OER Initiatives in African Higher Education Summary Report: Successes, challenges, and lessons learnt

Open educational resources (OER) are often endorsed as offering several potential benefits to improving education including: increasing access to educational materials; improving scalability and circulation of resources; providing the opportunity to adapt resources to suit students’ needs and contexts; and obviating the need to buy expensive textbooks that are often not relevant for the context. , ,  The term ‘OER’ was coined in 2002 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Although the concept of OER emerged in the Global North through initiatives like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) MITOpenCourseWare initiative in 2001, OER are gaining traction in Africa, with an increasing number of OER initiatives focusing on areas such as OER advocacy, practice, and research. Today, the concept has been codified around the world, particularly through the unanimous adoption of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER in 2019.

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.