[Oer-community] Forwarded message from Catherine Ngugi

Susan D'Antoni susandantoni at gmail.com
Wed Nov 14 06:18:13 MST 2012


Dear Colleagues,


I am forwarding another message - this one from Catherine Ngugi who is
Project Director for OER Africa.  Along with education, health is a key
social service.  OER Health is an initiative addressing one of the pressing
social demands.


My best,


Susan

*******************************


Dear All,


In 2009, OER Africa was launched to support African institutions of higher
education in creating and using OER as a means of improving teaching and
learning. We quickly set about the launch of a proof of concept pilot
project. The objective was to test that notion that OER could indeed serve
to address gaps in existing curriculum as well as to update and modify
curriculum by making it more contextually relevant. This is critical in the
environment in which OER Africa works, typified by rising costs of text
books, the slow (although steady) growth of information and communication
technologies, over-stretched faculty, and ever-increasing pressure by
governments on higher education institutions to provide quality higher
education to ever-growing numbers of potential students.


Accordingly, Health OER began as a partnership between the University of
Ghana, the Kwame Nkruma University of Science and Technology – also in
Ghana – the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town,
the University of Michigan and OER Africa. Faculty at the Colleges of
Health Sciences within these African partner institutions had long been
concerned with developing socially relevant and culturally appropriate
training materials and experiences for their students. They wished to
address the challenge of large class instruction in the face of limited
tutorial time and small numbers of qualified lecturers and realized they
needed to find alternative ways to deliver health education content in a
format that would enable students to have increased access to the material,
in their own time.


The results were positive. Faculty gained the chance to learn or refresh
their own skills in materials design – and the opportunity to include
within their curriculum the notion of resource based learning – and move
away from a dependence on lectures as the main means by which to deliver
the curriculum. Students gained access to resources specifically tailored
by their faculty to meet their particular needs.

As all the resources created were shared under an open license, there was
no need for faculty to re-invent the wheel: resources created in Ghana
could easily be used to teach students in North America; resources created
in local languages at the University of Cape Town, could easily be picked
up by neighboring universities to support even more students.


Adherence to universal standards meant that the metadata from all of these
resources was widely accessible through a regular search engine. With
little support from OER Africa, many of the faculty involved in the
original pilots, continue to create and share OER – and to raise the
institutional profile of their universities – and of their own intellectual
capital.


I have no doubt that pockets of OER projects and initiatives, not
dissimilar to what I have described, abound across the whole world.  Many
are visible only to a small circle of participants. An OER world map of
institutional initiatives might allow not only greater visibility to such
projects, but greater access to valuable resources that others might not
otherwise have. It is only a substantive body of OER work that will allow
us to foster useful research on the development, use, evaluation and re-
contextualisation of OER, as recommended by the 2012 OER Paris Declaration.
A world map of OER initiatives could thereby contribute to strengthening
the evidence base for public investment in OER and encourage governments to
adapt an implement OER policies to promote better teaching and learning in
publicly funded institutions of higher education.

That said, as we go forward, we may wish to consider some of the following
issues:

·       What constitutes an institutional OER project? Do we need a
definition?

·       In the interests of inclusivity rather than false dichotomies,
might the definition of “an institutional OER project” focus around the
open license that typifies both OER and Open Access?

·       How might we ensure searchability of the map? Might we need to
specify the kind of metadata that should accompany entries to the map?



Catherine Ngugi

Project Director

OER Africa
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