Africa

The exponential expansion of higher education enrolments throughout sub-Saharan Africa has led to the establishment of many new public and private universities offering face-to-face, blended and DE programmes. There is a growing need for QA frameworks at the national and institutional level. The chapter argues that there is still a great deal of work to be done, as there are significant variations in policies and procedures for QA and little has yet been done in regard to monitoring and assessing the quality of DE provision.

This country case study outlines the education system in South Africa, ICT developments in education, relevant copyright laws and the various OER initiatives at national and institutional levels

Significant   work has   been carried   out   at   the   institutional   level—by institutions  and  also  through donor-funded projects. Established  in  2008, the Partnership  for  Higher  Education, Educational  Technology  Initiative aims  to support ICT integration in African universities. Teaching and learning initiatives are  supported  that integrate use  of technology and promoting collaborative knowledge creation and dissemination.

This case study, supported by RUFORUM, is one of a series that recognizes the important role that universities play in contributing to the well-being of small-scale farmers and economic development of countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper considers some of the challenges in defining digital learning and the political challenges in measuring cost-effectiveness. It then focuses on issues of cost-effectiveness using examples from three initiatives: the Nepad e-Schools Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) financial modelling tool, the adaptation of the UNESCO ICT Competency for Teachers (CFT) professional development course for teachers, and the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) Facilitating Online Learning course (FOLC).

Although the concept of OER initially gained publicity in the Global North, OER are gaining traction in Africa, with an increasing number of OER initiatives focusing on areas such as OER advocacy, practice, and research. Today, the concept has been mainstreamed around the world, as exemplified through the unanimous adoption of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER in 2019.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the importance of professional development on effective teaching and learning for university academics into sharp relief. Universities found themselves having to close their campuses and were unable to teach their students face-to-face. Universities in Africa resorted to various strategies to reach students, ranging from no teaching taking place, through emergency remote teaching (ERT) with some form of online teaching, to fully implemented e-learning.

In 2018 we published an open licensing primer for early literacy publishers on open licensing, with a brief section for authors and illustrators. So much has changed since then that we decided to take a fresh look at the issues and challenges, this time giving full attention to content creators, such as publishers, authors, illustrators, and teacher, all of whom have a stake in producing high quality and cost effective materials for education.

In the last decade, a number of OER initiatives in African higher education have sought to address challenges related to the access, supply and contextualisation of educational materials. However, limited information is available on the effectiveness of such initiatives. To gain deeper insight into this, OER Africa conducted research between September 2019 and February 2022. The project analysed the effectiveness of eleven key African OER initiatives in higher education and their influence on developing and supporting effective OER practices.

Openly licensed educational content and librarians could enable more equitable access to quality resources, but only if governments, the development community, and other stakeholders pay attention to open educational resources (OER), open access, and other forms of open learning and research. This overview considers one global instrument aimed at facilitating openness, the UNESCO OER Recommendation, and carefully inspects it as it relates to the different library types in Africa and the user communities the libraries represent.