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As a result of its late ingress into the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, Africa enters the arena having little to no experience in the OER evolutionary process (that is, in the Creation, Organization, Dissemination and Utilization of OER) and with an undefined OER trajectory. Consequently, there is a need to mitigate against a very real possibility that African universities and other tertiary institutions may tend to participate as unequal participants in the OER movement with little control over its origin, quality and appropriateness. By involving African Higher Education institutions in the entire OER evolutionary process, issues and inconsistencies pertaining to the pedagogical, epistemological, ideological, cultural and social relevance as well as technology related challenges are reduced while enabling these institutions to participate actively so that they drive and own the process in terms of form, content, quality, structure and orientation. The author argues that the identification and inclusion of key stakeholders in the development of an African OER Network that would focus on Higher Education and Training should therefore be the starting point to establishing a robust OER movement in Africa. The paper then outlines an emerging example of just such a Network - the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) consortium - as a nascent OER project and a case in point for the potential of the wider OER movement in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper concludes that the promise of OER resides not only in the digitized information itself, but also in developing the policies, methodological approaches and mechanisms that manage and ascribe meaning to it. The paper further concludes that a strategic combination of key elements within an ‘OER Architecture’ that includes a clearly articulated OER Typology, may help guide the development of a dynamic, rational and comprehensive OER strategy for African Higher Education and training institutions.

Stream: Pedagogies and Teaching Practices

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Peter Bateman is a researcher at the Open University (UK). He holds a Masters Degree in Micro Technology in Education (UK), a Bachelor of Education Degree (Australia), and a PG Certificate in Online Instruction (USA). Born in Australia, he has worked in the education sector in Africa for the past 14 years during which time he has developed a particular interest in the application of appropriate technology supported pedagogies to increase access to Higher Education. Until recently he worked at the African Virtual University (AVU) in Nairobi, Kenya as Manager of the Open, Distance and eLearning (ODeL) Initiative where he coordinated programs aimed at assisting universities in the AVU network to participate in the development of an Open Educational Resources (OER) strategy. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Open University where he continues to investigate new paradigms for the OER movement in higher education in Africa.

His research is based on the premise that Higher Educational institutions in Africa, as centres for innovation and the creation of knowledge, must continually and progressively set the pace and direction for educational development and transformation and that, if well conceived, the OER movement holds great potential as one such innovation.