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During 2009 the University of Malawi (UNIMA) embarked
on two exciting and innovative OER projects, one at
the Kamuzu College of Nursing and the second at the
Bunda College of Agriculture. These projects were co-funded
by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA)
and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and facilitated
jointly by SAIDE’s OER Africa Initiative and the
International Association for Digital Publications (IADP).
This article draws from a draft case study developed
by Donna Preston and Andrew Moore, members of the OER
Africa team.
Challenge of Resources
Like most African tertiary institutions, the University
of Malawi is confronted by ongoing challenges as demands
for tertiary education continue to grow, but access
to both physical and human resources remains fixed.
In 2009, a total of 5,600 Malawians sat the entrance
exam to compete for a mere 1,152 UNIMA places. The legality
of this quota system is being fought in the country’s
law courts, and government is under constant pressure
to allow more places.
Meanwhile teaching staff face the daily challenge of
providing quality education to those fortunate enough
to have places. Prescribing relevant textbooks, for
example, is often considered a basic strategy when designing
an academic course in developed countries. In many parts
of Africa, however, copyrighted textbooks are difficult
to acquire and considered too expensive by students
and their families.
UNIMA has experienced situations where very few students
have access to approved textbooks and readings, nullifying
prescribed book lists. Resources in the reserve section
of College libraries are in great demand and popular
books are rebound many times in their life cycle.
It was against this background that UNIMA embarked on
a strategy to exploit Open Education Resources (OER).
The newly-appointed Vice Chancellor, Dr Emmanuel Fabiano
believes that, if deployed with insight, ICT and e-Learning
can assist the university to overcome a number of institutional
challenges.
Kamuzu College of Nursing (KCN)
This project aimed at training staff to source, evaluate,
and adapt OER for an e-Learning Certificate in Midwifery.
Staff conducted a needs analysis and the following aims
for the project were identified:
- Develop a course that would move students away from
having a purely theoretical knowledge to being able
to apply skills and knowledge clinically. At most,
any support material developed needed to be one third
theory and two thirds practical skills.
- Introduce 5th year nurses to electronic media where
colour photos and contextually relevant video clips
could be integrated with text resources.
- Achieve all of this in a cost-effective way by adapting
materials that had been released as OER rather than
developing materials from scratch. Support came primarily
from Michigan State University, which helped to identify
relevant OER for the project.
- Build capacity amongst the KCN staff to develop
a set of materials to support both students and staff
in the use of Problem-based Learning using OER.
A series of workshops were held to train the staff
to source, analyse and adapt OER, and with the support
of OER Africa/IADP, devise an interface to hold the
digital resources together in a manner that promoted
the use of Problem-based Learning. This courseware is
licensed under a creative commons licence and is freely-available
on the OER Africa
website.
First piloted with students in February 2010, the Midwifery
learning environment generated high levels of interest
amongst students. Students were provided with CD-Roms
of the materials to minimize the dependency on connectivity.
Uptake in using the materials, however, was slow because
both staff and students had to adapt to a different
way of teaching and learning and the integration of
problem-based learning may take some time yet. However,
there is growing consensus among staff that using OER
is a cost-effective way of creating high quality, contextually-relevant
teaching and learning materials.
Bunda College of Agriculture (BCA) OER Project
The College’s Language and Communication for Development
Department decided to develop a textbook to address
problems of staff and students not having access to
the same set of textbooks despite their Communications
Skills classes being a core course for all first year
students. Secondly, students could not always access
the recommended readings as the College Library did
not have, or had an insufficient number of the texts.
As with the Kamuzu College of Nursing a series of workshops
were held facilated by OER Africa/IADP to assist staff
to source, analyse, and adapt a variety of existing
OER to create the textbook. The first workshop introduced
the OER movement and a ‘hands-on’ approach
to searching digital repositories and adapting materials.
Between the first and second workshop, the Bunda team
re-worked the sourced OER, adapting them to suit the
Bunda context. The focus of the second workshop was
on the writing process and identification of gaps that
still existed. The final workshop focused on quality
control, provided an opportunity for further writing,
and also identified omissions in the text and set activities.
While it initially proved difficult to wean the writing
team off their preferred copyrighted texts, the Bunda
team now feels that there is a role for OER in the production
of university texts. The 102 page Communication Skills
textbook, which was created exclusively from OER, was
released in early-2010 and has been offered back to
the OER community. It is available from both the Bunda
College website and the OER
Africa website.
The more detailed case study will be available shortly
on the OER Africa
website, however, there are also detailed reports
on the projects and other similar initiatives available
on the website.
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