What's Happening in OER in Africa

Open licensing is used for many different kinds of resources – open educational resources (OER), open access research publishing, open data, and more broadly open science. This post discusses developments in access to African research information through repositories that use open licensing. All of the resources are freely available and usually carry a Creative Commons or equivalent license.

OER Africa’s open knowledge primer provides a background on basic concepts and their pertinence to African researchers. OER Africa has also created a Learning Pathway on publishing using open access, which defines terms and will help you acquire the skills necessary to publish or advise on publishing research using Open Access (OA).

Like their global counterparts, many African research institutions and universities are increasingly using open licensing to make their research available and visible globally. The number of open access repositories is growing so quickly that it is difficult to keep track of them. The UK International African Institute (IAI) maintains a list that is frequently updated. IAI, in collaboration with AfricarXiv, has created an interactive map of African digital research literature repositories. You can also search on Google or the search engine of your choice by entering the name of an institution or country and repository (though this would require you to know better what you are looking for).

University open access repositories collect student theses and dissertations, case studies, conference papers, and sometimes journal articles. There are also continent-wide repositories. Three are discussed below. One focuses on university research output; one is a pre-print service; and one is discipline specific.

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Database of African Theses and Dissertations

The Association of African Universities maintains the Database of African Theses and Dissertations, including Research (DATAD-R). At this writing, universities in six countries contribute to DATAD-R. There are over 29,000 theses and dissertations and 4,700 research articles.

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AfricArXiv African Preprint Service

The AfricArXiv African Preprint Service is a part of the worldwide ArXiv movement in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. ArXiv has become an important vehicle to speedily pre-publish scientific research and data on the coronavirus. The platform is maintained by Cornell University. Although contributions are not peer reviewed, ArXiv relies on a strong team of scientists as moderators and advisors.

Launched in 2018, AfricArXiv is an initiative of the Project for Open Science. This service allows African scientists to mount preprints of their research for review and discussion by peers in the international scholarly community before publication in a scholarly journal. AfricArXiv, which does not peer review submissions, sees itself as a way for African scientists to circulate their research quickly and freely in order to communicate with others in their field. It does not replace publication in a peer-reviewed journal. AfricArXiv is collaborating with Science Open to collect COVID-19 research in and about Africa.

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Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM)

RUFORUM, is a continent-wide consortium in 126 African universities and 38 countries. It operates an open access knowledge repository in the broad-based agricultural sciences, with copies of theses and dissertations, journal articles, case studies, briefing papers, policy briefs, posters, presentations, and conference papers from RUFORUM member universities and RUFORUM staff.

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Click on the links below to access other articles in this series.

• OER Africa COVID-19 Statement (3 April, 2020)
• Understanding OER in a Context that Necessitates Remote Learning (9 April 2020)
• Showcasing OER Platforms: OER Africa (15 April, 2020)
• Online (and offline) reading resources for children (23 April, 2020)
• How to Find Open Content (30 April, 2020)
• OER Repositories in Africa (8 May, 2020)
• Emergency Remote Teaching Webinar Series – All resources available (18 May 2020)

Photo courtesy of Trust Katsande, Unsplash

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, most African higher education institutions have halted face-to-face classes. But learning can continue, so OER Africa would like to share resources to help you to keep the doors of learning open. In contexts with limited educational means, Open Educational Resources (OER) can contribute to the accessibility of education and can encourage a culture of flexible and collaborative learning, particularly if the learning materials are reused, customized, and shared. 

A useful way of accessing such resources is via online knowledge repositories. A knowledge repository is an online database that systematically captures, organizes, and categorizes knowledge-based information. A few examples of OER repositories for the African context are:

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) OER – KNUST OER seeks to promote open learning through an open exploration that enables faculty, students, and the global academic community to access open licensed educational resources to maximize the impact and reach of their scholarly work through open sharing.

FundaOER, an initiative of VVOB, provides a repository of OERs to advance teaching and learning in Initial Teacher Education and Continuing Professional Development in South Africa. Articles, factsheets, videos, and other types of materials, covering different themes and phases, are freely and openly available on the platform.

The African Veterinary Information Portal (AfriVIP) contains materials pertaining to veterinary science. All its course materials, videos, animations, and images carry an open licence.

OpenUCT is the open access institutional repository of the University of Cape Town (UCT). It makes available and digitally preserves the scholarly outputs produced at UCT, including theses and dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, technical and research reports, and OER. These resources are organized into collections that are mapped against the university's organizational structure.

University World News recently published a list of South African OER, available here

For higher education courseware, the following resources are useful:

• AgShare Pilot and Planning Project
• African Teacher Education Network
• Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA)
• OpenStax
• MERLOT
• Middle East Technical University Open Courseware
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware

While many educators appreciate the value of openly licensed content, the issue is how to find these resources. Many educators and developers struggle to search for and identify useful resources.

OER Africa has prepared an interactive, multimedia rich, learning pathway on just this topic. It identifies a suggested simple set of procedures to find open resources that align with your curriculum requirements. 

The learning pathway is short, concise, and comprises eight segments of approximately 20 minutes each. 

The eight segments in the Find Open Content learning pathway cover:

1. Why find and use open content?
2. What is open licensing?
3. Identifying different types of open content
4. How to search for open content using Google
5. Search for open content using Creative Commons search
6. Search for open content on YouTube
7. Search for open content in open repositories
8. How to evaluate the open content discovered.

Access the learning pathway here

World Book and Copyright Day on 23 April is a celebration to promote the enjoyment of books and reading. Now that so many of us are at home with our children because of COVID-19, we can explore the virtual world of children’s stories – all free to read and many openly licensed. Some wonderful book and reading resources are listed below. 

African Storybook

With more than 7,200 children’s stories in 190 African languages, African Storybook has something for every child, from the very young ones just learning to read to older children. It’s possible to search in various ways, including by language and reading level, and to download freely and print. Most of the storybooks are created or translated by local educators and reflect African contexts. There is also an excellent guide for parents, teachers, and librarians on Preparing to Use African Storybooks with Children. Over 4,000 of these storybooks can be found on the ASb reader app. Selected books can be downloaded onto a personal library for offline use. 

StoryWeaver

There are more than 19,000 stories in 234 languages on the StoryWeaver platform. StoryWeaver has created a special page on Reading at Home during the Coronavirus school closures. This page links to: learning resources from grades one to eight; StoryWeaver’s special collection on science, mathematics, and technology; its local-language digital libraries, including African languages; and more.

Book Dash

Book Dash believes that every child should own one hundred books by the age of five. This South African non-profit gathers creative professionals who volunteer to create new, African storybooks that anyone can freely translate, print and distribute. It creates beautiful, high-quality books for young children in all South African languages. They currently have over 100 titles. Book Dash also has a short guide on Tips for Reading with Young Children.

African Storybook, StoryWeaver, and Book Dash use a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, which means that you can download, print, share, translate, and adapt all of the stories in their collections.

Nal’ibali

Nal’ibali (isiXhosa for “here’s the story”) believes that well-established culture of reading can be a real game-changer for education in South Africa. Literacy skills are a strong predictor of future academic success in all subjects – and children who regularly read and hear engaging stories, in languages they understand, are well equipped and motivated to learn to read and write. Nal’ibali promotes reading and writing in mother tongue languages. 

Nal’ibali has free to download stories and reading resources for children and teenagers, accessible here

Audible

Audible (by Amazon) is a platform that allows you to stream audiobooks. While schools are closed, Audible is allowing free access to stream an incredible collection of stories for children and teenagers, including titles across six different languages. All stories are free to stream on your desktop, laptop, phone or tablet. Note that these titles are currently freely available, but they are protected by full copyright.

The Early Literacy Resource Network

The Early Literacy Resource Network provides links to research and resources on licensing, policies, creation, and use of high-quality children’s materials in the global South. The Teaching Literacy page provides information for teaching reading and literacy skills. For more early literacy resources and information on how Creative Commons licences are used, access Good Stories Don't Grow on Trees: A Guide to Effective Costing of Storybooks in the Global South.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread, millions of learners and educational institutions globally have had to make rapid, unforeseen changes to how they run their learning programmes. Face-to-face teaching and learning have become impossible in many countries and there is uncertainty over when educational institutions will reopen their doors. This may have long-term effects on school programmes, examinations, and most importantly, learning. 

The pandemic has forced many educators and learners to explore new modes of learning provision such as online learning. It also places much greater emphasis on students being able to engage with educational resources as a primary mode of learning. Fortunately, over the last decade, a growing number of open educational resources (OER) have been made available by people in the education space for others to use. These OER offer great promise in ensuring that a range of educational materials are accessible to learners and educators.

What are OER?

There are many definitions of OER, one of the most comprehensive being:

Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property licence that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. (Hewlett Foundation, OER Defined)

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration states that OER should be freely shared through open licences that facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement, and sharing by anyone. The materials need to be published in formats that allow for both use and editing, while accommodating manipulation and adoption on various technical platforms. It also requires that materials be made available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet, where possible.

Creative Commons Licences 

The most common mechanism to share educational resources openly and legally is by using Creative Commons (CC) licences. Creative Commons ‘provides free, easy‐to use copyright licences to make a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work – on conditions of your choice’ (Creative Commons, nd). 

CC licences provide a wonderful opportunity to translate materials into other languages and use them for varying purposes. This is illustrated in the World Bank’s recent rapid response note, Remote Learning and COVID-19: 

A quick inventory of content that can be easily made available via remote learning is a first order of business. Freely available, ‘open education resources’ are plentiful in some languages; in languages where digital learning content is limited, translating existing open education resources from other languages may be worth considering, together with partners. (World Bank, 2020).

Over the years, countless educational materials have been available as OERs and released online. Because they are openly licensed, OERs can be rapidly aggregated and deployed in remote learning contexts to substitute for the loss of face-to-face teaching time caused by institutional shutdowns. With most proprietary educational materials locked behind paywalls and not free to copy or use, OERs can provide educators and students access to free, high quality resources, offered with no threat of litigation from overzealous copyright lawyers. 

In our upcoming series of communiques, we will share tutorials designed to provide users the skills to find and adapt OER. We will identify excellent open reading resources for your children while at home, and even how to start to assemble OER into a learning design. 

Our next installation will be on showcasing OER platforms. We will look at OER Africa’s activities and highlight some of the useful resources and sections on the website.

Image Credit: Bandita, CC-BY-SA 2.0

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL), an inter-governmental organisation headquartered in Burnaby, Canada, is committed to promoting learning for sustainable development. It does this through the use of distance learning and online learning technologies. For more than 30 years, COL has used innovative approaches to open the doors of learning not just for formal education but non-formal and informal learning that is accessible, affordable and available to the last person in the queue.

With an increasing number of states, provinces and even whole countries closing institutions of learning as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 363 million learners worldwide are being impacted (UNESCO, 2020). How can we ensure that valuable time is not lost and our learners at all levels continue to learn wherever they are?

Many countries are planning to offer online learning as an alternative. COL’s experience shows that open, distance and online learning, if done well, can have the same outcomes as campus education without requiring teachers and learners to be in the same place at the same time. However, we recognise that not all schools, colleges and universities are currently well-prepared to fully utilise these approaches, and COL stands ready to share its expertise and resources to enable stakeholders to keep the doors of learning open for all.

In this time of crisis, a suitable response requires a renewed commitment to sharing and re-using open educational resources (OER); exploring novel ways to enable interaction between learners and other learners, learners and teachers, learners and content using online platforms; and to use appropriate technologies so that no one is left behind.

Some guidelines to consider include:

1. Institutions should take emergency policy decisions to adopt alternative ways of teaching, including online learning.
2. Ensure that learning is delivered using ICT tools such as radio, TV, mobile devices so that no learner is disadvantaged.
3. Identify and use existing OER to provide quality learning.
4. Develop and implement strategies for synchronous/asynchronous approaches.
5. Encourage teachers to use free resources such as MoodleCloud to conduct online classes.

COL has compiled a selection of resources and tools as a first response to this crisis. The resources can be accessed below.

What is Open Education Week?

Founded in 2013 by the Open Education Global (previously Open Education Consortium), the goal of Open Education Week is to raise awareness and showcase impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide. Open Education Week has become one of the most foremost global events recognizing high achievement and excellence in open education.

The week-long event spotlights amazing work from over a dozen categories including live, face-to-face events, webinars, projects, and resources.

For more information, visit the Open Education week website: https://www.openeducationweek.org/

For resources and projects, see: https://www.openeducationweek.org/resources

For Open Education Week 2020 online and offline events, check out: https://www.openeducationweek.org/events

Is your organization hosting any events for OE Week? Let us know in the comments below or let us know on Twitter: https://twitter.com/oerafrica
 

This report assesses students’ access to educational materials in select institutions within Commonwealth countries. The findings indicate that learners are now engaging with a complex ecosystem of learning materials, both print and digital, in a multitude of differing forms and formats, with various terms of use and durations of sustained access.

This paper demonstrates how the features and affordances of open learning have been developed in new and productive ways to provide school-based continuing professional development for teachers in Zambia. It presents and critically reviews data from 200 teachers who have taken part in phase 1 of the Zambian Education School-based Training (ZEST) – a project which, over the next three years, will be scaled-up across Zambia. The project is underpinned by the belief that knowledge about teaching is co-constructed through participation in, and reflection on, practice. Thus, the emphasis is on empowering teachers to work together to develop practices appropriate to their context – open practices. In the study, we describe an on-going process of realist evaluation which enables us to establish at an early stage what works in which contexts and informs on-going project planning. It concludes that this approach to evaluation has the potential to be helpful in understanding open practices and how they can be developed.

The guidelines describe the whole process for designing and implementing OER policy in seven chapters, each representing a clear phase in the whole process. The chapters introduce the purpose of the phase and provide background information and references with practical examples for illustration. At the end of each chapter, specific tasks are set for the policy-maker, which will help with formulating of the final OER policy. The guidelines start with an introduction to the potential of OER and then ask the policy-maker to determine the vision of the OER policy she or he has in mind. This policy needs a framework, which determines on what level of the education system the policy will be set (scale) and which sector of the education system the policy will cover (focus). This sets out the first part of the theory of change – i.e., it determines what change is envisaged through the policy.

A gap analysis is then necessary to provide a realistic picture of the challenges and the opportunities that the current educational system, its infrastructure, its key members and the overall policy context present for the new OER policy. This can be used as a backdrop for designing the masterplan, which takes the building blocks present in a standard OER policy and specifies them for the specific policy context. These building blocks indicate what is going to be changed. An implementation plan adopts a strategy for how to realise the masterplan effectively and to ensure that all key stakeholders are involved. This phase includes setting up an evidence base and monitoring framework so that the policy can be adjusted during the implementation phase. Finally, the policy developed needs to be launched, so streamlining and checks against the reality of the context should be carried out. This is where the policy-makers have to focus on the outreach of the policy. In this phase, a policy needs to be officially endorsed by someone in an authoritative position – for example, the cabinet, education minister or president of a country – and by educational leaders, to ensure that it can have an impact on the education system. Moreover, it is important to ensure that the policy has been understood by those it is hoping to influence – i.e., the actors and institutions using OER to make teaching and learning better. Finally, a policy should be ambitious and aim to reach the mainstream in the future. Therefore, a review of implementation and its impacts should lead to a discussion of what shape the next-generation policy should take and how the scope and scale of this policy can be extended.

The key readers of this publication are those directly involved in policy design. The aims of these guidelines are to help these people to:

• Understand essential subject-matter knowledge on OER through a learning-by-doing process
• Develop a set of procedural knowledge on OER policy planning, working through key steps necessary for designing a comprehensive OER policy
• Reinforce the contextual knowledge needed to leverage OER in achieving SDG 4 through assessing the policy context and needs for OER, planning institutionalised programmes and drawing up a contextualised masterplan
• Ensure the commitment to policy adoption and implementation through integrating stakeholder engagement into the policy-planning process and determining adequate policy endorsement and implementation strategies
• Enhance the quality of policy implementation by planning a mechanism for monitoring and evaluation, and working towards an evidence based policy-planning and updating cycle.

Although textbooks are a traditional component in many higher education contexts, their increasing price have led many students to forgo purchasing them and some faculty to seek substitutes. One such alternative is open educational resources (OER). This study by John Hilton III synthesizes results from sixteen efficacy and twenty perceptions studies involving 121,168 students or faculty that examine either (1) OER and student efficacy in higher education settings or (2) the perceptions of college students and/or instructors who have used OER.

On Wednesday 3 April 2019, Neil Butcher of OER Africa conducted a webinar for librarians, hosted by the African Library & Information Associations & Institutions (AfLIA). The webinar was the first in a series of three on open education resources (OER) for librarians. In the webinar, Butcher introduced librarians to OERs, and described the Creative Commons licences licensing conditions. Butcher explained that librarians need to spend time understanding the licences to be able to explain them to library users, so that these users can get maximum value from OERs and also create and share their own work. Butcher discussed the opportunities presented to librarians, students, and academics through the use of OER, as well as various OER repositories to be found online. These OER repositories provide a platform for content creators to show African content to the world, and ensure that African content creators are active in global knowledge networks. Butcher presented examples of African OERs in practice, and explained how institutional policies on OER use and Internet access are essential for African academic libraries. The webinar was well received, and over 100 librarians participated.

In Webinar 2 in the series, held on 17 April 2019, Lisbeth Levey introduced Open Access (OA) publishing and licensing models. Lisbeth described how to determine reputable OA publishers. Dr Tony Lelliott explained how OER and OA intersect, and how good research can help educators prepare up-to-date and relevant learning materials. He identified African institutional repositories and discussed the importance of institutional OA policies and repository management. By the end of this webinar, librarians understood the ramifications of high-cost journal subscriptions, how they can help researchers identify high-quality OA journals, and how to manage institutional repositories. Librarians should be able to situate themselves as champions of OA within the university community. Webinar participants responded with many questions for the presenters, indicating deep engagement with the topic.

Webinar 3, on 2 May 2019, closed out the series by contemplating the implications of OER for librarians. In the first two webinars, librarians learned how to find and assess openly licenced resources. In the final webinar, presented by Kirsty von Gogh, librarians discovered how to integrate what they learned about openly licences resources into their work. With access to openly licenced resources, librarians need to establish processes for managing this content and to find ways of supporting academics and students to access and use high-quality research and resources.

For more on the webinars series, visit: http://web.aflia.net/open-educational-resources-oer-webinar-series-for-african-librarians/

The webinars are available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPaQeggWf7gVPSkLhYl9_8g

This free online course on OER from the Commonwealth of Learning has recently been updated. It is interactive and on completion you can download a certificate of participation.

We are excited to announce that the Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning (PEBL) Project, a collaborative project to develop blended learning courses with university partners across East Africa, will be using our platform to showcase these OER.

For a fifth consecutive year, Open Praxis has partnered with the Open Education Consortium for the publication of selected papers among those presented in the 2018 Open Education Global Conference. The conference theme was Transforming Education Through Open Approaches. This latest issue is now available on the Open Praxis website.

The African Virtual University (AVU) has released 1,335 Open Educational Resources (OERs) under the Creative Commons license CC BY 2.5. The new materials include 234 open textbooks or modules, 83 videos and 945 learning objects extracted from the modules. All resources are freely available online at OER@AVU http://oer.avu.org, an initiative launched in 2011 with some 288 open resources. OER@AVU has been a great contribution to the African and global OER communities; as of July 2018, it hosts a total of 1,623 resources available in English, French and Portuguese.

Discover ten key facts about open educational resources (OERs) in an easy to digest format. Each fact is supplemented with links to worldwide resources extending and deepening the core idea. Learn how OERs help make quality learning accessible, relevant and equitable. Ten Key Facts About OERs is the second in a series by Contact North on current and emerging tools influencing and shaping online learning such as Blended Learning, Learning Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Online Proctoring.

London School of Economics Press has launched the latest in a succession of new university press initiatives and one that will support the development of high-quality, academic-led, open access publications in the social sciences. Kieran Booluck provides details of the first LSE Press journal and outlines plans for the press to pursue more innovative publications and experiment with new types of content.

The Open Pedagogy Notebook has been set up by Rajiv Jhangiani from Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia and Robin deRosa from the Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. They are encouraging online submissions of examples of open pedagogical practices from practioners throughout the world.

The BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide is a reference for individuals or groups wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook. This guide provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook. This looks like a very useful resource for the OER Africa partners.

Ten Year's since the Cape Town Declaration, Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Foundation reflects on OER developments.

The OpenMed Consortium has recently released materials that form part of a capacity building course entitled "Open Education Fundamentals and Approaches - A Learning Journey to Open Up Teaching in Higher Education". Neil Butcher provides a review.

Jenny Glennie and Neil Butcher recently attended the 2nd World OER Congress in Slovenia.  South Africa was represented by the Honourable Minister Angie Motshekga, Minister of the Department of Basic Education.  Ministers present reaffirmed their committment of the important role of OERs in the attached Ministerial Statement.

Amanda Coolidge, Senior Manager , Open Education at BC Campus, and Daniel De Marte, Chief Academic Officer at Tidewater Community College have released an interactive toolkit to support institutions develop open policies. The toolkit is licensed CC BY and institutions are free to reuse it, remix it, revise it, and/or redistribute it.