The African Virtual University (AVU) www.avu.org launched an interactive Open Education Resources (OER) portal OER@AVU. The portal is available at http://oer.avu.org and contains quality resources developed together with 12 universities in 10 African countries. The resources are released as Open Education Resources under the Creative Commons open licence. Through the portal, the AVU will enable academics all around the African continent and beyond to share, distribute and disseminate their resources globally and contribute towards Africa’s economic development through education.

The resources are free to use and institutions and individuals can access the materials, use, modify and put them back to enrich the portal. They can also contribute their own resources. This initiative has been funded by the African Development Bank.

The newly launched interactive portal will host 219 high quality modules of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, ICT in Education, and Teacher Education Professional Courses available in three different languages – English, French and Portuguese.

With the resources, the AVU will be addressing the issue of accessing quality content which is one of the barriers to accessing quality education in Africa. The portal is accessible from everywhere in the world.
“We can proudly say that Africa is now contributing to global knowledge” said the AVU Rector Dr. Bakary Diallo.

AVU is the leading Pan-African eLearning network and one of the AVU’s strategic objectives is to increase access to high quality Open, Distance and eLearning resources that are relevant to Africa. The interactive portal http://oer.avu.org therefore furthers the AVU’s substantial commitment to open education and is an investment in the effort to create a shared body of open educational resources. Further, On October 25, 2010, AVU pledged $25,000 over the next five years to support the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW), the non-profit association of global OpenCourseWare supporters.

Founded in 1997, the African Virtual University (AVU) is a Pan African Intergovernmental Organization whose aim is to significantly increase access to quality higher education and training through the innovative use of Information and Communications Technologies.

AVU has graduated 40,000 students across Africa and established the largest network of Open Distance and eLearning institutions in over 30 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its greatest asset is its ability to work across borders and languages in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. In Somalia, AVU has graduated 4,000 students, 30% of whom are women. The AVU is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya with a regional office in Dakar, Senegal.