ANU and OER Africa

ANU and OER Africa have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that commits the two organisations to working together to:

• Support ongoing design, development, and implementation of ODeL programmes at ANU;
• Integrate as appropriate of OER into both ODeL and face-to-face programmes at ANU;
• Showcase emerging best practices at ANU to be shared with the broader higher education community within and beyond Africa;
• Lobby the broader higher education community within and beyond Africa regarding the merits of collaboratively creating and sharing intellectual capital in higher education as a mechanism to improve quality and enhance long-term cost-effectiveness;
• Mobilize release of OER in areas of prioritized strategic importance for African (and global) higher education; and, where appropriate;
• Jointly prepare new project and funding proposals.

To strengthen UFS’s capacity to harness OER effectively, our collaboration with them is focussed on the following specific activities:

1. Establish an open licensing framework, as part of a wider review of the institution’s Intellectual Property Policy, which enables academics to incorporate openly licensed materials in their courses as appropriate and allows academics to follow a defined process to apply open licences to their course materials and research products where there are valid reasons for doing this.
2. Systematically integrate high quality, available OER as appropriate into courses and their subsequent release for use by others, through a process of developing the capacity of both academics and staff of the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to make effective use of OER, as well as ongoing professional development of academic and support staff to enable this.
3. Explore the role that OER might play in helping to advance various policy objectives of the CTL.

Harness OER to enable student success and to support continuing professional development of university staff.

OUT and OER Africa

Building on an earlier relationship, OER Africa and OUT collaboratively took stock of their partnership goals and identified specific OUT needs which the two institutions will seek to address during this grant period. These include:

1. The institutionalisation of OER at OUT, including support for the review and update of a variety of OER related institutional policies;
2. Capacity development for academic staff teaching and learning with OER, including the development of a new open professional development course on Digital Fluency, comprising five modules;
3. Support for the further enhancement of the OUT Digital Library Portal and Open Repository, including developing processes for transforming existing OUT courses to OER.

In consultation with the OUT management team and in collaboration with the OUT Institute of Educational and Management Technologies (IEMT) and the OUT Library, OER Africa is providing support processes to meet the needs expressed above. These activities are framed by an approach that is designed to share and disseminate the project outcomes.

UP African Veterinary Information and OER Africa

Over the past six years, OER Africa has worked closely with UP’s Faculty of Veterinary Science (known as Onderstepoort) to support the launch of its African Veterinary Information (AfriVIP). This portal is part of a broad vision both to share all of its intellectual property under an open license.

AfriVIP is being used to systematically integrate the use of OER into both formal educational programmes and continuing professional development (CPD) activities at Onderstepoort. OER Africa will work with the Faculty to continue to expand this work by:

2. Supporting effective design of CPD courses that use openly licensed materials stored in AfriVIP;
3. Working with academics to integrate use of the AfriVIP Portal and its resources into the delivery of both postgraduate and undergraduate programmes;
4. Facilitating a wider institutional advocacy process to share the lessons learned at Onderstepoort as a basis for re-development of key institutional policies;
5. Broadening the base of participation in the development and management of the AfriVIP Portal to other faculties of veterinary science in Southern and Eastern Africa.

As part of OER Africa’s institutionalization grant OER Africa is also involved in supporting the Faculty’s curriculum review processes, particularly with an interest in investigating how OER might be used to enhance teaching and learning at the institution.