OER AFRICA/Understanding OER

OER Africa provides access to a wealth of information and resources necessary to benefit from Open Educational Resources (OER), which can be applied in a variety of online and elearning and offline and face-to-face environments. We define OERs as

"Education resources that are freely available for use by educators and learners, without the need to pay royalties or license fees."

There is considerable discussion in many OER communities around the globe, as to what constitutes an OER. Indeed, a broad spectrum of frameworks is emerging; focusing on governing which OER are licensed for use (i.e., some of which simply allow copying) and others that make provision for users to adapt and customise the resources that they use.

In an African context, we recognize that many of the resources produced will be printable (while remaining shareable in digital formats (i.e., online and offline formats such as CD-ROM). Consequently, we anticipate that a very high percentage of OERs for African education will be shared as RTF or similar files and packaged and distributed as PDF files.