Two interesting resources were launched recently by members of the UNESCO OER international community.
A OER toolkit authored by Philipp Schmidt and a new report about Access2OER. Two were already the outcomes of the discussion around ACCESS2OER. As reported by Bjoern Hassler.
The first proposal is about “Introducing digital Open Educational Resources into Zambian primary schools through school-based professional development”. Through this project we seek to overcome access barriers, and engage with OER for Zambian primary/secondary school mathematics teaching. The barriers are manifold, including infrastructural, awareness, appropriateness of materials, etc, but we hope that we’ll be able to draw on the various experiences and solutions to make this successful.
The project has a small amount of funding, which we will use to engage with teachers in Zambia in Spring 2010. The “we” here is a North-South partnership, which of course includes various partners in Zambia. The outcomes of the project will be reported at eLearning Africa (May 2010, Lusaka). Further information is available here.
The second outcome is continued engagement through the UK National Commission for UNESCO. Within the Information Society Working Group, OER has been a long-standing theme. However, based on the experience of the discussion, we are now focussing on issues around OER access and collaboration. The aims for this are concrete: We are running a series of meetings to further focus on feasible projects in this area.
The first meeting will take place on 25th/26th in conjunction with the Nottingham Open Learning Conference and in conjunction with OER Africa.
This is going to open a new world of opportunities for all.