UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER)
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 pinpoints five essential areas of action to build and sustain a worldwide OER ecosystem... more
Working draft: Possible Actions to Operationalize the UNESCO OER Recommendation
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... more
Learning for Development in the Context of South Africa: Considerations for Open Education Resources in Improving Higher Education Outcomes
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. A number of Open... more
OER and MOOCs at the National Open University of Nigeria
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... more
OER Africa OUT Collaboration: Open Educational Resources (OER) in Africa
Presentation given by Brenda Mallinson in 2015. more
Web Strategies for the Curation and Discovery of Open Educational Resources
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)... more
Mkwawa University College of Education (MUCE) and University of Dar-es Salaam (UDSM), Tanzania: Integrating OER into Teacher Development Programmes
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. more
Lessons Learned About Coordinating Academic Partnerships from an International Network for Health Education
There is a growing trend of academic partnerships between U.S., Canadian, and European health science institutions and academic health centers in low- and middle-income countries. These partnerships often encounter challenges such as resource disparities and power differentials, which affect the motivations, expectations, balance of benefits, and results of the joint projects. Little has... more
OER in Teacher Education: Reflections from the OER Africa Teacher Education Network
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. It provides some suggests regarding why OER should be integrated into teacher education as well as possible barriers and ways to overcome them. It provides insight into how different institutions in Africa are currently integrating... more
A Technical Mode for Sharing and Utilizing Open Educational Resources in Chinese Universities
Open educational resources just supply potentials to help equalize the access to worldwide knowledge and education, but themselves alone do not cause effective learning or education. How to make effective use of the resources is still a big challenge. In this study, a technical mode is proposed to collect the open educational resources from different sources on the Internet into a campus-... more