e-learning Africa -First Pan African Forum on Open Educational Resources

Gerry, Moustapha, Laura of the MERLOT Africa Network

At the AICC conference center in Accra, talking about MERLOT in an African context. Catriona Savage from UNESCO Education Sector, Paris, France presented first on Open Educational Resources. Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Open educational resources include:

• Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
• Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
• Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

She spoke about the UNESCO perspective on the international OER movement. The OER movement began in 1998 with the term ‘open content’ coined by David Wylie. In 2001, MIT Open Courseware became the first large OER project. She talked about Rice University Connexions intiatives that provide a response to the limitations of traditional textbooks and the University of the Western Cape Free Courseware Project. Health OER is a project between South Africa, Ghana and the University of Michigan dealing with Health education resources.

UNESCO themes include Education for All-Building knowlege societies. With Hewlett Foundation support, the OER movement has been growing as has the availability of free educational content worldwide. Ms. Savage addressed the priorities of the UNESCO OER community. In Africa, some of the priority issues are:

• Awareness raising
• Communities
• Capacity Development
• Sustainabilty
• Quality Assurance
• Copyright
• Learning support services

Raising awareness through community building and network development are highest priorities.

The OER Wiki

Dr. Bakary Diallo, rector, talked next about the African Virtual University, (AVU) begun in Washington, DC at the World Bank and now based in Nairobi, Kenya. The topic was to increase access to high quality higher education in Africa. Barriers:

• Limited classrooms
• Outdated curricula
• Teaching and Learning Methods
• Research capacity
• Access to OER
• Bandwidth

The AVU seeks collaborative partnerships for the creation, design and dissemination and utilization of OERs. Dr. Diallo stressed the importance of addressing the issues surrounding working in an African historical, philosophical, psychological and cultural context. AVU is establishing collaborative partnerships with MERLOT and the MERLOT African Network. There is a plan to release 73 AVU Math and Science modules as OER.

Dr. Moustapha Diack continued with a talk about “Open Solutions” to increase the availability of OER, to promote free access to scientific literature through Open Access and to adapt open source solutions for learning design and community building. Global and regional policies need to be aligned in this movement to promote truly open access. Diack promoted MERLOT as a premier e-learning community and the MERLOT Africa Network as a means of facilitating networked partnership between US and African institutions affiliated with MERLOT. Open Access resources he mentioned included:

1. Directory of Open Access Journals
2. The Hinari Program
3. The Agora Initiative

I came all the way to Ghana to hear Vikram Savkar, the Publishing Director of Nature Publishing Group, who also happens to be the son of my dear colleague at NOVA, Reva Savkar, Professor of Chemistry at the Annandale Campus.  He spoke about the importance of tertiary science education in Africa. Without access to current quality science research, it is a challenge to provide good education and build capacity. Among solutions to the challenges alluded to by all speakers were: Open (Me-learning) & print materials, centers of excellence and private and public partnerships. Vikram Savkar hasworks on the Nature Science Education library of searchable, reusable digital content, a community of teachers and learners who can collaborate online and tools to permit the community to interact with each other and the content. The key theme in all of these presentations today, including Vikram’s is partnerships- academic, industrial and government partnerships.

Questions and Answers followed: What is the best opportunity to promote OER? Catriona Savage mentioned “talking about OER , telling the story of what works and what does not.” Gerry Hanley of MERLOT talked about “planning for action”. He encouraged the forum participants to have dialogues in their countries after experiencing MERLOT firsthand at the afternoon workshop. Dr. Diallo stressed the importance of addressing different needs and different perspectives.

A question from the audience was about interpretation and translation needs of the OER movement as well as training material about how to effectively use ICTs for teaching and learning. How will we adapt materials for different cultures? Panelists all recognized the needs for multilingual solutions.

Another question raised was about how we will keep track of quality in ICTs? Community built around the content, peer review and user comments, as in MERLOT, were all promoted as means of making decisions about quality.

All speakers talked about the critical need for faculty development in the area of teaching well online. The participants were encouraged to join MERLOT and start making use of the free and open library.

This afternoon, participants in the forum will attend our MERLOT hands-on workshop and get a chance to start to build their own personalcollections of learning objects.

Banku is news to me

Goes great with Ghanaian stews.

We got to Accra very late. Our hotel is charming. I feel very at home here. Folks are so nice and the landscape is like Belem.

 I have tried a new food called banku. It is a starch. You’d love it, Vegan.  Check it out.|It goes very well with okra and fish stew which I also had. Funny and a little, just a tad awkward was when the waiter brought me a pot of water to go along and I asked him what it was for!! Apparently banku, and the stew that accompanies it, is eaten with the fingers. I didn’t know, but proceeded to apply my first lesson learned, day one in Accra.

On my way to Accra

Sitting in the Amsterdam airport, a remarkable place in that it contains a Van Gogh museum and a casino in addition to all the shops and things you’d come to expect. But best for me is that I have this wi-fi connection . I’m sitting outside this area called “the communication zone” and it’s a joy to be able to communicate. So  y’all keep that in mind when you need to connect somewhere. I wish we could get out and actually SEE Amsterdam, but that’ll be another day.

Rick and I are on our way to Ghana for the first Pan-African forum on Open Educational Resources. With my colleagues from the MERLOT African Network, Dr. Moustapha Diack, Dr. Gerry Hanley, who is also the Executive Director of MERLOT, and Dr. Solomon Negash, we are all going to give a MERLOT workshop for educators from all over Africa and the world. Hard to put into words what a great thing this is.

OERS are really taking off and it’s about time to acknowledge the hard work folks have been doing to increase access to technology-enhanced learning materials.Look at all these portals on Wiki Educator .  The bottom line is they are all making  very good materials available for free. Why? Cause it is the right thing to do.

Over the next several days, I hope to  be blogging the conference from Ghana. Please check back here for updates. I expect this trip will be a wonderful adventure.