OER Africa is an initiative established to develop and promote the use of open educational resources (OER) in Africa. It is funded by several foundations and partnerships across the continent. There is a need for OER in Africa due to limited learning resources and materials available, especially in universities, which are often too expensive. OER can help address this by providing openly licensed educational content without cost barriers. OER Africa has worked on several health-related OER projects in countries like Ghana, Uganda, and Malawi to develop training materials and clinical skills demonstrations for health education. Promoting the use of OER and open licensing can benefit teaching, learning, and institutions by improving access to resources and building institutional reputation.

1. 1
OER Africa:
A Health OER Case Study
Presentation to the Kenya National Symposium on
Open Education
Hilton Hotel, Nairobi
6th June 2013

2. 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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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:

6. 6
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)

7. 7

8. 8

9. 9
Ward rounds at Komfo Anokye
Teaching Hospital in Ghana

10. 10

11. 11
HIV Research Program
Makerere University, Uganda

12. 12
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.