1. OER:
Tomorrow’s main educational provider?
Higher Education and the Global Agenda:
Alternative Pathways to the Future
IAU 14th General Conference, 2012
Inter American University of Puerto Rico
27 – 30 November 2012
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2. OER Africa is:
An innovative initiative of Saide,
Headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya
Established to play a leading role
in driving the development and
use of OER in Africa.
Funded by the William & Flora
Hewlett Foundation, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, and
a variety of projects and
partnerships across Africa.
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3. Setting the Scene
• Too few learning resources for learners and
lecturers in African universities, and many of those
available are too expensive to be purchased by
universities or students.
• Limited ICT infrastructure to gain access to up-to-
date information available on the Internet and
participate in inter-institutional, geographically
dispersed collaborative activities.
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4. The OER Concept
• Educational resources that are freely available for
use by educators and learners, without an
accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees.
• OER is not synonymous with online learning or e-
learning;
• Within an African context, it is anticipated that many
of the resources produced – while shareable in a
digital format (both online and via offline formats
such as CD-ROM) – will be printable.
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5. HE - Facilitating Learning
1. READ Course
Materials
5. PRODUCE /
2. EXPLORE within Educators PERFORM
the discipline want APPROPRIATELY
students to:
3. ENGAGE in
learning 4. PRACTICE new
conversations skills
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6. E-learning is…
• The use of new multimedia technologies and the
Internet to improve the quality of learning by
facilitating access to resources and services, as
well as remote exchange and collaboration
• e-learning encompasses ‘all computer and Internet-
based activities that support teaching and learning
– both on-campus and at a distance’
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8. Policies to Transform HE: eLearning &
OER
• Review (and amendment) of institutional
policies
• Investment in more effective teaching,
learning and research environments, using
resource-based learning
• Embrace open licensing environments
• Bandwidth and access have become
essential
Kamuzu College of Nursing
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16. The Opportunities…
• Telecommunications capacity is growing rapidly
• Growth in range of devices at reducing cost
• Lower power use and growth in solar power
• And there is an explosion of freely available, high
quality content online that educators and students
can link to…
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17. The potential of OER
With tools that are already available, there
are almost limitless opportunities to
design high quality teaching and learning
environments…
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18. Leadership
Nobel Laureates
Madiba with Wangari Maathai
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19. This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Thank you
Catherine Ngugi
Project Director
catherine.ngugi@oerafrica.org
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