Dr. Bakary Diallo, rector of the African Virtual University (AVU) will present on the recently launched interactive portal called OER@AVU at the OCW Consortium webinar on March 15th, at 10AM EST. This talk is a must for those interested in production and use of open educational resources in developing countries.

The AVU, in partnership with the African Development Bank and 10 African countries have developed 73 modules of Maths, Physics, Chemistry, biology, Teacher Education Professional courses, and ICT in education. The 73 modules are structured as 4 Bachelor of Education in Mathematics and Sciences. The modules are available in 3 languages, French, English and Portuguese, which make it a total of 219 modules. They are now offered as degree, diploma and certificate programs at participating universities and as AVU’s own programs

A collaborative approach was used to develop the modules; the authors as well as the peer reviewers were selected from 12 universities in the 10 participating countries. Open content resources were used to enrich the existing programs of the participating universities, all modules are now published using a creative commons license, meaning that they can be used, modified, and re-submitted to AVU for further sharing.

The process of producing the materials included policy harmonization for the 12 participating universities, design and development strategy, a pilot phase, quality assurance framework, and formation of the teacher education virtual consortium. If you would like to learn more about the issues in launching a project that involves institutions from 3 different languages and 10 different countries, please register by sending an email with your name and affiliation to webinars@avu.org with the subject “OCW” to register. You will receive an email with details on how to join the webinar.

We strongly recommend that you browse through the OER@AVU website before the webinar. If you have any questions or would like to start a discussion during the webinar, please post them on the OCWC Communities of Interest website. We will try to cover the posted questions and issues during the webinar as much as possible.