UNESCO OER Platform
Abel Caine, Maria Liouliou, Igor NukICT in Education, Science and Culture Section
Information Society Division
Communication and Information (CI) Sector
What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?
UNESCO defines Open Educational Resources (OERs) as:
eLearning resources and tools in open document format
and released under an intellectual property licence allowing free use and re-use
What is the UNESCO OER Platform?
The UNESCO OER Platform seeks to: radically “enhance” UNESCO’s Clearing House
function by offering “certain” UNESCO publications as OER
products and allowing “stakeholders” to freely copy, adapt, and
share their resources.
Who are the UNESCO Stakeholders?
Policy-makers at Ministry or institutional-level looking for model policies, guides, or best-practices;
Teachers looking for courses, syllabi, and teaching materials and
Learners also looking for additional courses to study
Functionalities of the OER Platform
Find and compare: stakeholders can use the UNESCO base product to find and compare content
Translations: significantly higher than the 6 languages from UNESCO
Localization: incorporating the more relevant and superior quality and quantity of the national or regional literature base on the subject area;
Customization: the creation of customized versions, e.g. Guide on Internet Access for Disabled Journalists based on the original UNESCO “The Net for Journalists”
What is an ideal UNESCO OER Product? CI Sector will OERize the “UNESCO Model Curricula for
Journalism Education”
The Curricula is a generic model that can be adapted according to each country’s specific needs.
Composed of detail on: level of course, course description, mode, pedagogical approach, number of hours per week, required and recommended texts, weekly class agenda, grading and assessment protocols
Successfully adapted by 40+ university journalism schools worldwide with many more in progress
The OER Platform allows a new journalism school to:– easily find courses, – compare how other schools have adapted them and – freely copy and adapt the most suitable courses
Who will pilot the project?
Piloted by: Polytechnic of Namibia School of Communication University of Namibia Department of Media Studies(Coordinated by UNESCO Windhoek)
Development will commence very shortlyLaunch by November, 2010
We would like at least 1 OER Product from each Sector: SC1: Marovo Lagoon Encyclopedia SC2: Microscience Experiments SHS: Bioethics Curriculum WHC: Forum Univeristy Programme ED: LIFE
WALK-THROUGH
OER Platform Team
Abel Caine
Igor Nuk
Hara Padhy
Maria Liouliou
Jaco Du Toit