Overview

This case study explores the U.S. Department of Labour's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant programme, which was a major investment to promote the ability of U.S. community colleges to address the challenges of today's workforce.

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.

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.

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.

The Open University of Tanzania (OUT) is an open and distance learning (ODL) institution, operating through a network of 30 regional centres and ten coordinating centres spread throughout the United Republic of Tanzania and beyond the country borders to other parts of Africa. OUT has engaged in several open educational resources (OER) initiatives, starting from 2008 when it began working with OER Africa.
OER Africa collaborated with the OUT management team, the OUT Institute of Educational and Management Technologies (IEMT), and the OUT Library to implement the activities of the Institutionalization of OER Practices Project. The project was framed by a Participatory Action Research approach designed to share and disseminate the project outcomes.

Open Educational Resource Term Bank (OERTB) was an initiative by the University of Pretoria (UP), the University of Cape Town (UCT), and the South African Department of Higher Education (DHET). It aimed to establish an online, multilingual term bank, specifically aimed at South African university students. The initiative ran between 2014 and 2017, servicing all eleven official South African languages in various subject areas. Today, students are still able to use OERTB to access key subject-specific terms and definitions in one of those languages.

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.

To facilitate broad take-up and use of the concept of open educational resources (OER) in higher education systems across Africa, OER Africa, has, wherever possible, sought to build relationships with existing networks of educational organizations and individuals. The aim is to provide support of different kinds both to the networks and to individual organizations participating in them. One type of support was collaborative networks, of which the African Teacher Education OER Network (ATEN) was one.

This summary is based on desktop research, as well as an interview with the project manager involved in ATEN at the time.