Open Air

UNESCO Community Report on Access to OER

October 29th, 2009 Posted by: lukebeaman

The UNESCO OER Community have published an Access2OER report, based on discussions earlier this year in February/March. The report is available in PDF or on their wiki. One of the main aims of the discussion was to stimulate new work in the area and generate new proposals, two of which are being actively pursued:

Introducing digital OER into Zambian primary schools through school-based professional development.

This project intends to overcome access barriers, and engage with OER for Zambian primary/secondary school mathematics teaching. Such barriers include issues around infrastructure, awareness and appropriateness of materials, though it is hoped that various experiences and solutions can be drawn upon to make this successful.

Funding is limited and will be used primarily to engage in Spring 2010 with teachers in Zambia through a North-South partnership. The outcomes will be reported at eLearning Africa in May 2010, at Lusaka. Further information is available here.

Continued engagement through the UK National Commission for UNESCO.

OER has been a long-standing theme within the Information Society Working Group. The second proposal, however, recommends a shift in focus to concentrate on issues around OER access and collaboration. To achieve this, UNESCO are running a series of meetings to further focus on feasible projects. The first meeting will take place in Nottingham on the 25th/26th in conjunction with the Nottingham Open Learning Conference and OER Africa

Also blogged by Bjoern Hassler over at Open Education News.

OpenLearn published a research report in July – news story.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized, oer