Open Source and Open Content

Sharing Resources: OER in Higher Education in Africa

Catherine Ngugi has been working in the Open Educational Resources movement in Africa since its early days in 2002. In 2008, she became Project Manager of OER Africa, a new initiative that promotes open and freely shared learning resources from and for African higher education institutions. She explained to eLA how OER Africa works and how it can inspire the OER movement on the Continent and beyond.

eLA: There are already a range of OER initiatives underway and education content repositories available in Africa. What was the reason for establishing a new one – OER Africa?

OER Africa’s mission is to establish vibrant networks of African OER practitioners by connecting like-minded academics from across the Continent to develop, share and adapt OER to meet the higher-education needs of African societies. By creating and sustaining human networks of collaboration – face-to-face and online – OER Africa will enable African academics to harness the power of OER, develop their individual and institutional capacity, and become integrated into the emerging global OER networks as active participants rather than passive consumers.
Learn more at www.oerafrica.org

“In a nutshell, if there is no clear link between institutional policy and participation in the creation, organisation, dissemination and utilisation of OER, then there is only very limited possibility that faculty and institutions will actively engage themselves in OER in the long term.”

Catherine Ngugi: OER Africa seeks to improve teaching and learning within Africa’s institutions of higher education. This is not a sector currently overburdened with resources. However, as you rightly point out, there are several OER initiatives ongoing on the Continent.
Our approach is to facilitate interaction between existing and planned OER projects on the Continent. We believe that informal as well as formal interaction between OER projects is one way to avoid duplication of efforts and what may amount to a dissipation of human and financial resources by individuals and institutions who actually share a common goal.
Not only do we provide spaces for interaction on the OER Africa website at www.oerafrica.org, we support each other via face-to-face meetings and interactions via Skype or other cost-effective communication tools with other individuals and project leaders involved in OER working on the Continent.

eLA: How does the OER Africa website support African scholars?

Catherine Ngugi: The OER Africa website is not merely a content repository. All resources collected for the OER Africa Resource Collection Space are carefully scrutinised for fitness of purpose. The documents must be relevant to the African context and the developing world and to the topics that we have identified for resource collection for the project. Namely, they must provide information about and in support of the practise of OER.

As the OER Africa Plan of Work is informed by ongoing Action Research, this research is also made available to site visitors under the Creative Commons Licensing Framework. In addition, we encourage visitors to the site to upload resources that they find useful. Most critically, however, the meta data for all of this knowledge generated for and by Africa is then sent to global repositories. In this way, OER Africa seeks to showcase the Continent as an active producer of knowledge and not merely a passive consumer of the global knowledge economy.

eLA: Could you provide any data as to how widely used/known the OER movement is in Africa?

Catherine Ngugi: While many educators may have heard of OER, few have had the opportunity to test the concept for themselves. As advocates of OER, we know that unless the processes of creating, using and sharing OER are imbedded within the mindset and the policy environment of an institution, then pilot projects will never grow into fully fledged courses or programmes. When we work with higher education institutions, we often come across the impression that OER is synonymous with content or indeed with electronic learning. It is useful to begin by dispelling myths and providing practical examples of what is possible.

eLA: What is OER Africa's approach towards incentive structures within higher education and how do you facilitate participation in the creation, organisation, dissemination and utilisation of OERs?

Catherine Ngugi: OER Africa works directly with higher education institutions that have clearly identified their own particular needs with regard to teaching and learning.

Such a need may pertain to outdated materials and the skills and interactions required to update existing educational content in a specific area. In other instances, the need may pertain to new ways of teaching, such as the creation and integration of audio-visual resources. In cases where an institution may not have on record a current catalogue of their learning materials, we support them in conducting a materials audit. This facilitates an assessment of what materials exist and in what form; and of these, which are in need of updating, discarding or of a quality good enough to share with others.

OER Africa facilitates materials-development workshops that specifically target the area of need identified by an institution. We also facilitate institutional policy-review workshops under conditions of the strictest confidentiality to review institutions’ existing internal policies that relate, for example, to human resources, educational materials development, copyright and so on.

The purpose is firstly to jointly determine how, if at all, existing policy acts as an incentive to sharing educational resources, and secondly how, if at all, it would be beneficial to the institution to create an institutional framework that is conducive to their engagement with OER processes.

eLA: Communities of practice usually work quite well in higher education. How does OER Africa exploit CoPs?

Catherine Ngugi: A visit to the OER Africa website introduces several Africa-based online CoPs, hosted and supported by OER Africa. We provide spaces for subject-based CoPs that are working in areas such as mathematics, food security and life skills to communicate among themselves; to work on the development of domain-specific OER; to share ideas on the process of resource development; to host their finished products and to share these resources with others on the Continent and beyond.

We also provide both online and face-to-face support to CoP leaders in how they might tailor the online space to suit the particular needs of their communities.

For them as for us, this is a learning process. For anyone interested in setting up an online CoP, an online guide will be available from late March 2009.

The OER Africa website will also federate the meta data generated by these online CoPs and by our own research products with global OER repositories, thereby creating greater visibility for African-created OER. So far, the site has received positive feedback from both casual and regular users. A strategy is now in place to analyse site statistics carefully in order to assess what aspects of the site are of greatest interest to users.

Catherine Ngugi is the Project Director of OER Africa. Prior to holding this post, she established the African Virtual University’s Research & Innovation Facility (RIF) in January 2005 and managed it until September 2007. Ngugi holds an MA from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

She began her career in the private sector, working for a multinational manufacturer. In 1997, she relocated to Dakar, Senegal, to work with CODESRIA (the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), where she initiated and coordinated a grants management system and designed the CODESRIA Endowment Plan. Upon joining Oxfam GB, she conducted regional training sessions in project sustainability across the organisation’s regional group and facilitated the funding by SIDA (Swedish International Donor Agency) of the Oxfam GB West Africa Regional Girls Education Program.

A Rockefeller Associate of the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, Ngugi has worked as a consultant in higher education and the arts to various international organisations headquartered in Nairobi. Her work has been published in Kwani and in the Journal of African Cultural Studies. She has co-edited various publications, including the eight-country report on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Higher Education in Africa commissioned by the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) for the Educational Technology Initiative of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA).

Le Site de REL Afrique servira aussi à fédérer les Meta données générées par ces communautés de pratiques en ligne mais aussi par nos propres recherches dans les bibliothèques globales  de REL. Nous pourrons ainsi donner une meilleure visibilité aux REL créées en Afrique. A ce jour, nous avons eu des retours positifs de la part des utilisateurs réguliers et occasionnels. Notre stratégie est désormais d’analyser méthodiquement les statistiques de notre site avec pour mesurer quels éléments du site sont les plus intéressants pour les utilisateurs.

eLA: Are there any plans to cooperate with existing OER initiatives?
Catherine Ngugi: OER Africa has established relationships with institutions, faculties and networks interested in working with OER. Since its inception in 2008, OER Africa has supported the African Council for Distance Education (ACDE) Working Group on Collaboration, which, through the facilitation and services proffered by OER Africa, is seeking to design collaborative courses to be jointly offered across this network of African open universities.

As an impartial partner, we have been able to act as a convener of and facilitator to processes requested by the diverse ACDE membership. This is critical for an association such as ACDE, whose growing pan-African membership comprises 26 African institutional members from 11 countries.

Health OER is a network of higher education institutions, facilitated by OER Africa and  the University of Michigan. Currently, the network comprises the University of Ghana, the Kwame Nkruma University of Science and Technology, the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape. Membership of Health OER is expected to grow during 2009 to include other potential partners with which OER Africa is engaging separately. Here, as with other CoPs nurtured by OER Africa, each partner has a specific role to play. In this instance, the participating universities ahve identified specific areas in which they wish to develop OER pilots, to meet particular needs. These pilots are underpinned by institutional processes undertaken by OER Africa and enhanced by subject-matter expertise provided by the University of Michigan.

The end products of these OER proof-of-concept pilots will be made available for use by all concerned via the www.oerafrica.org platform.

eLA: Many thanks for your time.

February 19, 2009

Newsportal: Open Source and Open Content