Continuous Professional Development Frameworks

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Effective Continuous Professional Development (CPD) is crucial for building knowledge, enhancing educational praxis, and improving student outcomes in higher education. OER Africa’s CPD framework space offers academics and academic librarians a structured, resource-rich pathway to professional growth and impactful teaching and learning experiences. This space is designed to help you explore comprehensive CPD frameworks and access curated resources that correspond to the frameworks. Each resource provides suggestions for how it might be deployed in a CPD intervention.

What is CPD?
CPD refers to the activities and learning that professionals undertake to enhance their skills and knowledge. In higher education, CPD is about more than individual growth; it is about cultivating changes in teaching practices that lead to improved student learning outcomes. CPD can empower academics and academic librarians to adapt to the evolving demands of higher education, stay informed of best practices, and continuously build their expertise.

What are CPD Frameworks?
A CPD framework is a structured planning guide designed to support the career development of higher education professionals. While CPD can often happen informally, a framework helps make the process more intentional and focussed, ensuring that academic and academic librarian CPD aligns with institutional goals. CPD frameworks are particularly valuable for navigating the growing complexity in higher education, where professionals face pressures from massification, digitalization, and the need for career advancement (Inamorato, Gausas, Mackeviciute, Jotatutyte, & Martinaitis, 2019).

Frameworks

CPD Frameworks

Academics

CPD Framework for Academics

The framework consists of domains and capability descriptors.

There are 11 domains, of which OER Africa is developing four key domains initially. These are:

Course design
Materials development
Facilitating learning
Effective assessment and feedback.

Each domain contains capability descriptors that break the domain down into smaller units.

Download Framework View Resources

Academic Librarians

CPD Framework for Academic Librarians

This CPD framework is for academic librarians in all African tertiary institutions. Using the framework can bring about planned, ongoing, and continuous learning for African academic librarians for improved service delivery, better engagement with knowledge trends, and increased ability to integrate useful technology into information provision.

The framework consists of ten domains and corresponding capability descriptors.

Download Framework

Open Knowledge

Domain

The democratisation of knowledge boosts innovative solutions to development challenges.

Capability descriptor

Explain the concepts of openness and knowledge as a public good.
Propagate the principles of open science, open data, open access, open education, open knowledge and implications for knowledge creation, scholarly communication, storage, dissemination, and libraries.
Explain the characteristics and advantages of open knowledge across different disciplines to support decision-making for its adoption.
Create clear pathways for library users to understand how to adopt open science, open licensing, open data, open access, open educational resources, and other open knowledge practices.
Find, use, and contribute to repositories of open resources.
Define indicators and keep track of progress towards awareness, adoption, and use of open knowledge practices within the institution.
Advocate and make inputs into institutional policies that support open knowledge.

Copyright and Licensing

Domain

Understanding the different pathways for managing access and use of intellectual properties of authors and creators.

Capability descriptor

Implement copyright and licensing practices in the knowledge landscape, including their application to contemporary knowledge formats.
Explain local implications of relevant treaties administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Assist user communities to understand the principles and application of open licensing, and the entire spectrum of Creative Commons licences.
Show an understanding of how the technologies and licences within digital rights management operate.
Lead user communities to understand ethical copyright and licensing issues as they pertain to generative AI.

Digital Knowledge Management

Domain

Organizing, processing, preserving and creating access points for digital knowledge in different formats.

Capability descriptor

Show a firm grasp of the different levels of digital literacy skills and how to facilitate the acquisition of such skills for library users.
Understand how to create comprehensive (structural, descriptive, and content) metadata for digital resources and objects.
Acquire curation and sharing techniques for digital resources and objects.
Display basic repository management skills.
Display a basic understanding of the implications and applications of AI authoring, knowledge assistance, and learning.
Review features, accessibility, and usability of applications that provide digital access to books, journals, and reference sources e.g. R Discovery, Scribd, Headway, Researcher, Zotero, Blinkist, etc.
Explore integration of knowledge and e-books apps into regular library service e.g. Leganto (ProQuest), ePlatform Digital libraries, Libby, Ex Libris, Bookshelf, etc.
Provide resources and basic technical skills to users who create digital content, whether as standalone resources or integrated into other formats e.g. podcasts, videos, blogs, ebooks, memes, GIFs, presentations, newsletters, and infographics.
Secure migration and transfer strategies for digital resources.
Show familiarity with technologies and skills for digital preservation including web crawling and archiving tools, and digital content management systems.

Library Excellence

Domain

Benchmarking library services and librarians' skills for excellence in academic library services.

Capability descriptor

Identify and develop key metrics and indicators for skills and services that align with both the goals and resources of their libraries and the broader objectives of the institution.
Delineate and continuously update the expected outcomes of library services for each stratum of the user community, taking into account their perceived and actual knowledge needs.
Incorporate quality assurance processes to ensure that library services deliver positive outcomes that align with the expressed or expected goals of both the library and the institution.
Do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of internally generated data in comparison to peer institutions to benchmark library excellence.
Work with relevant human resources sections to align performance indicators to globally or nationally accepted standards for excellent academic library services.

Library Data Management

Domain

The collection, processing, storage, preservation, accessibility and usability of data generated within the research process by library users.

Capability descriptor

Describe the fundamentals of developing a data management plan.
Drive procedures and use tools that enable methodical and consistent research data collection.
Develop inclusive metadata for describing and creating access points for research data.
Understand the roles of Persistent Identifiers in data management and roles of organizations such as ORCID, Datacite, and Crossref.
Create or identify viable storage options for library research data that takes cognisance of large volume files including discoverable and accessible repositories.
Understand research security measures and subsisting management policies, regulations, and guidelines concerning data management.
Understand data management and how to help library users with making their own research data openly accessible.
Advocate for and practise ethical sharing of research data including linking, reuse, citations, and authenticity.
Advocate for and promote policies, while providing support services that emphasise responsible data management practices.

Course Design

Domain

Planning outcomes, learning resources, and content for a course or unit.

View Resources

Capability descriptor

Materials development

Domain

Planning, development, and preparation of learning activities, learning resources, and materials for a course or unit.

View Resources

Capability descriptor

Facilitating Learning

Domain

Mediating and facilitating content and resources guided by sound pedagogical practices.

View Resources

Capability descriptor

Effective Assessment and Feedback

Domain

Designing and implementing assessment tasks that are aligned with learning outcomes and the provision of appropriate and timely feedback.

View Resources

Capability descriptor

How to

How to Use the CPD Frameworks

Here, we suggest two ways in which you or your institution can use the framework, but institutions and individuals are free to use it to suit their own purposes.

Academics

A university department may decide to conduct a workshop on assessment for its academic staff. It can narrow the focus by choosing one or more of the capability descriptors for the effective assessment and feedback domain.
An institution may wish to foreground some overarching themes for CPD based on their own context. For example, a university in southern Africa might focus on workplace skills, entrepreneurship, social justice, and inclusion. An institution could integrate the theme of workplace skills for example, into one or more of the domains in the framework.

Download the academic framework document for more information.

Academic librarians

An academic library may decide to conduct a workshop on Open Knowledge or Digital Knowledge Management for its academic library. It can narrow the focus by choosing one or more capability descriptors for the corresponding domains.
An institution may wish to conduct CPD programmes for different professionals based on their own context. For example, a university in Kenya might adopt the framework for academic librarians and focus on domains such as Copyright and Licensing, E-Learning, and Partnerships and Collaborations, recognizing the library's crucial role in supporting the launch of a distance education programme for select faculties. The institution could integrate the theme of distance education, for example, into one or more of the domains in the framework.

Download the academic librarian framework document for more information.