Overview

This case study explores TESS-India. Initiated in 2012, TESS-India is an award-winning programme established to strengthen and transform professional development activities and classroom practices in India. Through a collaboration with 200 Indian and international teachers and teacher education experts, the programme has developed nearly 200 Open Educational Resources (OER) in multiple languages.

The African Virtual University (AVU) launched its OER initiative called OER@AVU in 2011. It was part of a larger project designed to increase access to affordable education at AVU’s 27 partner institutions spanning 22 countries. It sought to encourage the collaborative creation and sharing of open, distance, and e-learning resources.

African Storybook (ASb) is a multilingual literacy project that works with educators and authors to create and publish openly licensed storybooks for early reading in African languages. The initiative was launched in 2014 to address the need for accessible storybooks and improved literacy. It is an initiative of Saide, a registered non-profit organization governed by a trust and based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) is a network of small countries that are committed to the collaborative development of free content resources for use in an educational context. Small states represent 32 of the 54 member countries of the commonwealth and, although there are significant variations among them, many experience similar challenges regarding access to high-quality post-secondary education. In response to this challenge, VUSSC was launched by commonwealth Ministers for Education at a conference in Halifax, Canada in 2000.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) is South Africa’s oldest university and one of Africa’s leading teaching and research institutions. The university has a long history of involvement in open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEPs). UCT has spearheaded several open education projects, including OER UCT and the Health OER Project. The University is a member of the Open Education Consortium, an international consortium with approximately 300 universities that make their teaching materials openly available for sharing. This case study examines four of the institution’s key OER initiatives: the OpenUCT Initiative (2011–2014); Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) (2021–2017); the UCT Vice Chancellor’s OER Adaptation Project (2013–2016); and Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) (2018–2021). Each has been selected because of its focus and influence on OER advocacy, practice, and policy for Africa academics.

Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) is a collaborative network that helps to improve the practice of teachers and teacher educators operating across the region. TESSA was conceived as an emergency response to the teacher training crisis in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and has been active since 2005, a time when there was a focus on the millennium development goals of Education for All. Today, it provides both a bank of open educational resources (OER) that are linked to school curricula and a network of educators who work to improve learning and teaching. The OER are designed to support teachers and teacher educators in developing active approaches to learning.

With the revival of open and distance learning (ODL) programmes and the development of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) in 2002, the concept of open educational resources (OER) gained traction in Nigeria. As part of the staff development process for NOUN, OER became one of the areas where critical capacity building activities were undertaken. In response to the 2012 UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Paris Declaration on OER, NOUN initiated an OER project in 2014, which involved all faculties at the institution. The aim of the ongoing project was to integrate OER at all levels of teaching and learning at the institution to enhance the quality of and access to higher education.

This initiative focused on policy, practice, and research regarding health-related OER. It covered eleven disciplines at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The initiative was inspired by the reality that CHS had an increasing number of medical students and therefore an increased demand for practical sessions. However, students were often unable to see what was happening in practical sessions because of their large numbers.