About OER Africa

OER Africa is a Saide initiative in partnership with NBA. It was established in 2008 with a vision to support the emergence of:

Vibrant and sustainable African education systems and education institutions that empower academics and leaders to implement OER effectively, thereby enhancing the affordability and quality of higher education.

Man smiling and using laptop and cell phone

The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation have provided OER Africa with grants from 2008 to date to support our work and our mission:

To establish dynamic networks of African OER practitioners by sensitising and connecting like-minded educators – teachers, academics, academic librarians, trainers, and policy makers – to develop, share, and adapt OER to meet the education needs of African societies.
 
By creating and sustaining networks of collaboration – face-to- face and online – OER Africa supports African educators and learners to harness the power of OER. In turn, they can develop their capacity and join emerging global OER networks as active participants who showcase Africa’s intellectual property, rather than passive consumers of knowledge produced elsewhere.

Current Work

OER Africa is undertaking collaborative work to develop the professional competences and skills of stakeholders within African higher education institutions so that they can implement OER practices to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

We Are:

  • Developing and testing effective models of continuous professional development (CPD) for supporting OER practices in higher education institutions;
  • Collaborating with African universities to foster policy and institutional environments that support effective CPD implementation;
  • Developing an online collection of CPD OER in higher education; and
  • Establishing a CPD network to share lessons learned.

Our Website Showcases:

Projects

Current Work

Improve African universities' abilities to use OER effectively to support quality teaching and learning.

OER Africa is undertaking collaborative work to develop the professional competences and skills of stakeholders within African higher education institutions so that they can implement OER practices to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

Open Education Tutorials

OER Africa has developed, and continues to test, innovative alternative approaches to continuing professional development (CPD) for academics. One strategy has been to develop Open Education Tutorials for university academic staff that will empower them to embrace open education.

Advanced Diploma in Technical and Vocational Teaching (ADTVT)

The South African Advanced Diploma in Technical and Vocational Teaching (Adv Dip TVT) is the product of an initiative of the South African National Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) in association with the University of Free State and Saide who was responsible for the design and the development of the course Modules.

OER Courseware, Research and Policies

There are many OER repositories online and their number is growing. The OER Africa website aims to be the primary place to find African-produced OER. It is not, however, a comprehensive collection of ALL OER available online. We encourage you to also explore the other websites we have listed under OER Repositories.

Highlights

Our Website Showcases

Abstract painting

OER Africa has developed, and continues to test, innovative alternative approaches to continuing professional development (CPD) for academics. One strategy has been to develop Open Education Tutorials for university academic staff that will empower them to embrace open education.

The South African Advanced Diploma in Technical and Vocational Teaching (Adv Dip TVT) is the product of an initiative of the South African National Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) in association with the University of Free State and Saide who was responsible for the design and the development of the course Modules.

There are many OER repositories online and their number is growing. The OER Africa website aims to be the primary place to find African-produced OER. It is not, however, a comprehensive collection of ALL OER available online. We encourage you to also explore the other websites we have listed under OER Repositories.

Projects

Grant Activities

Grants Six and Seven: Developing the professional competences and skills of stakeholders within African higher education institutions

Since mid-2019, building on the research from Grant 5, OER Africa has been developing the professional competences and skills of stakeholders within African higher education institutions so that they can implement OER practices to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

During Grant 6, we created an evidence-based CPD framework comprising a set of inter-related Open Education Tutorials on effective OER practices. These seek to systematically develop African academics’ competence while providing immediate access to relevant and useful skills and knowledge that will make their teaching and learning easier to implement and more effective.

Building on the knowledge gained through the pilot implementation of the Open Education Tutorials and emerging partnerships with the Association of African Universities (AAU) and the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA), OER Africa is focusing on four key outcomes for Grant Seven. This includes developing CPD frameworks for personnel in higher education institutions, establishing an online collection of CPD OER in higher education, launching a CPD network, and working with a group of African higher education institutions to create supportive environments for effective CPD implementation.

Grant Five: A Focus on Continuing Professional Development

This grant was implemented between August 2017 and February 2019. Our main research interest in this Grant was to determine what kinds of continuing professional development (CPD) are needed by African faculty to be able to implement these improvements successfully and sustainably, as well as to model approaches to CPD that might be scaled successfully without additional cost once they have demonstrated their effectiveness.

During the project, OER Africa worked with several higher education and training institutions:

  • Haramaya University
  • Dire Dawa University
  • Mekelle University
  • Vaal University of Technology (VUT)
  • National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN)
  • Open University of Tanzania
  • Dar es Salaam College of Education (DUCE)
  • University of the Free State (UFS)
  • South Africa’s Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Colleges

Grant Four: Institutional Engagement

People using computers

The aim of this grant which ended in July 2017 was to embed OER practices within African Higher Education Institutions through improving both content and delivery of higher education by promoting a contextually relevant model for harnessing OER.

We worked with the following institutions:

Work we had started in the previous grant in working with institutions to develop specific OER policy for their institutions or have the development and use of OER incorporated in their intellectual property was galvanised in this grant.

Attached is a record of all our outputs from this grant.

Grants Two and Three: Implementation and expansion of networks

People using computers and talking

In this three-year grant, OER Africa focused attention on raising awareness about the benefits of OER, supported collaborative development, adaptation and implementation processes within faculties, courses and programmes, and supported development and elaboration of OER policy frameworks at institutional, national, regional and continental levels.

Our work with networks expanded during the period of this grant to include:

  • African Council for Distance Education (ACDE)
  • Agriculture Education Network – this included collaborating with the Agshare planning and pilot project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. OER sensitisation took place at Makerere in Uganda, USIU and Moi in Kenya and Haramaya in Ethiopia. Agshare II was a collaboration with three institutions, Haramaya and Mekelle Universities in Ethiopia and Makerere University in Uganda to create and openly share different types of OER that strengthen MSc agriculture faculty. RUFORUM came on board as a new partner in this phase
  • African OER Teacher Education Network which included working with the Open University (UK) TESSA Initiative.
  • Health OER Network – Work here was expanded during this period through a separate grant from the Hewlett Foundation. A consultative forum with partners and representatives from other African countries was held in 2009.
Person typing on a computer keyboard

The network spaces were strengthened with both internally developed resources and external resources, such as:

Research was conducted and documented in the form of case studies, which included:

 

OER Awareness Raising, Sensitisation and Support, which included running workshops, building up our repository to support and strengthen theoretical understanding of OER, was provided to:

We developed and supported development of the following resources and toolkits:

Room full of empty chairs and desks for students

Communities of practice were established and provided space on the OER Africa website to collaborate in the development of course materials and also to provide a home for their OERs.

We also prioritized research activities during this period to understand current OER practice in Africa, user needs and contextual factors. The following were the research outputs:

Grant One: Planning

Male and female students standing outside

This first grant was exploratory with a specific aim to establish strategic partnerships with higher education institutions in Africa. A research report Revisiting the challenges for higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of the Open Educational Resources Movement informed the team’s choices as to where we might geographically work most effectively. We joined the University of Michigan to collaborate on an initiative known as Health OER, which aimed to develop health expertise through communities of practice and the development of health OER content with the OER Africa website serving as the collaboration tool The pilot partners in higher education institutions in Africa were: