areas. Stakeholders come from all regions of the world and include representatives from government, inter-governmental organizations, NGOs, educational institutions, associations and networks, and research agencies, amongst others. Central to the organization of the event were efforts for geographic balance, gender balance and a multisectoral approach, contributing to a diverse set of inputs and conversations. The consultations aimed to follow-up on an online survey (distributed by UNESCO to participants in the OER Recommendation activities and administered from 10 to 20 July) that collected information on priority areas of action. As such, the objectives were to:

Further clarify the priority areas of action per Working Group; and
Identify activities and issues related to the establishment of an electronic tool for information sharing and collaboration on the activities of participating organizations.

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, all consultations took place online. While this introduced certain challenges, it also allowed more widespread participation from a very diverse group of stakeholders, including many people who likely would not have been able to engage had the sessions been face to face at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The online meeting formats, allowing simultaneous audio and text-based contributions generated very rich feedback. OER Africa, which is leading the Working Group on Communications for the OER Dynamic Coalition and part of the Advisory Group for the OER Coalition, served as the Rapporteur for Online Consultation. Furthermore, OER Africa has made recordings of all the consultative sessions, as well as the presentations made throughout, accessible on our website here.

The report from these consultations is expected to be completed during August as part of the following programme of activities:

In follow-up articles, we will present the final report when it becomes publicly available and provide further updates on the work of the Dynamic Coalition. We will also explore in more detail some of the suggested actions and associated challenges that may be experienced as UNESCO and its partners (including OER Africa) seek to give practical expression to the goals of the OER Recommendation and thereby ensure that OER practices are adopted on scale in ways that truly help to improving the educational experience for students at all levels around the world.

For more articles in this series, click on the links below.

Saide and OER Africa mourn Prof Mbwette former VC Open University of Tanzania

July, 24, 2020

Saide and OER Africa would like to extend their deepest condolences to Professor Tolly Mbwette’s family and friends. Professor Mbwette was the former Vice Chancellor of the Open University of Tanzania.

Saide and OER Africa would like to extend their deepest condolences to Professor Tolly Mbwette’s family and friends.

Professor Mbwette was the former Vice Chancellor of the Open University of Tanzania.

We are particularly grateful for Prof Mbwette’s contribution to Saide’s OER Africa initiative to promote use of OER in African universities. He participated actively in the inception gathering for OER Africa in 2008 and in subsequent reviews and strategic planning meetings. He was always available to provide support and advice to the initiative, as well as being a generous and convivial dinner companion.

In one phase of the initiative, he facilitated the commitment of the Open University of Tanzania’s to developing “Academic Digital Fluency” courses as open educational resources. These are available here.

Prof Mbwete was passionate and a great proponent for open learning and distance education in Africa. He firmly believed that distance universities have to play a very active role in expanding access to higher education in Africa. He served in a number of institutions and capacities at continental level to advance his belief and conviction on distance education.

He served as Vice Chairperson of the Executive Board of the African Council for Distance Education (ACDE) between July 2008 and July 2011 as well as one of the two Vice Chairpersons of the IUCEA Governing Board from July 2008 to June 2010.

From September 2009, Prof Mbwette was an Honorary Advisor to the Commonwealth of Learning (COL). In July 2011, he was elected as the President of ACDE for a period of three (3) years

The late Prof Mbwette will be sorely missed by the open and distance education community in African for his passion and commitment. His brilliance, humility and quest to achieve universal education transformed distance and open education. He left a legacy of achieving universal access to high quality higher education in Africa.

How can OpenCourseWare help you to improve your courses?

July, 16, 2020

Do you teach a course which you’d like to improve? Maybe you have run it a few times and now need to refresh and update it. Or maybe you are starting a new course on a topic that you are less familiar with, and would like a template to work with? OpenCourseWare (OCW) may provide the support you need.

Image source: Nick Morrison, Unsplash

What is OpenCourseWare?

OpenCourseWare are courses created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects have become a worldwide means of delivering educational content (Wikipedia). According to Open Education Global (formerly the Open Education Consortium), OpenCourseWare is:

A free and open digital publication of high-quality educational materials, organized as courses.
Available for use and adaptation under an open licence, such as certain Creative Commons licences.
Not normally certified.

It is important to understand that OpenCourseWare is a ‘subset’ of Open Educational Resources (OER).

Source: UCI Open

OER Africa will cover MOOCs in an upcoming article.

Advantages and Disadvantages of using OCW

The main advantage of OCW for academics who are developing courses is the open licence, which enables adaptation and reuse, but other benefits include:

OCW provides complete modules or courses, which can be very helpful if you are starting a course from scratch, providing you a template from which to work.
OCW development in an institution can encourage academics to foster and use OER if they have not previously had experience in doing so.
Course developers can share ideas and curricula openly, examine and adopt courses from other institutions, and potentially put their own courses online.
By sharing courses openly, institutions can attract new students to enrol and be certified for a formal qualification.

Some disadvantages:

In adopting someone else’s course, you are taking on their pedagogy and course structure, which may not suit your own style. For example, many OCW consist mainly of ‘talking heads’ and presentation slides, which can result in the student being a passive rather than active agent. Modern teaching theory stresses the need for active student engagement to enable them to construct their own knowledge rather than learn a series of facts. A further disadvantage is that many OCW are produced in developed country settings, and cannot easily be transferred to other contexts without considerable adaptation. On the other hand, of course, the open licence allows just this adaptation (though sometimes trying to adapt an existing course can end up taking longer than developing it from scratch if the differences between what is there and what you need is too great).

Where can I find OCW?

OCW available on the Internet can be used in various ways, both by academics in Higher Education Institutions and by other educators. Quality courses from providers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Open University (UK) or the University of Michigan can be accessed, and (if they are openly licenced) provide an impetus for lecturers to revise them into contextualised programmes for a developing country context. Academics can encourage their students to work through particular OCW to supplement their own learning. Teachers and other professionals can undertake their own development by working through courses relevant to their practice.

OER Africa has various OCW offerings available:

The Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) Mathematics to assist teachers in their understanding upper primary and middle school maths as well as teaching issues relating to mathematical content: https://www.oerafrica.org/acemaths
The ACE School Leadership and Management is aimed at empowering school leaders to lead and manage schools effectively: https://www.oerafrica.org/advanced-certificate-education
The Household Food Security Programme aims to train household food security facilitators to work as change agents in the areas of agriculture, food and nutrition, focusing on households within communities.: https://www.oerafrica.org/household-food-security-programme
The Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL) assists university partners across East Africa to develop courses that can be offered by participant universities through blended learning: https://www.oerafrica.org/partnership-enhanced-and-blended-learning-pebl
The Agshare II project, a collaboration between three HEIs in Ethiopia and Uganda on agricultural issues, lists a number of courseware documents under the list of Resources, while Communication Skills courseware developed by the University of Malawi is available at the IADP-SADC Digital Resources Project.

In summary, OCW can assist academics in higher education to improve their own offerings, and encourage them to share their own courses for the benefit of others. OCW can also assist students wishing to access courses within higher education that otherwise might not be available to them. However, as with all OER, you are ultimately responsible for assessing their utility by comparing what you find with your own understanding of what is needed to run your courses successfully.

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For more articles in this series, click on the links below.

Evaluating Open Content

July, 2, 2020

How can we be sure that OERs – open education resources – are of high quality? Many educators are concerned when it comes to open content as there appears to be no quality control. It also seems counter-intuitive that resources that are free can also be good.

Photo courtesy of Agence Olloweb, Unsplash

How can we be sure that open education resources (OERs) are of high quality? Many educators are concerned when it comes to open content as there appears to be no quality control. It also seems counter-intuitive that resources that are free can also be good. Many educators prefer the ‘safety net’ that commercially published textbooks offer, even though there is obviously no guarantee that, just because a book costs money, it will definitely be good. The logic is that textbooks have been through a rigorous review process. So why bother with OERs?

Of course, there is no international ‘review board’ vetting everything that is released with a Creative Commons licence (but nor is there any such mechanism for all-rights-reserved copyrighted materials). Regardless of licensing conditions, the onus is always ultimately on the planning to use the resource to assess its value; of course, experience helps to determine what that value might be. However, even for those relatively new to the process, quality assuring an OER is not difficult if guided by a suitable set of criteria.

OER Africa has recently released a learning pathway, or online tutorial, that includes a section on evaluating OER. You can access all of OER Africa’s learning pathways here. Our favourite set of OER quality criteria (see below) was created by British Columbia OER Librarians. The list has been released with an open (CC BY) licence and the six criteria are easy to apply. When you have sourced an OER and are wondering if it is good quality, use the checklist below to do a quick review.

Other resources about developing and using OER are available here, while you can find resources focusing on OER research in Africa here.

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For more articles in this series, click on the links below.

Adapting Open Content

June, 25, 2020

What exactly can you do with OER? In what ways are they different from other resources? The beauty of OER is that most of them can be adapted to better suit your teaching and learning environment. They can be revised. It is also possible to ‘stitch’ multiple OER into a new resource, like a patchwork quilt. We call this ‘remixing’ resources.

What exactly can you do with OER? In what ways are they different from other resources? The beauty of OER is that most of them can be adapted to better suit your teaching and learning environment. They can be revised: you can re-work the language to make them more accessible to students; cut out and replace images with your own; translate into different languages; and add additional content, questions and exercises.

It is also possible to ‘stitch’ multiple OER into a new resource, like a patchwork quilt. We call this ‘remixing’ resources.

However, there is some skill and know-how required to revise and re-mix well. OER Africa has prepared a concise learning pathway (LP) to help you acquire these practical skills quickly.

The Adapt Open Content learning pathway covers the following themes:

Access the learning pathway on the OER Africa website here.

This LP on Adapting Open Content follows a previous LP that focused on Finding Open Content so if you are not clear how to find a good open resource, make sure you look at that LP too. All the LPs can be accessed here.

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For more articles in this series, click on the links below.

Sharing Africa’s knowledge through open data

June, 18, 2020

This post is the third in a series on sharing African research outputs, using open licensing. This post concentrates on open data. Open data means that users can make free use of research data without requesting written permission and without copyright or patent violations.

Photo courtesy of Lukas Blazek, Unsplash

This post is the third in a series on sharing African research outputs, using open licensing. This post concentrates on open data.

Open data means that users can make free use of research data without requesting written permission and without copyright or patent violations. The data are typically stored in a non-proprietary format, which allows editing and analysis. Open data are usually given an ‘Attribution and Share-Alike for Data/Databases’ licence. Just as Creative Commons provides licences for educational and research resources, the Open Data Commons provides a set of legal tools for researchers to use when they make their data open to the public.

OER Africa’s open knowledge primer provides background on basic concepts and their pertinence to African researchers. OER Africa has also created a Learning Pathway – an online tutorial – on publishing using open access. Both resources describe the role of open data.

Why is open data assuming such significance today? Quick release of current and verifiable information on COVID-19 is one reason, of course. More generally, many open access journals, research organizations, and donors now require authors to make their data publicly available, usually by depositing them in an appropriate and approved data repository. The journal, Nature, maintains a list of data repositories that it has evaluated and approved.

The African Academy of Sciences (AAS) Open Data Guidelines also lists reputable repositories. The Open Knowledge Foundation gives three reasons why open government data is important: it promotes transparency; it can help create innovative business and services that deliver social and commercial value; and it can lead to participation and engagement on the part of the business sector and civil society.

The Open Data for Africa Portal was developed by the African Development Bank (AfDB) in response to the increasing demand for statistical data and indicators relating to Africa. The Portal provides multiple customized tools to gather indicators, analyze them, and export them into multiple formats. Users can search by region or country and by topic. There is also a COVID-19 Situation Room, with data collected by the World Health Organization.

The Open Data for Africa Portal relies on official statistics from governments and international agencies. Open Africa, on the other hand, is driven by volunteers and aims to be the largest independent repository of open data on the African continent. Although a civil society initiative, some government agencies contribute data, such as the South African National Department of Health. Data are available in PDF, CSV, and XLSX. Note that the dataset in the figure below was updated after its release.

Figure 1: South African health care system’s readiness for COVID-19

Open data does not mean sharing confidential information without protecting privacy. Some data qualify for release without any alterations; others must be altered to protect privacy before release. Still other data should not be released at all. The African Academy of Sciences, for example, gives detailed data guidelines for authors to follow, including a section on instances for which data deposit is not required.

Figure 2: When data deposit is not required for AAS Open Research

Making research and related data openly and widely accessible is an essential component of the Open Science movement, the benefits of which are becoming increasingly clear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Open science can also promote scientific collaboration between individuals and research centres.

Africa is becoming an integral part of Open Science. Following a three-year landscape study carried out by the South African Academy of Sciences and the Association of African Universities, the South African Research Foundation has been selected to host the African Open Science Platform (AOSP). The AOSP Strategic Plan delineates the challenges facing African science as research and communications methods worldwide undergo transformation. AOSP believes that the Platform can meet these challenges:

'The Platform’s mission is to put African scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary, data-intensive science as a fundamental resource for a modern society.'

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For more articles in this series, click on the links below.

Sharing Africa’s knowledge through openly licensed publishing

June, 11, 2020

Photo courtesy of Patrick Tomasso, Unsplash

This week, we focus on publishing in high-quality Open Access (OA) journals, with an emphasis on African journals. Open licensing allows for distribution of research literature, primarily online, without cost to the reader. Most OA materials use Creative Commons licences, which lay out the terms under which they can be used and distributed. Many OA journals employ a particular Creative Commons Licence, CC BY, which permits distribution, copying, and adaptation without requesting permission. Full attribution is always required, however.

Traditional journals typically meet their costs through subscriptions and selling advertising space, with some charging authors. OA journals usually charge authors a fee, called an Author Processing Charge (APC). The business model thus switches from one in which the subscriber or the advertiser pays the costs to one in which the author must pay. There is also a third mechanism called hybrid publishing. Funders increasingly require their grantees to publish using open access licences. If they publish with traditional journals, because of these donor requirements, these journals permit authors to select a Creative Commons licence for their accepted submissions, but charge a fee for doing so. In addition, some traditional publishers now produce fully OA journals. SHERPA/RoMEO, which is hosted by the University of Nottingham in the UK, maintains a database with information on publisher copyright restrictions and permissions. Note author rights and general conditions, see Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: SHERPA/RoMEO entry for African Journal of AIDS Research

There are two major platforms where you can search for journals. One is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); the other is through African Journals Online (AJOL).

AJOL hosts 526 journals, 264 of which are OA. On a national level, the University of Addis Ababa Libraries hosts Ethiopian Journals Online, a repository of 27 Ethiopian OA journals. The Academy of Science of South Africa also maintains Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA, which includes a selected collection of peer-reviewed OA South African scholarly journals and forms an integral part of the SciELO Brazil project.

Publishing research in African journals is significant for several reasons. It can give African scientists better global recognition. All too often African research is not accepted in traditional journals because it is not deemed a priority in Western journals or is considered too applied. African journals fill that gap; their peer review is comparable to their North American or European peers; and they are indexed by the same indexing and abstracting services. In addition, African OA journals charge lower Author Processing Charges or absorb costs in other ways. Moreover, the number of high-quality African OA journals continues to grow.

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how well African publishers can speedily disseminate research particularly pertinent to Africa. As an example, the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), which produces AAS Open Research, has a webpage on research and funding opportunities specific to Africa. It also maintains a COVID-19 collection with articles that have been peer reviewed and those that are awaiting peer review. This is an important mechanism to ensure that time-sensitive research becomes immediately available.

Equally timely, the Pan-African Medical Journal has published a special issue on COVID-19 in Africa. The research articles, essays, and commentaries in this issue are specifically relevant to the continent, for example, on the coronavirus in Nigeria, Morocco, conflict-affected areas of Cameroon, and migrant communities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) has started to publish weekly COVID-19 situation reports written by researchers associated with APHRC. They cover topics not usually included in traditional publications, for example supporting communities living in urban informal settlements to protect themselves from COVID-19. Although APHRC’s core business is to conceptualize, implement, and publish long-term evidence-based research, the Centre believes that information on the coronavirus pandemic is so urgent that it decided to publish these weekly briefs focusing on Africa.

Resources on Open Access

OER Africa’s open knowledge primer provides background on basic concepts and their pertinence to African researchers. OER Africa has also created a Learning Pathway (LP) on publishing using open access, which defines terms and will help you acquire the skills necessary to publish or advise on publishing research using OA. Both the primer and the LP will enable you to understand how to identify and select peer-reviewed OA journals that meet international standards. Both provide information on how to evaluate open access journals, an important consideration because some OA publishers use deceptive practices.

Our upcoming post on 25 June 2020 will address the significance of open data as a part of OA publishing.

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Click on the links below to access other articles in this series.

Podcast: OER and their relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic

June, 5, 2020

This week Mohini Baijnath speaks with Neil Butcher, OER Strategist at OER Africa, about OERs and their relevance in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Neil speaks about the challenges that COVID-19 poses to education systems, how OER can be used to support educators and students amidst institutional closures, and what role governments can play in promoting the use of OER.

Listen to the podcast below.

Mohini · OER Africa Podcast – Neil Butcher and Mohini Baijnath

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Click on the links below to access other articles in this series.

Sharing Africa’s knowledge through open African research repositories

May, 29, 2020

Open licensing is used for many different kinds of resources – open educational resources (OER), open access research publishing, open data, and more broadly open science. This post discusses developments in access to African research information through repositories that use open licensing.

OER Africa’s open knowledge primer provides a background on basic concepts and their pertinence to African researchers. OER Africa has also created a Learning Pathway on publishing using open access, which defines terms and will help you acquire the skills necessary to publish or advise on publishing research using Open Access (OA).

Like their global counterparts, many African research institutions and universities are increasingly using open licensing to make their research available and visible globally. The number of open access repositories is growing so quickly that it is difficult to keep track of them. The UK International African Institute (IAI) maintains a list that is frequently updated. IAI, in collaboration with AfricarXiv, has created an interactive map of African digital research literature repositories. You can also search on Google or the search engine of your choice by entering the name of an institution or country and repository (though this would require you to know better what you are looking for).

University open access repositories collect student theses and dissertations, case studies, conference papers, and sometimes journal articles. There are also continent-wide repositories. Three are discussed below. One focuses on university research output; one is a pre-print service; and one is discipline specific.

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Database of African Theses and Dissertations

The Association of African Universities maintains the Database of African Theses and Dissertations, including Research (DATAD-R). At this writing, universities in six countries contribute to DATAD-R. There are over 29,000 theses and dissertations and 4,700 research articles.

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AfricArXiv African Preprint Service

The AfricArXiv African Preprint Service is a part of the worldwide ArXiv movement in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. ArXiv has become an important vehicle to speedily pre-publish scientific research and data on the coronavirus. The platform is maintained by Cornell University. Although contributions are not peer reviewed, ArXiv relies on a strong team of scientists as moderators and advisors.

Launched in 2018, AfricArXiv is an initiative of the Project for Open Science. This service allows African scientists to mount preprints of their research for review and discussion by peers in the international scholarly community before publication in a scholarly journal. AfricArXiv, which does not peer review submissions, sees itself as a way for African scientists to circulate their research quickly and freely in order to communicate with others in their field. It does not replace publication in a peer-reviewed journal. AfricArXiv is collaborating with Science Open to collect COVID-19 research in and about Africa.

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Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM)

RUFORUM, is a continent-wide consortium in 126 African universities and 38 countries. It operates an open access knowledge repository in the broad-based agricultural sciences, with copies of theses and dissertations, journal articles, case studies, briefing papers, policy briefs, posters, presentations, and conference papers from RUFORUM member universities and RUFORUM staff.

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Click on the links below to access other articles in this series.

Emergency Remote Teaching Webinar Series – All resources available

May, 18, 2020

As the spread of COVID-19 continues around the world, face-to-face lectures have ceased in many countries and academics are trying to find practical ways of delivering curricula remotely. In response to this, the Association of African Universities (AAU) and OER Africa presented a series of four webinars on Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) strategies. In contrast to online learning, which is an experience that is planned from the beginning to be delivered online, ERT refers to ‘a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances.’^[1]

The webinars were intended to assist academics to implement ERT effectively. They covered a broad range of topics, including how to teach remotely; what content to cover; how to ensure that students are learning effectively; and how to communicate with students. We targeted academics with limited knowledge of online learning, aiming to provide a simple and practical guide to help them implement effective ERT for their students.

Recordings of all four webinars, along with their downloadable resources, are accessible here. To access information for individual webinars, click on the links below.

Webinar 1: Teaching effectively during the campus closure – Tips and tricks
Webinar 2: What to teach during campus closure
Webinar 3: How to know if learning is happening during campus closure
Webinar 4: Communicate effectively during campus closure

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To further support educators and students, OER Africa is also publishing regular communications on Open Educational Resources (OER) and their relevance within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Click on the links below to access articles in this series.
• OER Africa COVID-19 Statement (3 April, 2020)
• Understanding OER in a Context that Necessitates Remote Learning (9 April 2020)
• Showcasing OER Platforms: OER Africa (15 April, 2020)
• Online (and offline) reading resources for children (23 April, 2020)
• How to Find Open Content (30 April, 2020)
• OER Repositories in Africa (8 May, 2020)

For more, sign up to the newsletter here.

OER courseware is also available on the website. Follow us on social media for links to our news and events.

[1] Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T. and Bond, A. (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. Educause Review. Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning

OER Repositories in Africa

May, 8, 2020

Photo courtesy of Trust Katsande, Unsplash

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, most African higher education institutions have halted face-to-face classes. But learning can continue, so OER Africa would like to share resources to help you to keep the doors of learning open. In contexts with limited educational means, Open Educational Resources (OER) can contribute to the accessibility of education and can encourage a culture of flexible and collaborative learning, particularly if the learning materials are reused, customized, and shared.

A useful way of accessing such resources is via online knowledge repositories. A knowledge repository is an online database that systematically captures, organizes, and categorizes knowledge-based information. A few examples of OER repositories for the African context are:

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) OER – KNUST OER seeks to promote open learning through an open exploration that enables faculty, students, and the global academic community to access open licensed educational resources to maximize the impact and reach of their scholarly work through open sharing.

FundaOER, an initiative of VVOB, provides a repository of OERs to advance teaching and learning in Initial Teacher Education and Continuing Professional Development in South Africa. Articles, factsheets, videos, and other types of materials, covering different themes and phases, are freely and openly available on the platform.

The African Veterinary Information Portal (AfriVIP) contains materials pertaining to veterinary science. All its course materials, videos, animations, and images carry an open licence.

OpenUCT is the open access institutional repository of the University of Cape Town (UCT). It makes available and digitally preserves the scholarly outputs produced at UCT, including theses and dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, technical and research reports, and OER. These resources are organized into collections that are mapped against the university's organizational structure.

University World News recently published a list of South African OER, available here

For higher education courseware, the following resources are useful:

UNESCO and the Dynamic Coalition for OER

May, 7, 2020

Following adoption of the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommmendation, UNESCO launched the Dynamic Coalition for the OER Recommendation on 2 March 2020

Following adoption of the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommmendation, UNESCO launched the Dynamic Coalition for the OER Recommendation on 2 March 2020.

The multi-stakeholder coalition aims to expand and consolidate commitments to actions and strategies, as well as reinforce international cooperation among all stakeholders in the four areas of the Recommendation:

1. Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, re-use, adapt and redistribute OER;

2. Developing supportive policy;

3. Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER; and

4. Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER.

The work of the Dynamic Coalition has become more pertinent amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as countless educational institutions have closed in response to various lockdown requirements. Millions of students and educators are required to study and work from home, thus necessitating greater use of freely available open and online learning resources.

In support of this, UNESCO has issued a call to support learning and knowledge sharing through OER amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Details about the call are available here.

In recognition of the importance of digital technologies, UNESCO has also launched a page featuring initiatives that it and its partners are involved in to harness the potential of digital technologies against COVID-19. You can access the page here.

How to Find Open Content

April, 30, 2020

While many educators appreciate the value of openly licensed content, the issue is how to find these resources. OER Africa has prepared an interactive, multimedia rich, learning pathway on just this topic. It identifies a suggested simple set of procedures to find open resources that align with your curriculum requirements.

While many educators appreciate the value of openly licensed content, the issue is how to find these resources. Many educators and developers struggle to search for and identify useful resources.

OER Africa has prepared an interactive, multimedia rich, learning pathway on just this topic. It identifies a suggested simple set of procedures to find open resources that align with your curriculum requirements.

The learning pathway is short, concise, and comprises eight segments of approximately 20 minutes each.

The eight segments in the Find Open Content learning pathway cover:

Why find and use open content?
What is open licensing?
Identifying different types of open content
How to search for open content using Google
Search for open content using Creative Commons search
Search for open content on YouTube
Search for open content in open repositories
How to evaluate the open content discovered.

Access the learning pathway here

Emergency Remote Teaching Webinar Series

April, 24, 2020

Trying to work out how to best teach your students during university shutdowns due to the COVID-19 crisis? Sign up for a webinar series on Emergency Remote Teaching, hosted by the Association of African Universities (AAU) and OER Africa. Register here.

Trying to work out how to best teach your students during university shutdowns due to the COVID-19 crisis? Sign up for a webinar series on Emergency Remote Teaching, hosted by the Association of African Universities (AAU) and OER Africa.

Register here https://forms.gle/wToc2YCa6QnAQUw37

AAU Webinar Series Final.jpg

Online (and offline) reading resources for children

April, 23, 2020

World Book and Copyright Day on 23 April is a celebration to promote the enjoyment of books and reading. Now that so many of us are at home with our children because of COVID-19, we can explore the virtual world of children’s stories – all free to read and many openly licensed. Some wonderful book and reading resources are listed below.

African Storybook

With more than 7,200 children’s stories in 190 African languages, African Storybook has something for every child, from the very young ones just learning to read to older children. It’s possible to search in various ways, including by language and reading level, and to download freely and print. Most of the storybooks are created or translated by local educators and reflect African contexts. There is also an excellent guide for parents, teachers, and librarians on Preparing to Use African Storybooks with Children. Over 4,000 of these storybooks can be found on the ASb reader app. Selected books can be downloaded onto a personal library for offline use.

StoryWeaver

There are more than 19,000 stories in 234 languages on the StoryWeaver platform. StoryWeaver has created a special page on Reading at Home during the Coronavirus school closures. This page links to: learning resources from grades one to eight; StoryWeaver’s special collection on science, mathematics, and technology; its local-language digital libraries, including African languages; and more.

Book Dash

Book Dash believes that every child should own one hundred books by the age of five. This South African non-profit gathers creative professionals who volunteer to create new, African storybooks that anyone can freely translate, print and distribute. It creates beautiful, high-quality books for young children in all South African languages. They currently have over 100 titles. Book Dash also has a short guide on Tips for Reading with Young Children.

African Storybook, StoryWeaver, and Book Dash use a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, which means that you can download, print, share, translate, and adapt all of the stories in their collections.

Nal’ibali

Nal’ibali (isiXhosa for “here’s the story”) believes that well-established culture of reading can be a real game-changer for education in South Africa. Literacy skills are a strong predictor of future academic success in all subjects – and children who regularly read and hear engaging stories, in languages they understand, are well equipped and motivated to learn to read and write. Nal’ibali promotes reading and writing in mother tongue languages.

Nal’ibali has free to download stories and reading resources for children and teenagers, accessible here

Audible

Audible (by Amazon) is a platform that allows you to stream audiobooks. While schools are closed, Audible is allowing free access to stream an incredible collection of stories for children and teenagers, including titles across six different languages. All stories are free to stream on your desktop, laptop, phone or tablet. Note that these titles are currently freely available, but they are protected by full copyright.

The Early Literacy Resource Network

The Early Literacy Resource Network provides links to research and resources on licensing, policies, creation, and use of high-quality children’s materials in the global South. The Teaching Literacy page provides information for teaching reading and literacy skills. For more early literacy resources and information on how Creative Commons licences are used, access Good Stories Don't Grow on Trees: A Guide to Effective Costing of Storybooks in the Global South.

Showcasing OER Platforms: OER Africa

April, 15, 2020

This week, OER Africa shares some resources we consider useful for institutions in the midst of current restrictions of movement and the requirements to introduce remote teaching in many countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have selected resources for universities, school management teams, mathematics, reading and writing, as well as our most popular downloads over the past six months.

Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash

Most of these resources have been produced in sub-Saharan Africa for our context.

Resources for universities

The Commonwealth of Learning’s Guide to Blended Learning
Policy documents on OER

Resources for School Management Teams

The Creating a Caring School Series: A Guide for School Management Teams

Resources for Mathematics; Reading and Writing

Although the following resources are not new, their approach to activity-based learning for teachers is still relevant.

Exploring What It Means To ‘Do’ Mathematics
Exercises on Teaching Data Handling
Reading Skills
Writing Skills

Most popular downloads

Finally, OER Africa’s most downloaded resources include the Being a Teacher series; the Household Food Security programme; and the Farmers Agribusiness Training course.

These resources are a small selection of what is available on the OER Africa website. The website concentrates on Health, Teacher Development, Agriculture and Foundations in Higher Education.

You can search for resources at the top of any page on the website.

Understanding OER in a Context that Necessitates Remote Learning

April, 9, 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread, millions of learners and educational institutions globally have had to make rapid, unforeseen changes to how they run their learning programmes. Face-to-face teaching and learning have become impossible in many countries and there is uncertainty over when educational institutions will reopen their doors. This may have long-term effects on school programmes, examinations, and most importantly, learning.

The pandemic has forced many educators and learners to explore new modes of learning provision such as online learning. It also places much greater emphasis on students being able to engage with educational resources as a primary mode of learning. Fortunately, over the last decade, a growing number of open educational resources (OER) have been made available by people in the education space for others to use. These OER offer great promise in ensuring that a range of educational materials are accessible to learners and educators.

What are OER?

There are many definitions of OER, one of the most comprehensive being:

Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property licence that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. (Hewlett Foundation, OER Defined)

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration states that OER should be freely shared through open licences that facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement, and sharing by anyone. The materials need to be published in formats that allow for both use and editing, while accommodating manipulation and adoption on various technical platforms. It also requires that materials be made available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet, where possible.

Creative Commons Licences

The most common mechanism to share educational resources openly and legally is by using Creative Commons (CC) licences. Creative Commons ‘provides free, easy‐to use copyright licences to make a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work – on conditions of your choice’ (Creative Commons, nd).

CC licences provide a wonderful opportunity to translate materials into other languages and use them for varying purposes. This is illustrated in the World Bank’s recent rapid response note, Remote Learning and COVID-19:

A quick inventory of content that can be easily made available via remote learning is a first order of business. Freely available, ‘open education resources’ are plentiful in some languages; in languages where digital learning content is limited, translating existing open education resources from other languages may be worth considering, together with partners. (World Bank, 2020).

Over the years, countless educational materials have been available as OERs and released online. Because they are openly licensed, OERs can be rapidly aggregated and deployed in remote learning contexts to substitute for the loss of face-to-face teaching time caused by institutional shutdowns. With most proprietary educational materials locked behind paywalls and not free to copy or use, OERs can provide educators and students access to free, high quality resources, offered with no threat of litigation from overzealous copyright lawyers.

In our upcoming series of communiques, we will share tutorials designed to provide users the skills to find and adapt OER. We will identify excellent open reading resources for your children while at home, and even how to start to assemble OER into a learning design.

Our next installation will be on showcasing OER platforms. We will look at OER Africa’s activities and highlight some of the useful resources and sections on the website.

Image Credit: Bandita, CC-BY-SA 2.0

OER Africa COVID-19 Statement

April, 3, 2020

We hope that you are doing well and staying safe as South Africa and many other Sub-Saharan African countries adapt to closure of schools and other educational institutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As people practise social distancing and implement new routines at home, OER Africa would like to reiterate its support for African educators and students to harness the power of open content.

As people practise social distancing and implement new routines at home, OER Africa would like to reiterate its support for African educators and students to harness the power of open content. Open content provides a unique opportunity to take advantage of digital learning and to make educational materials accessible.

Open educational resources (OER) include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, videos, assessments, software, tools, materials, and techniques used to support access to information. OER Africa’s website provides information on understanding OER, how to access OER, links to OER initiatives in Africa, and actual OER that can be used by academics, teachers, and learners.

In the coming weeks, OER Africa will publish bi-weekly communications on OER and their relevance within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Take care.

Warm Regards,

The OER Africa Team

Commonwealth of Learning: Keeping the Doors of Learning Open

March, 20, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected 363 million learners worldwide (UNESCO, 2020). The Commonwealth of Learning's (COL’s) experience shows that open, distance and online learning, if done well, can have the same outcomes as campus education without requiring teachers and learners to be in the same place at the same time. COL has compiled a selection of resources and tools as a first response to this crisis.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL), an inter-governmental organisation headquartered in Burnaby, Canada, is committed to promoting learning for sustainable development. It does this through the use of distance learning and online learning technologies. For more than 30 years, COL has used innovative approaches to open the doors of learning not just for formal education but non-formal and informal learning that is accessible, affordable and available to the last person in the queue.

With an increasing number of states, provinces and even whole countries closing institutions of learning as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 363 million learners worldwide are being impacted (UNESCO, 2020). How can we ensure that valuable time is not lost and our learners at all levels continue to learn wherever they are?

Many countries are planning to offer online learning as an alternative. COL’s experience shows that open, distance and online learning, if done well, can have the same outcomes as campus education without requiring teachers and learners to be in the same place at the same time. However, we recognise that not all schools, colleges and universities are currently well-prepared to fully utilise these approaches, and COL stands ready to share its expertise and resources to enable stakeholders to keep the doors of learning open for all.

In this time of crisis, a suitable response requires a renewed commitment to sharing and re-using open educational resources (OER); exploring novel ways to enable interaction between learners and other learners, learners and teachers, learners and content using online platforms; and to use appropriate technologies so that no one is left behind.

Some guidelines to consider include:

Institutions should take emergency policy decisions to adopt alternative ways of teaching, including online learning.
Ensure that learning is delivered using ICT tools such as radio, TV, mobile devices so that no learner is disadvantaged.
Identify and use existing OER to provide quality learning.
Develop and implement strategies for synchronous/asynchronous approaches.
Encourage teachers to use free resources such as MoodleCloud to conduct online classes.

COL has compiled a selection of resources and tools as a first response to this crisis. The resources can be accessed below.

e-Learning Africa Report, 2019

March, 13, 2020

The eLearning Africa Report 2019 is a leading source of news, information, and analysis about ICT, EdTech, digital technology, learning and development.

The Report looks at the state of education, training, development and technology at this moment of unparalleled change.

The eLearning Africa Report 2019 is a leading source of news, information, and analysis about ICT, EdTech, digital technology, learning and development.

As African leaders seek to make a reality of the African Union's vision of a ‘transformed continent’ by 2063, setting their sights on the creation of the largest single market in the world and, as businesses assess the implications of a ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ the eLearning Africa Report looks at the state of education, training, development and technology at this moment of unparalleled change.

Open Education Week: 2-6 March 2020

March, 5, 2020

Founded in 2013 by the Open Education Global (previously Open Education Consortium), the goal of Open Education Week is to raise awareness and showcase impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide. Open Education Week has become one of the most foremost global events recognizing high achievement and excellence in open education.

What is Open Education Week?

The week-long event spotlights amazing work from over a dozen categories including live, face-to-face events, webinars, projects, and resources.

For more information, visit the Open Education week website: https://www.openeducationweek.org/

For resources and projects, see: https://www.openeducationweek.org/resources

For Open Education Week 2020 online and offline events, check out: https://www.openeducationweek.org/events

Is your organization hosting any events for OE Week? Let us know in the comments below or let us know on Twitter: https://twitter.com/oerafrica

Open Education Week – Call for Proposals Now Open

February, 6, 2020

Open Education Week (OEW) aims to raise awareness and showcase the impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide. It spotlights amazing work from over a dozen categories including live, face-to-face events, webinars, projects, and resources.

This year, OEW is taking place on 2-6 March 2020. You can submit an Open Education Week entry in two easy steps Follow the link to find out more.

Learners’ Access to Educational Materials in Select Institutions within the Commonwealth

January, 30, 2020

This report assesses students’ access to educational materials in select institutions within Commonwealth countries. The findings indicate that learners are now engaging with a complex ecosystem of learning materials, both print and digital, in a multitude of differing forms and formats, with various terms of use and durations of sustained access.

UNESCO General Conference Adopts OER Recommendation

December, 13, 2019

OER Africa was very pleased to note that UNESCO OER Recommendation (40 C/32) was adopted at the 40th UNESCO General Conference in Paris on 25th November 2019. The formal Recommendation is yet to be posted online by UNESCO but the text can be found here. Approval of the Recommendation represents a significant recognition of the concept of open educational resources (OER) and its potential in education by governments around the world.

OER Africa is proud to have been actively engaged in development of the OER Recommendation. Although the origins of the process may be said to date back to when the term was first coined was first coined in 2002 at UNESCO's Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, the first meaningful effort to achieve consensus over global positions on OER took place at the first World OER Congress in Paris in 2012, which led to adoption at the Congress of the Paris OER Declaration 2012. OER Africa participated actively in the work leading up to this Declaration, conducting research on the status of government OER policies, participating in regional workshops leading up to the Congress, and helping with drafting of the Declaration. As the UNESCO website notes, ‘the Declaration marks a historic moment in the growing movement for Open Educational Resources and calls on governments worldwide to openly license publicly funded educational materials for public use’. However, as a Congress Declaration, it has no official status as a UNESCO document.

Following from this, a Second World OER Congress was organized in Llubljana, Slovenia in 2017, an event in which OER Africa was again actively involved (conducting further research on the status of OER globally, participating in regional consultation workshops, and playing an active role in the Congress programme and drafting of the Second World OER Congress Ljubljana OER Action Plan 2017.

This Congress initiated development of a first draft of the UNESCO OER Recommendation for public consultation, with OER Africa having participated in the drafting of this document at a special meeting of experts that took place alongside the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week in 2018. Following receipt of public comments, a second expert meeting took place alongside Mobile Learning Week in 2019, in which OER Africa again participated actively, which culminated in publication of the first official draft of the UNESCO OER Recommendation in April, 2019. As UNESCO Recommendations are ultimately inter-governmental agreements, this version was circulated to governments for their comments and discussed at an Intergovernmental Meeting for the Draft Recommendation in Paris in May 2019, to which all member states of UNESCO were invited and 150 delegates from 100 countries participated. OER Africa was able to attend and contribute to the meeting as an invited expert observer, though UNESCO procedures require that changes to a draft Recommendation can only be made with agreement by all member state representatives.

At the May 2019 meeting, the final text of the OER Recommendation was approved by consensus by all Member States and thereafter prepared for formal submission to the 4th UNESCO General Conference in November, 2019, where it was adopted. As the UNESCO website notes,

'Recommendations are instruments in which ‘the General Conference formulates principles and norms for the international regulation of any particular question and invites Member States to take whatever legislative or other steps may be required in conformity with the constitutional practice of each State and the nature of the question under consideration to apply the principles and norms aforesaid within their respective territories’ (Article 1 (b)). These are therefore norms which are not subject to ratification but which Member States are invited to apply. Emanating from the Organization's supreme governing body and hence possessing great authority, recommendations are intended to influence the development of national laws and practices.'

Thus, while not legally binding, Recommendations are important documents within UNESCO and member states are obliged to report to the General Conference on their progress in implementing them. Given this, adoption of the OER Recommendation is a major achievement and one which OER Africa is proud to have contributed.

Since the Recommendation was approved, there have inevitably been some criticisms of the final text that was adopted (see, for example, critiques by David Wiley and Stephen Downes). These critiques tend to focus on compromises that were made during the drafting process of the Recommendation that may have the consequence of allowing some ‘closed’ practices to creep into implementation of the Recommendation by governments. While there is technical validity to these critiques, our view at OER Africa is that the OER Recommendation is important for the spirit of what it encourages governments to do, rather than in its specific technical details. As Recommendations are not legally binding on states, those governments that wish to undermine that spirit are more likely to do so by ignoring the OER Recommendation than by seeking to subvert its intent. And the compromises made were an essential part of the process of securing the necessary consensus to adoption of the final OER Recommendation (as we saw clearly during the Intergovernmental Meeting in May, 2019 where the final text was agreed). Consequently, as OER Africa, we believe that these technical limitations are relatively minor in the overall movement towards openness that adoption of the UNESCO OER Recommendation represents. Thus, we are excited to continue our work, and to continue supporting UNESCO and its government in implementing their work, in our joint efforts to harness open licensing to improve access to high quality education for all Africans.

Supporting Open Practices with Teachers in Zambia

November, 21, 2019

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.

Creative Commons and access to knowledge

November, 6, 2019

A big barrier to lifelong learning can be the cost of resources. There are worldwide initiatives to change this, though, and it’s helpful to know how to use these resources legally.

One such arrangement is Creative Commons, considered to be the global standard for open licences.

A big barrier to lifelong learning can be the cost of resources. There are worldwide initiatives to change this, though, and it’s helpful to know how to use these resources legally.

One such arrangement is Creative Commons, considered to be the global standard for open licences. These were written by legal experts around the world and dedicated to the public domain. They enable teaching and learning resources to be made available in the public domain. This is usually in their digital form under an open licence and without cost other than the cost of access to the internet. Users of the resources may use, adapt and redistribute them with no or few restrictions.

This article looks at how Creative Commons works, and why it enables access to knowledge.

Guidelines on the development of OER policies

October, 16, 2019

The guidelines describe the whole process for designing and implementing OER policy in seven chapters, each representing a clear phase in the whole process. The chapters introduce the purpose of the phase and provide background information and references with practical examples for illustration. At the end of each chapter, specific tasks are set for the policy-maker, which will help with formulating of the final OER policy. The guidelines start with an introduction to the potential of OER and then ask the policy-maker to determine the vision of the OER policy she or he has in mind. This policy needs a framework, which determines on what level of the education system the policy will be set (scale) and which sector of the education system the policy will cover (focus). This sets out the first part of the theory of change – i.e., it determines what change is envisaged through the policy.

A gap analysis is then necessary to provide a realistic picture of the challenges and the opportunities that the current educational system, its infrastructure, its key members and the overall policy context present for the new OER policy. This can be used as a backdrop for designing the masterplan, which takes the building blocks present in a standard OER policy and specifies them for the specific policy context. These building blocks indicate what is going to be changed. An implementation plan adopts a strategy for how to realise the masterplan effectively and to ensure that all key stakeholders are involved. This phase includes setting up an evidence base and monitoring framework so that the policy can be adjusted during the implementation phase. Finally, the policy developed needs to be launched, so streamlining and checks against the reality of the context should be carried out. This is where the policy-makers have to focus on the outreach of the policy. In this phase, a policy needs to be officially endorsed by someone in an authoritative position – for example, the cabinet, education minister or president of a country – and by educational leaders, to ensure that it can have an impact on the education system. Moreover, it is important to ensure that the policy has been understood by those it is hoping to influence – i.e., the actors and institutions using OER to make teaching and learning better. Finally, a policy should be ambitious and aim to reach the mainstream in the future. Therefore, a review of implementation and its impacts should lead to a discussion of what shape the next-generation policy should take and how the scope and scale of this policy can be extended.

The key readers of this publication are those directly involved in policy design. The aims of these guidelines are to help these people to:

Understand essential subject-matter knowledge on OER through a learning-by-doing process
Develop a set of procedural knowledge on OER policy planning, working through key steps necessary for designing a comprehensive OER policy
Reinforce the contextual knowledge needed to leverage OER in achieving SDG 4 through assessing the policy context and needs for OER, planning institutionalised programmes and drawing up a contextualised masterplan
Ensure the commitment to policy adoption and implementation through integrating stakeholder engagement into the policy-planning process and determining adequate policy endorsement and implementation strategies
Enhance the quality of policy implementation by planning a mechanism for monitoring and evaluation, and working towards an evidence based policy-planning and updating cycle.

Seminar on Open Education Resources at UNISA

August, 23, 2019

The UNESCO Chair on Open and Distance Learning (ODL) at UNISA organised a seminar on Open Education Resources for staff in the university, held on 12th June, 2019. Ephraim Mhlanga and Kirsty von Gogh from Saide and Neil Butcher & Associates respectively facilitated the workshop, which was attended by about 25 participants.

The UNESCO Chair on Open and Distance Learning (ODL) at UNISA organised a seminar on Open Education Resources for staff in the university, held on 12th June, 2019. The seminar took place at the Muckleneuk Campus in Pretoria. Known for its seminal work on OER Africa, an initiative that supports using and creating OER in Africa, Saide was invited to facilitate this workshop. Ephraim Mhlanga and Kirsty von Gogh from Saide and Neil Butcher & Associates respectively facilitated the workshop, which was attended by about 25 participants.

The workshop started with a joint presentation from the two facilitators, which focused on familiarising participants with OER and their potential value in expanding access by reducing the cost of learning materials. In the presentation, workshop facilitators brought home the point that OER are different from commercial products in that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt, and re-share them without any need to pay royalties or licence fees, or request permission. They also informed participants that OER are a whole range of educational materials that include textbooks, curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video, and animation. By way of illustration, the presentation also gave specific examples of OER that were developed by some African universities with the support of OER Africa. These examples were mainly in Health Sciences, Agriculture, and use of ICTs in education.

In addition to discussing the concept of OER and their potential value in education, the facilitators also highlighted major international developments and events associated with OER. These were:

The World Open Educational Resources Congress (2012), organised by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and UNESCO with the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation which attracted over 400 participants from 70 countries. The purpose of this Congress was explained to participants, which was to support government support for OER. The Congress adopted the Paris OER Declaration which encouraged governments to openly license educational materials developed with public funds.
The second World OER Congress that was hosted by the Government of Slovenia in Ljubjana, Slovenia on 18–20 Sept 2017, which aimed at making the transition from commitment to action. Participants were informed that at this conference, the global community identified strategies to harness the potential of OER for achieving inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030.
2019 UNESCO OER recommendations, which provide an opportunity for the open education community to work with national governments to help them understand and implement open education recommendations in their countries.

It was also important to inform participants of how COL and UNESCO are collaborating in the field of OER for advocacy, capacity building, and policy development in order to put into effect the Paris OER Declaration.

Finally, workshop facilitators highlighted how Saide’s African Storybook initiative is making a difference in terms of promoting literacy. Participants were interested to hear about the initiative. Almost all storybooks are written by the African communities that use the storybooks. The storybooks reflect contexts and interests of the people who use them. Saide is responsible for the quality assurance process, and digital publishing makes it possible to have continuous improvement.

The session closed with an informative discussion on OER matters concerning participants, and discussion around Unisa’s OER policy and its implementation.

OER, student efficacy, and user perceptions

August, 23, 2019

This study by John Hilton III synthesizes results from sixteen efficacy and twenty perceptions studies involving 121,168 students or faculty that examine either (1) OER and student efficacy in higher education settings or (2) the perceptions of college students and/or instructors who have used OER.

Although textbooks are a traditional component in many higher education contexts, their increasing price have led many students to forgo purchasing them and some faculty to seek substitutes. One such alternative is open educational resources (OER). This study by John Hilton III synthesizes results from sixteen efficacy and twenty perceptions studies involving 121,168 students or faculty that examine either (1) OER and student efficacy in higher education settings or (2) the perceptions of college students and/or instructors who have used OER.

COL President and CEO delivers keynote at Pan-Africa distance education conference

August, 5, 2019

COL President and CEO Professor Asha Kanwar delivered a keynote at the eighth Distance Education and Teachers’ Training in Africa (DETA) Conference at the University of Lagos, Nigeria on 24 July 2019.

COL President and CEO Professor Asha Kanwar delivered a keynote address at the eighth Distance Education and Teachers’ Training in Africa (DETA) Conference at the University of Lagos, Nigeria on 24 July 2019.

In her address, ‘Educating the African Learner in an Era of Crises: What are the options?’ Professor Kanwar explored five crises that impact education: climate change, migration and displacement, out-of-school youth, the ‘learning crises’ and the challenge of pedagogy.

OER Africa AfLIA Webinars Series for Librarians

April, 29, 2019

On Wednesday 3 April, 2019, Neil Butcher of OER Africa conducted a webinar for librarians, hosted by the African Library & Information Associations & Institutions (AfLIA). The webinar was the first in a series of three on open education resources (OER) for librarians.

On Wednesday 3 April 2019, Neil Butcher of OER Africa conducted a webinar for librarians, hosted by the African Library & Information Associations & Institutions (AfLIA). The webinar was the first in a series of three on open education resources (OER) for librarians. In the webinar, Butcher introduced librarians to OERs, and described the Creative Commons licences licensing conditions. Butcher explained that librarians need to spend time understanding the licences to be able to explain them to library users, so that these users can get maximum value from OERs and also create and share their own work. Butcher discussed the opportunities presented to librarians, students, and academics through the use of OER, as well as various OER repositories to be found online. These OER repositories provide a platform for content creators to show African content to the world, and ensure that African content creators are active in global knowledge networks. Butcher presented examples of African OERs in practice, and explained how institutional policies on OER use and Internet access are essential for African academic libraries. The webinar was well received, and over 100 librarians participated.

In Webinar 2 in the series, held on 17 April 2019, Lisbeth Levey introduced Open Access (OA) publishing and licensing models. Lisbeth described how to determine reputable OA publishers. Dr Tony Lelliott explained how OER and OA intersect, and how good research can help educators prepare up-to-date and relevant learning materials. He identified African institutional repositories and discussed the importance of institutional OA policies and repository management. By the end of this webinar, librarians understood the ramifications of high-cost journal subscriptions, how they can help researchers identify high-quality OA journals, and how to manage institutional repositories. Librarians should be able to situate themselves as champions of OA within the university community. Webinar participants responded with many questions for the presenters, indicating deep engagement with the topic.

Webinar 3, on 2 May 2019, closed out the series by contemplating the implications of OER for librarians. In the first two webinars, librarians learned how to find and assess openly licenced resources. In the final webinar, presented by Kirsty von Gogh, librarians discovered how to integrate what they learned about openly licences resources into their work. With access to openly licenced resources, librarians need to establish processes for managing this content and to find ways of supporting academics and students to access and use high-quality research and resources.

For more on the webinars series, visit: http://web.aflia.net/open-educational-resources-oer-webinar-series-for-african-librarians/

The webinars are available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPaQeggWf7gVPSkLhYl9_8g

Understanding the Impact of OER: Achievements and Challenges

April, 23, 2019

This new publication has been put together by the OER Africa team in partnership with UNESCO IITE. The aim of the research was to shed light on economic and pedagogical value of investing in OER.

Finding Open Content - New OER Africa resource

April, 4, 2019

Simple, short tutorial to acquire the skills necessary to search for open content, decipher Creative Commons rights and permissions and evaluate the usefulness of OER for new purposes.

UCT Professor Awarded UNESCO OER Chair

March, 14, 2019

OER Africa would like to congratulate Associate Professor Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams on her appointment as a UNESCO Chair in Open Education and Social Justice. The UNESCO Chairs Programme serves as a think tank and bridge-builder between academia, civil society and local communities, as well as researchers and policymakers.

Understanding Open Educational Resources

January, 25, 2019

This free online course on OER from the Commonwealth of Learning has recently been updated. It is interactive and on completion you can download a certificate of participation.

Achieving the Dream's OER Degree Initiative - Year 2 Report

October, 12, 2018

Participant Experiences and Financial Impacts: Findings from Year 2 of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative.

Participant Experiences and Financial Impacts: Findings from Year 2 of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative. This report expands on last year’s report with updated course and enrollment data as well as new findings about students’ perceptions of their OER courses and the institutional costs and actual student savings of OER degree pathways.

PEBL Project

October, 5, 2018

We are excited to announce that the Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning project, a collaborative project to develop blended learning courses with university partners across East Africa, will be using our platform to showcase these OER.

We are excited to announce that the Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL) Project, a collaborative project to develop blended learning courses with university partners across East Africa, will be using our platform to showcase these OER.

UCT MOOCs Make International Impact

September, 27, 2018

As the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) 14-strong portfolio of open online courses continues impacting internationally, six have been singled out as world class by global MOOC monitoring website Class Central, based on participants’ reviews.

2018 Open Education Global Conference

August, 7, 2018

Open Praxis has partnered with the Open Education Consortium for the publication of selected papers among those presented in the 2018 Open Education Global Conference.

For a fifth consecutive year, Open Praxis has partnered with the Open Education Consortium for the publication of selected papers among those presented in the 2018 Open Education Global Conference. The conference theme was Transforming Education Through Open Approaches. This latest issue is now available on the Open Praxis website.

Latest JL4D Features 3 Articles on OER Research in Africa

July, 25, 2018

The latest JL4D features three articles on OER Research in Africa, including "Learning for Development in the Context of South Africa

The latest JL4D features three articles on OER Research in Africa, including "Learning for Development in the Context of South Africa: Considerations for Open Education Resources in Improving Higher Education Outcomes" by Narend Baijnath CEO of the Council on Higher Education. Kirk Perris of the Commonwealth of Learning reviews the CILT research "Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South".

African Virtual University Releases Hundreds of New Open Educational Resources

July, 24, 2018

The African Virtual University (AVU) has released 1,335 Open Educational Resources (OERs) under the Creative Commons license CC BY 2.5.

The African Virtual University (AVU) has released 1,335 Open Educational Resources (OERs) under the Creative Commons license CC BY 2.5. The new materials include 234 open textbooks or modules, 83 videos and 945 learning objects extracted from the modules. All resources are freely available online at OER@AVU http://oer.avu.org, an initiative launched in 2011 with some 288 open resources. OER@AVU has been a great contribution to the African and global OER communities; as of July 2018, it hosts a total of 1,623 resources available in English, French and Portuguese.

Digital Fluency Course at e/merge 2018 - 17 July

July, 5, 2018

Saide's OER Africa consultant, Brenda Mallinson, will be running a session together with Shadrack Mbogela from the Open University of Tanzania on "Exploring the Digital Fluency course for Academic staff Professional Development" at the e/merge Online Festival. The workshop was a live stream session on Tuesday 17th July (15:00-17:00) and the materials will be open for at least a week afterwards for participants to engage with the DF courses on the OUT Moodle.

Ten Key Facts About OERs

June, 13, 2018

Discover ten key facts about open educational resources (OERs) in an easy to digest format. Each fact is supplemented with links to worldwide resources extending and deepening the core idea.

Discover ten key facts about open educational resources (OERs) in an easy to digest format. Each fact is supplemented with links to worldwide resources extending and deepening the core idea. Learn how OERs help make quality learning accessible, relevant and equitable. Ten Key Facts About OERs is the second in a series by Contact North on current and emerging tools influencing and shaping online learning such as Blended Learning, Learning Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Online Proctoring.

Professional Development in a Digital Age

June, 5, 2018

Exploring Aspects of Digital Fluency for Blended Teaching and Learning. Workshop presentation by Brenda Mallinson to The First Annual Teaching and Learning Conference 2018 at North West University, South Africa. The workshop was on the digital fluency course developed together with the Open University of Tanzania.

LSE Press Open Access Publishing Platform for Social Sciences

May, 23, 2018

London School of Economics Press has launched the latest in a succession of new university press initiatives and one that will support the development of high-quality, academic-led, open access publications in the social sciences. Kieran Booluck provides details of the first LSE Press journal and outlines plans for the press to pursue more innovative publications and experiment with new types of content.

A Collaborative Approach to OER Policy and Guidelines Development in the Commonwealth: The Case of Botswana, Cameroon, and Sri Lanka

May, 2, 2018

COL has identified the development of OER as a potential answer to the challenges of access to relevant learning resources to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education. Provincial/regional OER policies and guidelines were developed in Sri Lanka, Botswana, and Cameroon involving provincial/regional education policymakers.

Open Pedagogy Notebook

April, 19, 2018

The Open Pedagogy Notebook has been set up by Rajiv Jhangiani from Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia and Robin deRosa from the Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. They are encouraging online submissions of examples of open pedagogical practices from practioners throughout the world.

Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South

April, 12, 2018

This volume examines aspects of educator and student adoption of OER and engagement in Open Educational Practices (OEP) in secondary and tertiary education as well as teacher professional development in 21 countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia.

Self-Publishing Guide: BC Open Textbook

April, 12, 2018

The BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide is a reference for individuals or groups wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook. This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook. This looks like a very useful resource for the OER Africa partners.

A Guide to Good OER Stewardship

April, 12, 2018

An important new resource has just been timeously released during Open Education Week. The question of “what makes a good actor or not” in OER is one that Lisa Petrides, founder and CEO of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, has addressed in a new guide for OER stewardship.

10 Years After International Accord, 5 Ways Education Will Become More Open in the Next Decade

January, 23, 2018

Ten Year's since the Cape Town Declaration, Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Foundation reflects on OER developments.

OER in and as MOOCs

November, 14, 2017

The ROER4D project being managed through the University of Cape Town is releasing chapters from their forthcoming online publication. In this chapter the authors report on an investigation into the production and rollout of four MOOCs at UCT in South Africa, and on the experiences of the educators involved in their production.

OpenMed Consortium Course Materials Review

July, 11, 2017

The OpenMed Consortium has recently released materials that form part of a capacity building course entitled "Open Education Fundamentals and Approaches - A Learning Journey to Open Up Teaching in Higher Education". Neil Butcher provides a review.

Launching OER Degree Pathways

July, 5, 2017

Launching OER Degree Pathways: An Early Snapshot of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative and Emerging Lessons is a formative evaluation report prepared by SRI International that was released in June, 2017. It is a preliminary report that shares findings from initial surveys and interviews of an initiative to launch ‘OER degrees’ in 38 community colleges across the United States of America, which is being led by Achieving the Dream.

2nd World OER Congress

May, 13, 2016

Jenny Glennie and Neil Butcher recently attended the 2nd World OER Congress in Slovenia. South Africa was represented by the Honourable Minister Angie Motshekga, Minister of the Department of Basic Education. Ministers present reaffirmed their committment of the important role of OERs in the attached Ministerial Statement.

Supporting Distance Learners

April, 21, 2016

We have created a PDF of our Supporting Distance Learners online resource that will be used at a workshop to be conducted at the University of Lesotho which others may find useful too.

OER Policy Development Toolkit for Higher Education

April, 21, 2016

Amanda Coolidge, Senior Manager , Open Education at BC Campus, and Daniel De Marte, Chief Academic Officer at Tidewater Community College have released an interactive toolkit to support institutions develop open policies. The toolkit is licensed CC BY and institutions are free to reuse it, remix it, revise it, and/or redistribute it.

OER Policy Video Series Released

April, 21, 2016

Everyone talks about OER Policy, but what does it mean? What do OER policies look like in practice? How do they impact OER initiatives? How does our government and our world perceive Open policy?

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