First Africa Forum on Open Education Resources

Open source learning materials, when complemented by digitally-based multimedia and interactive teaching approaches, have great potential to engender significant improvement of educational endeavours in developing countries. Indeed, these free assets could enable rather humble school-based achievements to evolve into world class educational efforts, suggests a recent review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement by Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown and Allen L. Hammond.

In regard to the hardware involved, the report predicts that for the vast majority of people in developing countries, their “PC” and Internet access device will be a mobile phone, a handheld computer or a hybrid of these devices.

If education and technology providers join efforts to offer educational content for these tools, chances are high that the education in the developing countries will improve measurably, the authors contend. While there is obvious logic to this, the fact is that a huge amount of digital learning content available already exists; the issue is how and if educators actually take as much advantage of it as they could.

The Open Education Resources Movement has some answers to offer. Besides making high-quality online resources freely available and sharing pedagogy, colleagues and students from all over the world can collaborate in the improvement of learning and teaching resources. This can be done by translating, making comments, rating, evaluating or adding annotations to the content shared on the web.

The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching Organisation (MERLOT) is one of the leading OER initiatives worldwide, and its first African branch was inaugurated at the end of last year. The MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) has already built partnerships with higher education institutions from all over the Continent, such as the African Virtual University, the National University of Rwanda, Mbarara University of Science and Technology Uganda and many more. The Network is expanding rapidly and by involving higher education institutions from Africa, MAN also strives to add significantly to the global MERLOT e-learning repository.

The First Africa Forum on Open Educational Resources - on May 28th at eLearning Africa in Accra - is a programme organised by the MAN Council that seeks to promote open education resources. Because of the respect the eLearning Africa international conferences have garnered, the various MAN institutions have decided to use the gatherings as the locus for their efforts to initiate international collaboration and networking among African higher education institutions. “The annual events will serve as a venue for the organisation’s discussions”, states Moustapha Diack, the MAN Project Director. “We plan to use it as a hub for our activities, such as the dissemination of best practices and promotion of the adoption of e-learning repositories to support education in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

The First Africa Forum themes focus on global awareness of OER, universal access for all to high quality teaching and learning resources, equal access through internationalisation of resources with multi-language capabilities and research, as well as OER Global Communities of Practices.

The event is organised by MAN in collaboration with eLearning Africa and the African Virtual University.

The forum targets education professionals from all disciplines, including educational researchers, educational trainers, faculty members and teachers from the secondary and higher education sectors.

More information on the First Africa Forum can be found at
http://man.merlot.org/research/MAN%20at%20eLA.html.

January 23, 2008

Further links and resources:

Atkins, Daniel E.; Brown, John Seely; Hammond, Allen L.: A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities, February 2007,
http://www.oerderves.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-
resources-oer-movement_final.pdf

MERLOT Africa Network (MAN)
http://man.merlot.org/

MERLOT is a leading-edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer-reviewed, higher education online learning materials created by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. MERLOT's vision is to be a premiere online community where faculty, staff, and students from around the world share their learning materials and pedagogy. www.merlot.org

Newsportal: Open Source and Open Content