Collaboration

Continuous Professional Development (CPD) networks can provide a useful platform to share knowledge, improve professional praxis, and facilitate collaboration and peer support. As part of its current grant, OER Africa aims to advance the professional competences and skills of stakeholders in African higher education institutions. A key aspect of this is the development of a CPD network, which will provide a platform for institutional stakeholders to engage in meaningful dialogue about their CPD practices, share valuable insights and lessons learned, and offer ongoing peer support.

UNESCO members states unanimously approved the OER Recommendation on November 29, 2019. It is the first international normative instrument to embrace the field of openly licensed educational materials and technologies in education and builds on almost two decades of UNESCO work on OER.

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, this raises the practical question of what steps government and educational institutions at all levels can do to help to operationalize the OER Recommendation.

Education is at the core of South Africa’s national development. The National Development Plan recognizes the potential of education to transform individuals and drive attainment of other development goals. The country’s higher education system is characterized by low participation and high attrition. This presents challenges for the attainment of targets set by the NDP.

The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) is the second largest university in Africa with more than 180,000 students. The OER project at NOUN was initially motivated in response to the 2012 UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning Paris Declaration on OER. Specifically, NOUN referred to the section that encouraged government-funded materials to be released under an open licence and made available and accessible as OER.  

Presentation given by Brenda Mallinson in 2015.

 For those receiving funding from the UK HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resource Programme (2009- 2012), the sustainability of project outputs was one of a number of essential goals. Our approach for the hosting and distribution of health and life science open educational resources (OER) was based on the utilisation of the WordPress.org blogging platform and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to curate content  and  widen discovery.This paper outlines the approaches taken and tools used at the time, and reflects upon the effectiveness  of web strategies several years post-funding.

This case study documents the background, process and outcomes of a collaboration between Mkwawa University College of Education, the University of Dar-es-Salaam and OER Africa in the period 2011 to 2014.

This document is the result of a discussion within the African Teacher Education Network of OER Africa on the status of OER integration into teacher education.