{"id":1839,"date":"2011-05-18T09:27:57","date_gmt":"2011-05-18T13:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/?p=1839"},"modified":"2012-09-27T10:39:04","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T14:39:04","slug":"towards-free-learning-opportunities-for-all-students-worldwide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/digital-learning-resources\/towards-free-learning-opportunities-for-all-students-worldwide\/","title":{"rendered":"Towards Free Learning Opportunities for All Students Worldwide"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n Information and communication technologies (ICTs) combined with the open intellectual property arrangements of Open Education Resources<\/a> (OER) and networked collaboration have the potential to change fundamental business models for the education sector in Africa. In this blog post I explore the contemporary challenges we face and the opportunities for using digital OERs to implement new models of educational provision in Africa. <\/p>\n The concept of open education<\/i> encapsulates a simple but powerful idea that the world\u2019s knowledge is a public good and that the open web provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge. <\/p>\n Internationally, the education sector is now exploring and implementing the potential of OER to provide free learning opportunities for all students worldwide. Africa has a unique opportunity to leverage the benefits of open education and digital ICTs in providing free learning opportunities for her learners, especially those students currently excluded from the formal sector.<\/p>\n The problem<\/b><\/p>\n Today, in Sub-Saharan Africa the majority of children of school going age will not have the privilege of completing the last three years of their schooling and very often do not have access to affordable textbooks. With reference to the higher education sector, Olugbemiro Jegede, Secretary General of the Association of African Universities reminds us that even if Africa were to build one new university per month, still this would not provide a cost-effective solution for the projected 7 million applicants who will be seeking university placements over the next 5 years. <\/p>\n OER offers two significant business enablers for sustainable education futures:<\/p>\n Therefore, it is possible to provide affordable access to high quality learning materials and textbooks, even for learners who may not have reliable or low-cost access to the Internet. Moreover this would not necessarily require new money or investment. <\/p>\n Within the publicly funded education system, the educators’ salaries who produce learning materials are already to some extent sponsored by the taxpayer. Rather than investing new money, all that is needed is a policy shift to re-license selected outputs produced by state-supported educators under open content intellectual property arrangements where the respective institutions provide permissions for others to reuse, adapt and redistribute learning materials at no cost. <\/p>\n We also have the technologies to produce print-based materials from digital OER repositories for learners who may not have affordable access to the Internet. In WikiEducator<\/a>, for instance, educators can collate open textbooks for printing or offline editing with the added advantage of using the same digital repository for integrating teaching materials into online delivery systems for those institutions who use learning management systems. <\/p>\n Worldwide, there is a growing inventory of open access learning materials on the Internet. There are literally thousands of courses, research journals and OER available under open access licensing provisions, which could be integrated into selected courses for academic credit in Africa. With permissions to adapt and modify these materials, it is now easier for African educators to share and localise learning resources for the Continent. <\/p>\n Already Africa hosts a number of exemplary OER projects. OER Africa<\/a> is a continental network supporting and driving the development and use of OER across all education sectors in Africa. <\/p>\n The African Virtual University has launched the OER@AVU<\/a> portal which will provide 219 high quality modules of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, ICT in Education, and Teacher Education Professional Courses available in three different languages \u2013 English, French and Portuguese. Individual institutions like the University of the Western Cape<\/a> and University of Cape Town<\/a> in South Africa support open content projects. <\/p>\n The Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa<\/a> (TESSA) project brings together teachers and teacher educators from across Africa working on OER in four languages to support school based teacher education and training. Siyavula<\/a> is a ground-breaking project working collaboratively with school teachers to produce open textbooks for high school students. <\/p>\n As the global inventory of OER increases we are presented with new opportunities and challenges. Specifically, learners who access digital OERs on the web and acquire knowledge and skills either formally or informally, cannot readily have their learning assessed and subsequently receive credible credentials in recognition for their efforts. Open assessment and credentialisation services are needed. The Open Education Resource (OER) university concept is a new international initiative which aims to address these challenges.<\/p>\n The OER university concept<\/b><\/p>\n\n
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