Resources

This case study explores the U.S. Department of Labour's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant programme, which was a major investment to promote the ability of U.S. community colleges to address the challenges of today's workforce.

This case study explores TESS-India. Initiated in 2012, TESS-India is an award-winning programme established to strengthen and transform professional development activities and classroom practices in India. Through a collaboration with 200 Indian and international teachers and teacher education experts, the programme has developed nearly 200 Open Educational Resources (OER) in multiple languages.

The African Virtual University (AVU) launched its OER initiative called OER@AVU in 2011. It was part of a larger project designed to increase access to affordable education at AVU’s 27 partner institutions spanning 22 countries. It sought to encourage the collaborative creation and sharing of open, distance, and e-learning resources.

This case study addresses the LiDA suite, which is made up of four micro-courses developed by the OERF that are delivered virtually, with the aim of supporting adults in developing digital and critical media literacy skills for learning online.

In mid-2017, OER Africa commenced a series of interrelated research activities to explore in more detail the relationship between educationally effective use of OER and Continuous Professional Development (CPD) of African academics, which are brought together in a summary report. The purpose of this work was to move beyond the rhetoric of the OER community to determine what effect the OER movement has had in educational systems and how sustainable this has been.

The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) is a network of small countries that are committed to the collaborative development of free content resources for use in an educational context. Small states represent 32 of the 54 member countries of the commonwealth and, although there are significant variations among them, many experience similar challenges regarding access to high-quality post-secondary education. In response to this challenge, VUSSC was launched by commonwealth Ministers for Education at a conference in Halifax, Canada in 2000.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) is South Africa’s oldest university and one of Africa’s leading teaching and research institutions. The university has a long history of involvement in open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEPs). UCT has spearheaded several open education projects, including OER UCT and the Health OER Project. The University is a member of the Open Education Consortium, an international consortium with approximately 300 universities that make their teaching materials openly available for sharing. This case study examines four of the institution’s key OER initiatives: the OpenUCT Initiative (2011–2014); Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) (2021–2017); the UCT Vice Chancellor’s OER Adaptation Project (2013–2016); and Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) (2018–2021). Each has been selected because of its focus and influence on OER advocacy, practice, and policy for Africa academics.

Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) is a collaborative network that helps to improve the practice of teachers and teacher educators operating across the region. TESSA was conceived as an emergency response to the teacher training crisis in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and has been active since 2005, a time when there was a focus on the millennium development goals of Education for All. Today, it provides both a bank of open educational resources (OER) that are linked to school curricula and a network of educators who work to improve learning and teaching. The OER are designed to support teachers and teacher educators in developing active approaches to learning.

The Open University of Tanzania (OUT) is an open and distance learning (ODL) institution, operating through a network of 30 regional centres and ten coordinating centres spread throughout the United Republic of Tanzania and beyond the country borders to other parts of Africa. OUT has engaged in several open educational resources (OER) initiatives, starting from 2008 when it began working with OER Africa. OER Africa collaborated with the OUT management team, the OUT Institute of Educational and Management Technologies (IEMT), and the OUT Library to implement the activities of the Institutionalization of OER Practices Project. The project was framed by a Participatory Action Research approach designed to share and disseminate the project outcomes.

Open Education Influencers (OEIs), or #OpenEdInfluencers, is an initiative based at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The initiative has been operational in an informal capacity since 2015 but has been officially operational in its current form since 2018. Led by Gino Fransman from NMU, it seeks to influence decision-makers to adopt open educational resources (OER) through advocacy and facilitation, while aiming to affect decision-making and practice through activities to publicise and entrench the use of open education praxis.

Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face critical shortages of resources related to eye health, such as limited training facilities and training personnel, as well as a shortage of ophthalmologists and eye care specialists. Open Education for Eye Health (OEEH), an initiative led by the International Centre for Eye Health (ICEH) at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), responds directly to these issues. The programme focuses on collaboratively developing and delivering a series of seven open online courses and associated open educational resources (OER). It aims to empower students, educators, managers, and leaders in eye health to build knowledge and skills in public health eye care and strengthen both clinical and teaching practice for the elimination of avoidable blindness.

Open Educational Resource Term Bank (OERTB) was an initiative by the University of Pretoria (UP), the University of Cape Town (UCT), and the South African Department of Higher Education (DHET). It aimed to establish an online, multilingual term bank, specifically aimed at South African university students. The initiative ran between 2014 and 2017, servicing all eleven official South African languages in various subject areas. Today, students are still able to use OERTB to access key subject-specific terms and definitions in one of those languages.

To assess the long-term contribution to establishing sustainable OER practices in African higher education, OER Africa undertook a retrospective analysis of selected initiatives. The research sought to understand their effectiveness and what might be learnt from them to enable better development and support of OER practices. It also aimed to use this engagement to deepen OER Africa’s understanding of professional development needs amongst African academics to enable more effective OER practices. The process involved preparing profiles on several African OER initiatives in higher education to gain an understanding of the effectiveness of each initiative, followed by this analytical summary report. This report collates the findings from the OER initiatives , highlighting the implications of the findings for better development and support for effective OER practices.

OER Africa researched eleven African OER initiatives to assess their long-term contribution to establishing sustainable OER practices in African higher education. This work explored their effectiveness and identified lessons to enable better development and support of OER practices.

With the revival of open and distance learning (ODL) programmes and the development of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) in 2002, the concept of open educational resources (OER) gained traction in Nigeria. As part of the staff development process for NOUN, OER became one of the areas where critical capacity building activities were undertaken. In response to the 2012 UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Paris Declaration on OER, NOUN initiated an OER project in 2014, which involved all faculties at the institution. The aim of the ongoing project was to integrate OER at all levels of teaching and learning at the institution to enhance the quality of and access to higher education.

This initiative focused on policy, practice, and research regarding health-related OER. It covered eleven disciplines at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The initiative was inspired by the reality that CHS had an increasing number of medical students and therefore an increased demand for practical sessions. However, students were often unable to see what was happening in practical sessions because of their large numbers.

The field of veterinary science in Africa has been characterised by under-resourced faculties and schools and a lower quality education in many contexts because of a lack of equipment and teaching resources. OER Africa began engaging with the University of Pretoria’s (UP’s) Faculty of Veterinary Science since 2008 to support the concept of open educational resources (OER).

To facilitate broad take-up and use of the concept of open educational resources (OER) in higher education systems across Africa, OER Africa, has, wherever possible, sought to build relationships with existing networks of educational organizations and individuals. The aim is to provide support of different kinds both to the networks and to individual organizations participating in them. One type of support was collaborative networks, of which the African Teacher Education OER Network (ATEN) was one. This summary is based on desktop research, as well as an interview with the project manager involved in ATEN at the time.