OER initiatives in African Higher Education Successes, challenges, and lessons learnt

This involved staff from the College of Health Sciences, the KNUST library, the ICT Directorate, the Department of Communication Design, and other parts of the university as part of a strategy to ‘build a multidisciplinary team for the development and use of OER at KNUST’.19 KNUST faculty created several OER as a result of the initiative. [...] The aim of the ongoing project is to integrate OER at all levels of teaching and learning at the institution to enhance the quality and access to higher education.26 The institution’s OER portal27 offers access to a range of courses and downloadable material for educational purposes and an integrated search engine that provides multiple filters for maximum efficiency. [...] The overarching aim of the project was to improve the quality of veterinary science education in Africa through collaboration in the development, sharing, and re-use of educational and research resources under open licences, to enrich both African and global veterinary science knowledge networks and educational programmes. [...] OER Africa collaborated with the OUT management team, the OUT Institute of Educational and Management Technologies, and the OUT Library to implement the activities of the Institutionalization of OER Practices Project. [...] Open textbooks, the initiative showed, have the potential to promote an enabling pedagogy for social justice and the transformation in South African higher education.50 The body of research that such initiatives have produced has been a significant success as it has highlighted the complexities of OER adoption and provided insights and lessons learnt regarding the implementation of OEPs.