Institutional Initiative

Initially the project was conceived as an extension of the International Association of Digital Publications? (IADP) Affordable Access project from South Africa into the SADC region. The Affordable Access project provides free and/or heavily discounted copyrighted electronic textbooks to students at tertiary institutions. It relies on Digital Rights Management systems to protect the interests of the publisher.

MAN is a network of partnerships between African and US educational institutions affiliated with the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) and leading global eLearning providers with educational programs targeting Sub-Saharan Africa.

MAN's goal is to facilitate communities of eLearning expertise and capacity building for open education, scholarship, and development in Africa.

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.

The Open Resources for English Language Teaching (ORELT) portal supports classroom activities of teachers of junior secondary schools (JSS). The ORELT project aims to provide a bank of open content multi-media resources in online and traditional text formats that will support school based education and training for teachers in junior secondary schools and provide open content support resources for teacher educators who prepare teachers for junior secondary schools.

Vula Bula, an initiative of Molteno Institute for Language Literacy, is graded reading programme is unique in that each series originates from the respective indigenous South African language - as opposed to being translated from English - and is carefully designed in accordance with the natural phonic progression of that language.

The African Council for Distance Education (ACDE) is a continental educational organization comprising African universities and other higher education institutions, which are committed to expanding access to quality education and training through Open and Distance Learning (ODL) including e-Learning. It is a unifying body of distance education providers and practitioners in Africa, ACDE and was formally launched in January 2004 at Egerton University, Kenya.

The Zimbabwe Open University is a multi-disciplinary and inter-faculty institution of higher learning offering Open and Distance Learning (ODL) programmes. ZOU offers degree and non-degree programmes through distance teaching and open learning to youth and adult learners.

The Open University of Tanzania is the first university in the whole of the East Africa region to offer educational programs through Open and Distance Learning mode. This makes OUT peculiar from conventional residential universities. Through Open and Distance Learning, OUT allows flexible learning environment leading to protracted periods of course completion.

Through our research in Zambia we developed a practical professional development (PD) programme for school-based teacher education, supporting teachers to embed interactive methods of teaching and learning into classroom practice through the exploitation of mobile technologies. It moves beyond technology and skills-focused initiatives by highlighting the crucial role of teacher support in promoting innovation and experimentation with teaching styles.