Adapting OER for Professional Communities

Over a period of three years a number of International and African based institutions collaborated to design and create a set of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to support school based teacher education as part of the TESSA project. Writing of the materials drew on case studies, experiences and existing resources from across the region using a highly structured template. These TESSA OERs were then adapted to be appropriate for each user setting and practices. It is this process - supporting the user community to harness and integrate OERs for their own systems and cultures, which is the focus of this article. The authors draw on a range of data to make explicit the kinds of knowledge, skills and support employed in the adaptation process and in particular the role of the structured template in supporting this process, and the problems encountered. The article suggests that OERs will only fulfil their promise if more attention is accorded to issues of user access and skills as well as the form of the OERs, their purpose and underlying pedagogy. Finally the paper offers suggestions for guidance to support other users in adapting OERs for their own context whilst maintaining the quality of the OERs and working towards self-sustaining communities of users.

The challenges to teacher educators in sub-Saharan Africa are acute. This paper describes how the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) consortium is working within institutional and national policy systems to support school-based teacher professional development. The TESSA consortium (13 African institutions and 5 international organisations delivering teacher education across 9 countries) designed and produced a bank of open educational resources (OERs) to guide teachers’ classroom practices in school-based teacher education. Drawing on examples from the TESSA consortium and from the University of Fort Hare, South Africa, the authors categorize the forms of TESSA OER integration as highly structured, loosely structured, or guided use. The paper concludes by outlining success factors for the integration of OERs: accessibility, adequate resources, support for teachers, accommodation of local cultural and institutional practices, and sustainable funding.

Open educational resources (OERs) have the potential to reduce costs, improve quality, and increase access to educational opportunities. OER development and deployment is one path that could contribute to achieving education for all. This article builds on existing information and communication technology (ICT) implementation plans in Africa and on the experiences of organizations and initiatives such as the African Virtual University (AVU), OER Africa, the South African Institute of Distance Education (SAIDE), and the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) Project, to present one view of the benefits, challenges, and steps that could be taken to realize the potential of OERs in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, the article focuses on the factors necessary for creating and sustaining a vision for OER development and deployment; developing and distributing resources with an open license; improving technology infrastructure and reducing the cost of Internet access; establishing communities of educational collaborators; sustaining involvement in the OER initiative; producing resources in interoperable and open formats; establishing and maintaining the quality of OERs; providing local context to address national and regional needs and conditions; informing the public about OERs; and taking the initiative to build on the knowledge, skills, and experiences of others. In order to assist educators and decision makers, links to a variety of resources are provided.

Developing a pedagogy of mutuality in a capability approach: Teachers’ experiences of using the Open Educational Resources (OER) of the teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) programme

This chapter addresses the importance of using innovative teaching and learning methods in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to improve the education systems and to provide quality education for all, as outlined in United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4. It is based on an on-site research project in Ghana and review of the literature and covers innovative teaching and learning initiatives in SSA countries. Some results of the research project that was conducted in Ghana are included in this chapter. The outcome of the research project on how the use of ICT can benefit teaching and learning in a senior high school in Ghana encouraged the researchers to identify possible developments in teacher education in Africa by integrating open education resources (OERs) and massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the system. Findings of the research illustrate the importance for enhancing mobile learning and how developments of OER and the ability to participate in MOOCs could encourage teachers to widen their daily practice and shift teaching to more self-directed learning. The integration of OER in secondary education and the potential of OER and MOOCs in teacher education in SSA are summarized.

In this chapter, the authors highlight the potential of open educational resources (OER) to increase access to knowledge and the challenges to adapt these resources with the participation of students. They analyze the emerging practices resulting from pedagogical innovation, with open educational resources, in the cycles of design, implementation, and evaluation in the curricular unit of a Master's course in Pedagogy of eLearning at Universidade Aberta de Portugal. The investigation is carried out through the methodological procedures of design-based research with two groups of students of higher education at a distance where they addressed the concepts related to OER and participated in the educational practices for integrating OER in online education. In the field of innovation scenarios in online education, the results demonstrate the need to carry out/think about training, with practical actions, so that students can know, adapt, produce, integrate OER in their activities and share resources, thus contributing to increase the availability of quality OER.

This paper presents the origins, design, and implementation of a research-informed initiative aimed at capacitating African teacher educators in co-authoring Open Educational Resources (OER). It responds to the need to equip teacher educators with the competencies required to engage in and model open educational practices tailored to local educational contexts. Despite the global expansion of Open Educational Resources (OER), particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, their integration into African teacher education institutions remains limited. The project brings together five initial teacher education institutions from four African countries: Botswana, South Africa, Nigeria, and Rwanda, in a collaborative effort to strengthen OER development using a design-based research approach. The initiative commenced with a webinar designed to raise awareness among African teacher educators about the potential of OER. Following this, a baseline case study was conducted to assess existing competencies and inform targeted training strategies. Drawing on these insights, a workshop employing experiential learning methodologies was held to equip participants with the necessary skills for OER co-creation. The process culminated in the collaborative development of outlines for a generic OER module and two STEM and two non-STEM subject modules, guided by the principles of communities of practice. By integrating research-driven design with collaborative authoring, this project provides a model for sustainable capacity building in teacher education. The paper concludes by highlighting key lessons learned and proposing strategies for scaling similar initiatives to foster greater OER adoption and use across the African education landscape.

Open Educational Resources (OER) comprise freely accessible, openly licensed educational materials that educators and learners can adapt and share for teaching and learning. The Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL) has recently increased OER integration into various programme learning materials. This study examined the integration of Open Educational Resources (OER) in teacher education course materials at the Open University of Sri Lanka. Using systematic content analysis, researchers evaluated OER frequency, type, and pedagogical quality in two Postgraduate Diploma in Education study guides: Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Foundations. The analysis revealed significant disciplinary variations in the adoption of OER. The Educational Technology Foundations guide incorporated 40.23% OER content with an average integration score of 3.5, while Educational Psychology included only 21.75% OER content, scoring 3.18. Both guides relied heavily on supplementary rather than primary OER content, with technical issues, including broken links and outdated materials, undermining the effectiveness of implementation. The absence of interactive OER activities represents missed opportunities for modeling innovative teaching practices. Findings reveal a policy-practice implementation gap where faculty technological expertise and disciplinary context significantly influence OER adoption patterns. The study recommends targeted faculty development, systematic quality assurance, and enhanced integration of interactive OER to realize the transformative potential of open educational resources in teacher preparation programs.

The government of Cameroon has been increasingly pre-occupied with the quality of learning outcomes and the lack of learning resources at all levels of the education system. Research on similar educational systems in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond indicate that Ministries of Education are exploring the potential of open educational resources (OER) to cut down the high cost of textbooks and enhance the availability of quality learning materials in classrooms. To explore possibilities of mainstreaming OER under the Ministries of Basic and Secondary Education in Cameroon, a quantitative research design approach was used to survey n=393 Regional Pedagogic Supervisors from the 10 Regions of the country. The outcome of this study presents the factors shaping the perspectives of Regional Pedagogic Supervisors in terms of perceptions and barriers to using OER. The novelty of this approach is the application of a proven model for technology acceptance testing in the context of OER. Based on the findings, three major recommendations for mainstreaming OER in Cameroon with potential impact on lowering textbook costs and increasing learning outcomes were formulated.

Open educational resources (OER) have significant potential for transforming teacher education in developing countries, yet this remains underexplored. This systematic literature review analyzes 98 articles to understand the impact and innovative prospects of OER’s ‘openness’ attributes on teacher education over the past two decades. While free access to OER is a crucial benefit and contributes to teacher education programmes, effective OER use relies on the proper application of other attributes. Thus, adaptation allows tailoring of materials to specific needs, promoting flexibility and contextualised learning, which are vital for effective teacher education. Free access addresses barriers like the digital divide and ensures content quality and sustainability, enabling equitable access to educational resources. Collaborative practices through OER foster knowledge co-construction and the development of essential 21st-century skills for teachers. The combination of formal and informal learning and remixing enriches teacher education by integrating structured curricula with personalised learning paths. This broader view of ‘openness’ beyond mere access provides insights for reshaping teacher education programmes to be more innovative and responsive to the evolving needs of educators in developing countries. The findings offer guidance for policies and practices to cultivate a new generation of empowered, adaptive teachers through OER integration.

Health literacy is the ability of individuals to understand health information and to make informed health decisions. As part of a larger project, we completed a scoping review to consider the question “To what extent does teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) currently include a focus on health literacy?” In this paper, we specifically address the question, “How might OER support teacher education in health literacy to support individual and community resilience in sub-Saharan Africa?” We examine the extent literature on health literacy, its relevance to teacher education and OER, and how OER can be used to support health literacy education in SSA. A discussion on the ways in which health literacy education in SSA can be fostered through governments and through other partnership is explored.

There is a growing body of work advocating the use of open educational resources (OERs) to enhance teaching and learning across all sectors: primary, second level and third level (Boyle & Ravenscroft, 2012; Ljubojevic & Laurillard, 2011; Smith & Casserly, 2006). The role of OERs in the development and improvement of teaching skills is also growing. However, there are still barriers preventing teachers from integrating OERs into their classroom (Ertmer et al., 2007; Taylor, 2008; West & Victor, 2011). One possible solution to overcoming these barriers is raising awareness of ICT and recognising the potential of OERs either by placing an emphasis on them during accredited initial teacher education programmes or through continuing professional development programmes aimed at existing teachers. Both national and international repositories (JORUM, MERLOT, MIT Open Courseware) offer educators free access to high-quality teaching resources which have been designed and developed by educators for educators. Therefore, the OERs are primarily pedagogically driven and not driven solely by the available technology. The majority of these OERs in these repositories are also shared under an open creative commons license allowing equitable access to all. This chapter discusses why it is necessary to put a policy in place to actively advocate and promote the use of OERs at second level.

This paper describes how critical realism was operationalized to provide an explanatory framework for a small-scale qualitative study in the field of teacher education in a sub-Saharan African context. Critical realism combines a realist ontology (there is something to find out about) with a relativistic epistemology (different people will come to know different things in different ways). An attraction of this approach is that it seeks to explain observed phenomena through processes of inference, thus providing the opportunity to make changes for the better in the situation under investigation. The stratified view of reality provided a framework for the analysis of data, which led to the identification of two underlying causal mechanisms and new understandings of teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa. The approach is not without challenges, including the potentially intrusive nature of the enquiry and the positioning of the researchers. Despite these challenges, the evidence from this study is that the approach has the potential to provide new insights which have informed on-going international development projects in teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa.

The research presented here provides baseline data regarding the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) by higher education instructors in the Global South (South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia). It does so while attending to how such activity (or inactivity) is differentiated across continental regions and associated countries. The chapter addresses two questions: what proportion of instructors in the Global South have used OER, and which variables may account for different OER usage rates between respondents? This is done by examining which variables – such as gender, age, technological access and digital proficiency – seem to influence OER use rates, thereby allowing the authors to gauge which are the most important for instructors in their respective contexts. This study is based on a quantitative research survey taken by 295 randomly selected instructors at 28 higher education institutions in nine countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia; Ghana, Kenya, South Africa; India, Indonesia, Malaysia). The 30-question survey addressed the following themes: personal demographics, infrastructure access, institutional environment, instructor attitudes and open licensing. Survey responses were correlated for analysis with respondents’ answers to the key question of the survey: whether they had ever used OER or not. Findings indicate that 51% of respondents have used OER, a rate slightly differentiated by region: 49% in South America, 46% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 56% in South and Southeast Asia. A number of variables were associated with varying levels of OER use rates – such as instructors’ country of habitation (and its gross domestic product per capita), level of digital proficiency, educational qualification, institutional position and attitude to education – while many others were not, such as instructors’ gender, age or perception of their institutions’ OER-related policies. For these respondents in the Global South, OER use is predicated upon instructors enjoying a certain minimum level of access to information and communication technologies infrastructure – especially hardware (computers, mobile devices, etc.) and internet connectivity (broadband, Wi-Fi, etc.) – which, once achieved, can be described as an enabling factor for OER engagement, but not a motivating factor. Beyond that minimum, increased internet speeds, lower internet costs and greater diversity of technical devices do not seem to lead to ever-increasing OER use rates. Similarly, while OER-related policies would likely be a crucial factor in OER creation, they did not seem to be important regarding OER use. Lastly, it was instructors in the comparatively less-developed countries who were using OER at a markedly higher rate than those from the more developed countries (at least intra-regionally). This suggests that instructors from the relatively lesser-developed countries may find greater utility in OER because it serves to overcome some of the pressing educational challenges associated with their nations’ contexts’ lower economic development. The dataset arising from this study can be accessed at: https://www.datafirst.uct.ac.za/dataportal/index.php/catalog/609

The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project was undertaken to provide a better understanding of the uptake of Open Educational Resources (OER) and their impact on education in the Global South. The 18 sub-projects that comprise the larger project investigated the extent of OER adoption by educators and students; the factors influencing OER adoption; and the impact of OER adoption on access to educational resources, the quality of teaching and learning, and some of the costs of education provision in 21 countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. The findings of each of the sub-projects are discussed in the various chapters comprising this volume, and a meta-synthesis of these findings is presented in Chapter 2. Using a social realist lens, the meta-synthesis provides a comparative analysis of OER use, adaptation and creation across the research sites, and identifies the structural, cultural and agential factors that enable and constrain these Open Educational Practices (OEP). It points out disjunctures in adoption processes in the countries and institutions studied, and draws insights regarding the extent to which OER adoption can expand access to educational materials, enhance the quality of educational resources and educators’ pedagogical perspectives and practices, and improve the affordability and sustainability of education in the Global South. This concluding chapter explores the implications of the main research findings presented in the meta-synthesis for the attainment of social inclusion, which lies at the heart of the Open Education movement. The Paris OER Declaration of 2012 explicitly calls upon states to “[p]romote and use OER to … contribut[e] to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education [and i]mprove both cost-efficiency and quality of teaching and learning outcomes” (emphasis added). The Ljubljana OER Action Plan of 2017 likewise recognises that, “[t]oward the realization of inclusive Knowledge Societies ... [OER] support quality education that is equitable, inclusive, open and participatory”. Understanding how OER, OEP and Open Education more generally, can help to achieve social inclusion is particularly critical in the Global South where increased demand, lack of resources and high costs limit the capacity of education systems to provide accessible, relevant, highquality and affordable education. This chapter aims to contribute to this understanding the potential of OER and their accompanying OEP through a critical exploration of the ROER4D findings in terms of whether and how OER adoption promotes equitable access, participatory education and empowerment of teachers and students, and thus helps to achieve social inclusion. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the relationship between OER and social inclusion, details the implications of ROER4D’s findings as they pertain to social inclusion, and concludes with recommendations for advocacy, policy, practice and further research in OER and OEP in the Global South.