OER Websites and Repositories to Which Africa Contributes
This section provides links African repositories and international repositories to which African Higher Education Institutions may contribute. This collection of OER and open access repositories was collected in relation to our themes, namely, Agriculture, Health, Teacher Education and Foundation Skills. There are also however repositories covering all subjects.
OERu
The OERu makes higher education accessible to everyone. Coordinated by the OER Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit organisation, the OERu network of institutions offers free online courses for students worldwide. The OERu partners also provide affordable ways for learners to gain academic credit towards qualifications from recognised institutions.
Partners from Africa include:
- The University of Namibia;
- Botswana Open University;
- North-West University, South Africa; and
- The University of South Africa.
OpenUCT
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 open educational resources. These resources are organised into collections that are mapped against the university's organisational structure.
Early Learning Resource Network
The Early Learning Resource Network is an online platform designed to help governments and others working in education find and download open licensed children’s books and instructional materials for foundational literacy and numeracy programs.
The ELRN also offers easy access to a wide range of other materials, including practical guidance on book procurement, book design, and parent/caregiver resources. The ELRN is growing rapidly with more resources, books, and languages added every day.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers. The scope of Commons is set out on the project scope pages.
Openverse
Openverse is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone.
Openverse searches across more than 700 million images and audio from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It aggregates works from multiple public repositories, and facilitate reuse through features like one-click attribution.
OpenLearn
OpenLearn is an Open University initiative offering free courses to the public. These courses are comprised of articles, educational packages including images and videos on a range of fields including Psychology,Sports and Health.
Merlot African Network
Health Education And Training (HEAT)
Health Education and Training (HEAT) Programme offers courses with the focus on rural community diseases, particularly those without health care. Their course's are structured specifically to meet these needs
Siyavula Open Textbooks
Siyavula is a South African website that offers quality, curriculum-aligned maths and science textbooks span Grades 4-12. You can read them online, or download them all totally for free. It urges learning through practising and offers books with quizzes and questions for learner engagement
The Teacher's Domain
PBS LearningMedia provides educators with access to free digital content and professional development opportunities designed to improve teacher effectiveness and student achievement.
Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA)
Open Education Global (OEG)
Open Education Global is a member-based, global, non-profit supporting the development and use of open education around the world