A Contribution Towards Innovating Continuing Professional Development in African Higher Education Institutions

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the importance of professional development on effective teaching and learning for university academics into sharp relief. As has been reported in numerous publications during 2020 to 2022, universities found themselves having to close their campuses and unable to teach their students face-toface. Whatever form the teaching has taken, academics have found that traditional lecturing has not been effective when implementing Emergency Remote Teaching or online teaching. The lecture mode of teaching has been regarded as inadequate for the last few decades (e.g. Jones, 2007; Khan, 1997), and the pandemic has brought this into sharp relief.

Traditional CPD has tended to focus on lecture-style inputs, and is regarded in the EU report as ineffective because there is often little relationship between the training and academics’ classrooms and students. One way to mitigate these challenges is to provide short, online tutorials that engage participants in authentic learning tasks that can be done individually or collaboratively in their own time, while they are in the workplace. This paper describes the development and piloting for three of OER Africa’s learning pathways: finding and adapting OER, and Open Access Publishing.