Explore the dynamic world of Open Educational Resources and discover how OER Africa is driving the movement forward. This page is divided into two sections:
Articles: Our articles aim to deliver insights on OER-related themes that inform, spark conversation, and engage with the developing open education landscape, with a particular focus on Africa.
Updates: Below, the articles, you'll find updates on OER Africa’s latest initiatives, activities, and contributions to the OER community.
Articles
This section features targeted articles crafted specifically for educators, students, and the global Open Educational Resources (OER) community. The articles examine themes related to OER, offering insightful perspectives and information. The content seeks to inform, prompt discussion, and actively engage with the dynamic landscape of open education, particularly within the African context.

The open knowledge ecosystem has seen significant growth in the last few years. This communication is about Open Science from an African perspective. It explores examples of how Open Science platforms are being constructed, together with linkages among the different forms of openness.

Are you familiar with open learning as an approach to education? Are open learning and open pedagogy the same thing? What does open pedagogy look like in practice?
In this week’s article, we explore the concepts of open pedagogy and open learning. We also unpack open pedagogy using an interactive learning template.

As readers will know, OER Africa is a strong proponent of open educational resources (OER) and open licensing. Creative Commons licences are the ones most frequently used when OER content is produced. There are six of them, which range from very permissive, allowing copying and modification (CC BY), to those that are more restrictive, permitting distribution of a work in its original form, but no modification (CC BY-ND).

Open Education has the potential to make education more accessible, enable the creation of relevant teaching and learning materials, improve the quality of content, and empower learners to be critical thinkers and knowledge creators. Open Education Week (OE Week), held annually, is an opportunity for actively sharing and learning about the latest achievements in Open Education worldwide.

Are you looking to interact with people who are interested in Open Education Resources (OER)? Do you have ideas that you want to share with a wider audience and learn more about OER? A Community of Practice (CoP) might be the right place for you.
The term ‘Community of Practice’ was created by Etienne Wenger, who offers a social theory of learning – a school of thought that proposes that humans can acquire new ideas and behaviours by observing others.

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.
Updates
This section provides updates on OER Africa’s initiatives and activities. Stay informed about our contributions to the OER community and how we are driving the open education movement forward.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.