Photo courtesy of Trust Katsande, Unsplash
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, most African higher education institutions have halted face-to-face classes. But learning can continue, so OER Africa would like to share resources to help you to keep the doors of learning open. In contexts with limited educational means, Open Educational Resources (OER) can contribute to the accessibility of education and can encourage a culture of flexible and collaborative learning, particularly if the learning materials are reused, customized, and shared.
A useful way of accessing such resources is via online knowledge repositories. A knowledge repository is an online database that systematically captures, organizes, and categorizes knowledge-based information. A few examples of OER repositories for the African context are:
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) OER – KNUST OER seeks to promote open learning through an open exploration that enables faculty, students, and the global academic community to access open licensed educational resources to maximize the impact and reach of their scholarly work through open sharing.
FundaOER, an initiative of VVOB, provides a repository of OERs to advance teaching and learning in Initial Teacher Education and Continuing Professional Development in South Africa. Articles, factsheets, videos, and other types of materials, covering different themes and phases, are freely and openly available on the platform.
The African Veterinary Information Portal (AfriVIP) contains materials pertaining to veterinary science. All its course materials, videos, animations, and images carry an open licence.
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 OER. These resources are organized into collections that are mapped against the university's organizational structure.
University World News recently published a list of South African OER, available here
For higher education courseware, the following resources are useful:
- AgShare Pilot and Planning Project
- African Teacher Education Network
- Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA)
- OpenStax
- MERLOT
- Middle East Technical University Open Courseware
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware