Inaugural Workshop, Cape Town, July, 2009

A Vision for a Health OER A Vision for a Health OER

Network in AfricaNetwork in Africa

The RationaleThe Rationale Need to scale up training of health

workforce – good materials are an essential requirement, but often expensive to procure or develop from scratch, leading to significant duplication in materials development or absence of resources

Wealth of good, available content, but often hard to find

Essential to put mechanisms in place to build capacity to replace ageing academic populations

Ensure OER processes in health are driven from Africa, not imported to Africa and see Africans as contributors to OER Networks not passive beneficiaries

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A Vision for the NetworkA Vision for the Network

The African Health OER Network seeks to enable participants to develop, adapt, and share health education resources to augment limited human and other resources in the health sector and impact positively on overall health provision in Africa and beyond

African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

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Network FunctionsNetwork Functions

Aggregate the results of multiple initiatives by collecting, classifying, tagging, and then actively sharing Africa-initiated resources with the global health community

Facilitate discussion of how those resources can best be used

Share exemplars of best practice Work through institutions and associations

to advocate the principles of openness and sharing of educational materials

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Guiding PrinciplesGuiding Principles The Network will not be owned by any single

entity, but rather by all participants

Commitment to link and work with other emerging Regional Health OER Networks where they are initiated, as well as seeking to align activities to enable global integration between networks

Network participants will drive processes based on their needs – Health OER Network participations should not generate additional work load, but rather help people to manage work load more effectively

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Guiding PrinciplesGuiding PrinciplesCode of conduct will be established

and continually updated through ongoing consultation to set rules of ‘engagement’ between members

Advisory Board to be established to oversee adherence to Code of Conduct by all participants

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What the Network will NOT What the Network will NOT dodoHold funds for disbursement to

Network participantsCentralized quality controlSeek to control membershipDevelop content itself – only through

participants’ activities

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Audience(s)Audience(s)Participation in network will be open –

no conditions for joiningPrimary target is African health

academics and faculties – first focus on English, but open to growing to accommodate other languages if suitable partners indicate willingness to drive process

Network to include individuals, health faculties, NGOs, project teams, associations, consortia, government departments, etc

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Audience(s) – ctdAudience(s) – ctd

No need to sign anything, but all individuals and institutions will be encouraged to add electronic signature to Statement of Commitment

No policy implications for institutions joining, but it is likely that participation in Network will lead to institutions reviewing key policies (e.g. IPR, rewards/incentives, etc)

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Audience(s) – ctdAudience(s) – ctd

Learners may become a secondary beneficiary, but Network will assume primary responsibility for communication with learners resides with academics and institutions

Thus no attempt to include additional technologies - e.g. print-on-demand, audio/video streaming, mobile technology – to get materials to learners

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Statement of CommitmentStatement of CommitmentParticipants will commit to:

Releasing all content to be shared with Network available under some CC or equivalent licence (but no obligation to use one specific licence or to release all content they have available)

Ensuring content released does not breach other copyrights

A culture of constant improvement of curriculum and learning and teaching resources

Recruiting new participants to join and contribute to the Network

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Sharing ResourcesSharing Resources No attempt to replace existing/ emerging

institutional repositories of content Institutions to be responsible for branding

content properly for attribution purposes Seek to aggregate content housed in those

repositories through a Health OER Network online platform, using common meta-data framework

Push content aggregated into Health OER into key OER repositories globally (e.g. OER Commons, OCW Repository, Merlot, etc)

Use XML feeds to seek to automate version control and RSS feeds to provide notifications of new content

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Quality AssuranceQuality Assurance

The Network will not perform any quality assurance function itself

QA will happen at the margins of the Network:Institutions/individuals encouraged to

ensure they only submit work they consider to be of high quality

Institutions/individuals expected to perform QA work when deciding what content to incorporate into their programmes

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Quality Assurance – ctdQuality Assurance – ctd

Network’s online platform will enable rating of content, view of number of downloads, and addition of comments to facilitate Network participants doing community-driven QA

Institutions/individuals will be encouraged to do reviews of content online to make comments on content accessible to all in Network

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Next StepsNext Steps

Agree priority focus areas – Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Public Health, Occupational Therapy, etc – and generate generic content categories within each to facilitate sharing of content under common framework

Identify existing sources of content, generate required meta data, and aggregate it into relevant frameworks for shared access

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Next Steps – ctdNext Steps – ctd

Set up web space – initially inside OER Africa site, but possibly to become dedicated URL over time – to facilitate sharing of content

Set up discussion list to enable participants to stay in contact

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Our CommitmentOur Commitment

OER Africa and UofM commit to functioning as initial Network custodians

Will host online health OER platform Available to assist where requested with

advocacy processes Will facilitate initial communication to bring

Network to life and grow participation Expect to distribute ownerships of custodian

functions to Network participants wherever possible to grow the contributions of all involved

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