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OER Africa: A Health OER Case Study

Presentation to the Kenya National Symposium on

Open Education

Hilton Hotel, Nairobi

6th June 2013

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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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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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Dependence on lectures:

• 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.

Some Challenges to Higher Education

in Africa in this Digital Era

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1. READ Course Materials

5. PRODUCE / PERFORM

APPROPRIATELY

4. PRACTICE new skills

3. ENGAGE in learning

conversations

2. EXPLORE within the discipline

HE - Facilitating Learning

Educators

want

students to:

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Rationale for Health OER

African health sector aware of the need to develop

socially relevant and culturally appropriate training

materials and experiences:

• Need to find new ways of delivering health education

content in a format that will enable students to have

increased access to the material, e.g.

case based studies using video or print;

recorded demonstrations by clinical experts of techniques

in history taking, physical examination, and clinical

procedures made available to students for review and

practice in their own time. (Clinical Skills Demonstration)

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Ward rounds at Komfo Anokye

Teaching Hospital in Ghana

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HIV Research Program

Makerere University, Uganda

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Kamuzu College of Nursing

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

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What are we learning?

OER & improved teaching and learning:

• effective use of teaching and learning resources

(RBL) can be more effective than some forms of

contact, e.g. rote transfer of content via lectures.

• judicious mix of teaching strategies may serve to

free up time of academics from delivery of

content, to instead, investing time in curriculum

and resource development, more problem-based

interaction and more varied assessment strategies

that do not focus on rote recall of content.

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OER & Improved Teaching & Learning

• In this digital era, educational institutions will

succeed by guiding their students effectively through

educational resources via well-designed teaching and

learning pathways and providing accreditation.

• Use by other educational providers of your

institution's materials will build institutional

reputation and thereby attract new students.

• Where there is no commercial or strategic advantage

to be gained, making this intellectual capital available

via an open license, can only be of benefit to teaching

and learning.

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Here at Last!

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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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Thank you Catherine Ngugi

Project Director catherine.ngugi@oerafrica.org

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.