OER Africa
An introduction
Kenya Methodist University
Meru, Kenya
8th October, 2009
Who we are
 OER Africa is an innovative new project, headquartered in
Nairobi, under the auspices of SAIDE.
 Established to play a leading role in driving the development and
use of OER in Africa.
 OER Africa brings together all of SAIDE’s OER-related activities
under a common conceptual framework designed to ensure that
the full value proposition of OER is unleashed to the greatest
possible effect in African education.
 Seed funding from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and a
wide variety of projects and partnerships running across Africa,
to deploy African experts and expertise to harness the concept of
OER to the benefit of education systems on the continent and
around the world.
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What is the Vision of OER Africa?
 Vibrant and sustainable African education systems
and institutions that play a critical role in building
and sustaining African societies and economies, by
producing the continent’s future intellectual leaders
through free and open development and sharing of
common intellectual capital.
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What is the Mission of OER Africa?
 To establish dynamic networks of African OER
practitioners by connecting like-minded academics
from across the continent to develop, share, and
adapt OER to meet the higher education needs of
African societies.
 By creating and sustaining human networks of
collaboration – face-to-face and online – OER Africa
will enable African academics to harness the power
of OER, develop their capacity, and become
integrated into the emerging global OER networks
as active participants rather than passive
consumers.
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What is / are OER?
The concept :
 Educational resources that are freely available for
use by educators and learners, without an
accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees.
 OER is not synonymous with online learning or elearning;
 Within an African context, it is anticipated that many
of the resources produced – while shareable in a
digital format (both online and via offline formats
such as CD-ROM) – will be printable.
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The OER Value Proposition
 Whilst OER concept means different things
to different people, we believe that it can
make the following potential contributions to
African education:
1. Increased availability of relevant, need-targeted
learning materials can contribute to more
productive learners and faculty members.
2. Because OER removes restrictions around
copying resources, it holds potential for
reducing the cost of accessing educational
materials.
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OER Value Proposition (2)
3. The principle of adaptation contributes to
enabling learners to be active participants in
educational processes – to learn by doing and
creating – not just by passively reading and
absorbing.
4. Collaborative partnerships of people working in
communities of practice are key: collaborative
OER processes built on networks of peer
members can lead to increased availability of
relevant, need-targeted learning materials
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OER Value Proposition (3)
5. OER has the potential to build capacity in
African education by providing educators with
access, at low or no cost, to the tools and
content that they need to boost their ability to
produce high quality educational materials and
complete the necessary instructional design to
integrate such materials into high quality
programmes of learning.
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Requirements for Successful
Implementation
 Collaborative partnerships within Africa, and
between African education institutions and those
from other parts of the world;
 Ownership by African educators of resulting OER
products – simply importing content into Africa from
other parts of the world will do nothing to solve
capacity and resource constraints in African
education systems.
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Requirements for Success (2)
 Development of OER cannot be a sideline activity –
dev’t of learning resources should be integrated
into institutional or systemic processes in order to
be successful and sustainable.
 Policies, e.g. intellectual property rights,
remuneration, and promotion, need to support and
sustain licensing of educational materials as OER.
 Whilst potential of OER lies within active
collaborations and a new economic model for
procuring and publishing learning materials,
ultimate key will be that OER will help overstretched educators to manage their work more
effectively.
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Our Operational Approach
 Wherever possible, to try to build
relationships with existing networks of
African education systems, institutions, and
educators, and provide support of different
kinds to the networks, to institutions, and to
individual educators:
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1. Institutional Policy Engagement
 Success and sustainability of OER is predicated
upon its meaningful integration into the institutional
processes of a university.
 OER Africa offers African universities practical
support in the mapping and review of their existing
policies with regard, for example, to intellectual
property rights, materials development, and
remuneration.
 We facilitate the adaptation of such policies / their
elaboration into an over-arching OER policy
framework that, in accordance with your particular
circumstances, will support and sustain the
development and use of OER.
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2. Development or Adaption
OER for Higher Education Programmes
 Aim is improved quality and more effective
management of delivery costs;
 Examples range from single modules to
processes aimed at developing entire
programmes;
 Support to HEI program dev’t or adaptation
takes 10 key forms;
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Development or Adaption (2)
 Supporting initial design and planning of the
proposed development process;
 Assisting in materials audits so as to catalogue
their intellectual property and the copyright
conditions governing those materials;
 Providing ongoing guidance regarding licensing
issues;
 Searching global repositories and other
appropriate sources for potentially relevant
materials;
 Broadening searches by targeting the global OER
‘movement’ on behalf of African universities;
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Development or Adaption (3)
 Facilitating materials development/adaptation
processes where required;
 Supplying instructional design expertise to support
the process as appropriate;
 Providing management support to materials
development processes where this is required;
 Assisting with generation of meta-data for OER
produced (whether new or adapted); and
 Using the OER Africa platform – www.oerafrica.org
– to make OER produced in Africa accessible to the
global OER community.
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3. Support to Collaborative Networks
 Assisting to convene the network (particularly
in instances where a need for collaboration has
been identified, but no functioning network yet
exists);
 Facilitating processes to design collaborative
projects for such networks;
 Supporting development of funding proposals
for the network (particularly important as much
collaboration is undermined by the limits of
available funds to allow institutions to dedicate
human capacity to collaborative activities);
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3. Support to Collaborative Networks
 Managing collaborative projects in the field of
OER, where this is requested by the network;
 Providing online tools for collaboration and
sharing through the OER Africa website; and
 Providing other forms of support as
appropriate to help to ensure the success and
sustainability of the network.
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WORKING WITH PARTNERS:
HEALTH OER
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OER Africa Activities (Summary)
Structured Institutional Engagement:
 Initial OER Sensitization & Exploration;
 Policy Reviews to support development supportive
institutional environment;
 Materials Audits;
 Proof of Concept Pilots in support of the
reinvention of African higher education program
curricula;
 Regular & ongoing communication / relationshipbuilding.
 A one-stop OER online platform – www.oerafrica.org
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Q&A
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“Give a man a fish; you have fed him
for today.
Teach a man to fish; and you have
fed him for a lifetime”
Author unknown
Thank you
Catherine Ngugi
Project Director
[email protected]
Thank you
Catherine Ngugi
Project Director
[email protected]