Open Source and Open Content

Professor Moustapha Diack is the Director of MERLOT Africa Network, an educational network of the African Higher Education Institutions. At eLearning Africa, he will organise a first forum on Open Educational Resources on May 28th. Edris Kisambira from the eLA editorial team, talked to Prof Diack about the potential of multimedia content that is made available free of charge through the MERLOT network.
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How can African journalists benefit from the Web 2.0 revolution? Web 2.0 and all of its manifestations have been a major turning point in media history. For the first time ever, the mass media has had to deal with a dialogic challenge as readers begin to actively involve themselves in the making of news and deciding what is news and what is not. They have even begun to produce their own content through so-called grass roots journalism or citizens’ journalism. This is indeed a huge challenge for the traditional media, all over the world. PenPlusBytes, an international organisation, seeks to empower journalists through the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). Brenda Zulu reports.
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Teacher in primary
school in northern
Laos,© Wikimedia
Commons

Wikiversity is organising an online course “Composing free and open online educational resources”. Starting on March 3, 2008, the course is designed for teachers and teacher-students who do not have prior knowledge or skills related to free and open education resources.
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The MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) Council will host the First Africa Forum on Open Educational Resources (OER) in conjunction with the eLearning Africa Conference. The Network plans to use the annual eLearning Africa events as a hub for creating awareness of the potential of open education resources and for collaboration in higher education around the globe.
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Open Educational Resources (OER) - educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use - are becoming increasingly important for education in Africa. To reward excellence in the OER movement, the MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) and eLearning Africa announce the opening of nominations for the first MAN-eLA Awards for Exemplary OER Practices.
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The objective of this open platform is to provide users with training and capacity-building resources on literacy and other subjects. It will also provide a space to share training material.

Developed by a variety of stakeholders worldwide in co-operation with UNESCO, the platform advocates open content in non-formal education. Most of the training programmes have open licenses which make them accessible to all for teaching and learning. Besides literacy, the subjects covered include computers, business, environment and community development.
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