About Us

About OER Africa

OER Africa was established in 2008 with a vision to support the emergence of:

Vibrant and sustainable African education systems and institutions that play a critical role in building and sustaining African societies and economies through free and open development and sharing of common intellectual capital.

The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation have provided OER Africa with grants from 2008 to date to support our work and our mission:

To establish dynamic networks of African OER practitioners by sensitizing and connecting like-minded educators – teachers, academics, academic librarians, trainers, and policy makers – to develop, share, and adapt OER to meet the education needs of African societies. By creating and sustaining networks of collaboration – face-to- face and online – OER Africa supports African educators and learners to harness the power of OER. In turn, they can develop their capacity and join emerging global OER networks as active participants who showcase Africa’s intellectual property, rather than passive consumers of knowledge produced elsewhere.

Current Work

OER Africa is undertaking collaborative work to develop the professional competences and skills of stakeholders within African higher education institutions so that they can implement OER practices to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

We Are:

Developing and testing effective models of continuous professional development (CPD) for supporting OER practices in higher education institutions;
Collaborating with African universities to foster policy and institutional environments that support effective CPD implementation;
Developing an online collection of CPD OER in higher education; and
Establishing a CPD network to share lessons learned.

Our Website Showcases:

Resources on Open Education, including our recently developed learning pathways.
Information on what is happening in OER in higher education in Africa.
OER courseware that has been developed in Africa. We are very excited by a new development to host courseware from the Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL) Project.
Research, theses, and national/institutional policies around OER in Africa.

Grant Activites

Grants Six and Seven: Developing the professional competences and skills of stakeholders within African higher education institutions

Since mid-2019, building on the research from Grant 5, OER Africa has been developing the professional competences and skills of stakeholders within African higher education institutions so that they can implement OER practices to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

During Grant 6, we created an evidence-based CPD framework comprising a set of inter-related learning pathways on effective OER practices. These seek to systematically develop African academics’ competence while providing immediate access to relevant and useful skills and knowledge that will make their teaching and learning easier to implement and more effective.

Building on the knowledge gained through the pilot implementation of learning pathways and emerging partnerships with the Association of African Universities (AAU) and the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA), OER Africa is focusing on four key outcomes for Grant Seven. This includes developing CPD frameworks for personnel in higher education institutions, developing an online collection of CPD OER in higher education, and working with African universities to create supportive environments for effective CPD implementation.

The CPD frameworks we are developing at OER Africa, in collaboration with our partners, are adapted from the British Council’s CPD framework for teacher educators. We have used a wheel structure (Figure 1), with wedges showing the professional development domains and levels of progress (foundation, established, and advanced) aligned with Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Grant Five: A Focus on Continuing Professional Development

This grant was implemented between August 2017 and February 2019. Our main research interest in this Grant was to determine what kinds of continuing professional development (CPD) are needed by African faculty to be able to implement these improvements successfully and sustainably, as well as to model approaches to CPD that might be scaled successfully without additional cost once they have demonstrated their effectiveness.

During the project, OER Africa worked with several higher education and training institutions:

Haramaya University
Dire Dawa University
Mekelle University
Vaal University of Technology (VUT)
National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN)
Open University of Tanzania
Dar es Salaam College of Education (DUCE)
University of the Free State (UFS)
South Africa’s Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Colleges

Grant Four: Institutional Engagement

The aim of this grant which ended in July 2017 was to embed OER practices within African Higher Education Institutions through improving both content and delivery of higher education by promoting a contextually relevant model for harnessing OER.

We worked with the following institutions:

Africa Nazarene University – ANU (Kenya) on block teaching
University of Pretoria, Faculty of Veterinary Science on continuing professional development.
Open University of Tanzania in developing teaching and learning resources.
University of the Free State on continuing professional development.

Work we had started in the previous grant in working with institutions to develop specific OER policy for their institutions or have the development and use of OER incorporated in their intellectual property was galvanised in this grant.

Attached is a record of all our outputs from this grant.

Grants Two and Three: Implementation and expansion of networks

In this three-year grant, OER Africa focused attention on raising awareness about the benefits of OER, supported collaborative development, adaptation and implementation processes within faculties, courses and programmes, and supported development and elaboration of OER policy frameworks at institutional, national, regional and continental levels.

Our work with networks expanded during the period of this grant to include:

African Council for Distance Education (ACDE)
Agriculture Education Network – this included collaborating with the Agshare planning and pilot project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. OER sensitisation took place at Makerere in Uganda, USIU and Moi in Kenya and Haramaya in Ethiopia. Agshare II was a collaboration with three institutions, Haramaya and Mekelle Universities in Ethiopia and Makerere University in Uganda to create and openly share different types of OER that strengthen MSc agriculture faculty. RUFORUM came on board as a new partner in this phase
African OER Teacher Education Network which included working with the Open University (UK) TESSA Initiative.
Health OER Network – Work here was expanded during this period through a separate grant from the Hewlett Foundation. A consultative forum with partners and representatives from other African countries was held in 2009.

The network spaces were strengthened with both internally developed resources and external resources, such as:

Research was conducted and documented in the form of case studies, which included:

OER Awareness Raising, Sensitisation and Support, which included running workshops, building up our repository to support and strengthen theoretical understanding of OER, was provided to:

We developed and supported development of the following resources and toolkits:

Communities of practice were established and provided space on the OER Africa website to collaborate in the development of course materials and also to provide a home for their OERs.

We also prioritized research activities during this period to understand current OER practice in Africa, user needs and contextual factors. The following were the research outputs:

Grant One: Planning

This first grant was exploratory with a specific aim to establish strategic partnerships with higher education institutions in Africa. A research report Revisiting the challenges for higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of the Open Educational Resources Movement informed the team’s choices as to where we might geographically work most effectively. We joined the University of Michigan to collaborate on an initiative known as Health OER, which aimed to develop health expertise through communities of practice and the development of health OER content with the OER Africa website serving as the collaboration tool The pilot partners in higher education institutions in Africa were:

OER Africa Menu

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About Us

About OER Africa

OER Africa was established in 2008 with a vision to support the emergence of:

The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation have provided OER Africa with grants from 2008 to date to support our work and our mission:

Current Work

We Are:

Our Website Showcases:

Grant Activites

OER Africa Menu

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You are here

About Us

About OER Africa

OER Africa was established in 2008 with a vision to support the emergence of:

The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation have provided OER Africa with grants from 2008 to date to support our work and our mission:

Current Work

We Are:

Our Website Showcases:

Grant Activites