In Africa, OER Africa (www.oerafrica.org), an initiative of the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide), is involved in promoting the use of OER in Africa and supporting individuals and organizations in creating OER:
- OER Africa's mission is to establish dynamic networks of African OER practitioners by connecting like-minded educators – teachers, academics, and trainers –to develop, share, and adapt OER to meet the education needs of African societies. By creating and sustaining human networks of collaboration – face-to-face and online – OER Africa will enable African educators and students to harness the power of OER, develop their capacity, and become integrated into the emerging global OER networks as active participants rather than passive consumers.[1]
OER Africa is also involved in numerous projects supporting the adoption of OER in a number of HEI across Africa. The site not only allows access to African-developed resources, but also allows users to follow a documented process of how the materials were created. The website provides a space for various OER projects in Africa, for example, the Saide ACEMaths project, which piloted a collaborative process for the selection, adaptation and use of OER materials on the teaching and learning of mathematics for teacher education.
Figure 21: Sample Unit Interface for the ACEMaths Project
These initiatives are having practical effects on the quality of education in programmes on the ground. The University of Malawi also embarked on an OER project at the Bunda College of Agriculture, which led to compilation of
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