Resources

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education’. Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to support the removal of barriers to accessing resources and supporting inclusiveness (facilitated by digital literacy and information and communication technology). There are concerns about the quality aspect of OER, and how this is ensured for users and content creators. In addition, inclusion requires OER to be available in languages in which users prefer to access and use them.

Investments in early years of education and childhood development are among the most cost-effective and beneficial a country can make to tackle learning poverty, promote healthy child development, and enhance shared prosperity. Over the past two decades, the Government of Indonesia (GoI) has scaled up its commitment to early childhood education and development (ECED) through various educational reforms, policies, programs, and financial investments. With the expansion of Indonesia’s ECED system, the GoI has committed to improving its quality since the early 2000s.

This report seeks to explore various issues relating to education in sub-Saharan Africa. Of particular interest is how distance education and open learning can be supported by ICT, for the majority of people in Africa (many of whom are now excluded from educational opportunities of any form). The report is based on desk research, including a review of literature and examples of current initiatives using ICTs for education in sub-Saharan Africa, with a specific focus on open and distance learning.

This paper provides a review of literature on the status of higher education and ICT in Egypt. The broader national context and move towards prioritizing ICT on a national level is considered, before looking specifically at higher education challenges and e-learning initiatives centred in higher education.

The role of higher education as an enabler of development has gained increasing prominence, particularly in the context of the knowledge society and the growing importance of learning, information and technology in economic performance. In order to reach the goals of the SADC Protocol and to release the potential of higher education in the region, decision-makers require current, relevant, accurate and comparable information on the state of higher education.

In pursuit of the vision of an integrated Africa, the African Union Commission (AUC) has embarked on developing a strategy for harmonization of Higher Education Programmes (HEP) in Africa in order to foster cooperation in information exchange, harmonization of procedures and policies, and attainment of comparability of qualifications, in order to facilitate mobility of Africans across African countries for employment and further study. This paper provides an overview of existing harmonization initiatives globally and continentally.

This paper examines the concept of OER in more detail, offering a simple, clear definition, explaining the economic and educational potential behind that definition, introducing examples of OER practices around the world, exploring legal considerations, and highlighting some of the challenges to releasing the transformative
potential of OER.

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.