e-Learning Africa 2016 and OER

This 1000 participant event took place in Cairo in 2016. With 36 exhibitors and themes ranging from skills and competencies, students and learning, health care initiatives, teachers and educators, development opportunities in and for local communities, schools, and higher education institutions, the conference had a strong focus on Open Education Resources. Tessa Welch attended the gathering.

Egypt is a good place to talk about OER. Last year the presidency launched the Egyptian Knowledge Bank, the biggest digital library in the world – not quite OER, but at least free to all 90 million Egyptians. It houses content from 29 publishers including prominent publishing houses such as National Geographic, Discovery Cambridge, Oxford, Reuters, Britannica and others. Professor Dr. Tarek Shawki, head of Egypt’s Presidential Specialized Council for Education and Scientific Research tasked with organizing the project, said in his keynote presentation, “By providing these materials free of charge, the knowledge bank ensures that all Egyptians, no matter what their economic circumstances, will have the tools they need to excel in their education and research.” The portal services all 90 million Egyptian citizens. To ensure that each segment receives the appropriate contents and services suitable for their interests and needs, the portal sections are tailored to the needs of four different audiences:

1. Researchers: target all academic and researchers;
2. Students: target Egyptian students at all educational levels;
3. Kids: target till 6th grade;
4. General reader: free to all Egyptians.

For more information see http://ela-newsportal.com/knowledge-on-the-nile-Egypt-library/. Collaboration from other African countries is invited.

There was plenty of discussion about MOOCs and associated issues such as incentives for staying engaged in these massive open online courses, incentives such as badges and micro-credentials.  Many participants talked about the importance of leveraging people’s desire for social recognition to incentivise consistent participation. For example, the experience of University of Cape Town (UCT) is that it isn’t the badge itself that provides the incentive, but who awards the badge. MOOC participants value having a badge from UCT as it is regarded as a prestigious institution.  In response to this, UCT is linking badges to careful descriptions of evidence, so that the badge becomes a description of learning, rather than merely a status symbol.

Egypt has the most active MOOC community of learners not only in the Arab region but also in Africa. Key issues being discussion in Egypt are the challenges of connectivity and localisation, in both language and context. One way to address connectivity is to make MOOCs available on mobile devices. However, localisation is more difficult. 56% of all web content is in English. The attached graphic demonstrates English dominance. African languages and Arabic do not feature at all in this graph. However, we know that learners become more engaged and participative if they learn in their mother tongue. The suggestion was that MOOCs should leverage one of the benefits of OER – translation without the need to ask permission or pay a fee. Translation of MOOC content could put MOOCs more within the grasp of the people that need open and free education the most.

In a fascinating session on localisation (both through translation and through re-contextualisation), there was input from three initiatives. First Christer Gundersen spoke about about the Norwegian National Digital Learning Arena (NDLA), a portal of OER in secondary education entirely developed by teachers themselves. Teachers themselves provide content for this portal, but the portal as a whole is a joint initiative between county councils in Norway, where a portion of state funds is allocated to ensure free access to textbooks for Norwegian students and to develop digital resources (or purchase from publishers or other producers). He also spoke about his African initiative, Maarifa. Maarifa works with local teachers (projects in Uganda and Ethiopia at the moment), using crowdsourcing and micropayment, to translate open learning resources and re-contextualise them.

Christer didn’t go into detail about the process of re-contextualisation, but Gerry van der Hulst (of a course design and materials development initiative called Three Mountains, currently working in Rwanda), spoke about the tension between producing cost effective generic materials, and locally relevant materials. To work effectively (particularly if people are not highly educated), materials should not only be in a familiar language but speak to people in the examples and images used. It doesn’t help to translate a John Cleese management training video into a local language – if the humour is completely alien, a language change won’t help. The downside of this is that the more specific materials become for a particular context, the less transferable they are to other contexts. Both generic and contextualised versions of materials are needed. And we need to develop and share methodologies for contextualisation so that, more and more, people can do it themselves.

The third speaker in this session was Mesfin Derash from SIL International in Ethiopia. Ethiopia took a policy decision in 1993 that over 40 of the 85 local languages in Ethiopia should be used as medium of instruction in primary schools. In other words – a policy decision for the localisation of literacy development. For this, teachers have to be identified and trained and materials created to support teaching and learning. Teachers are selected according to their oral competence in the mother tongue. However, Mesfin pointed out that oral reading fluency tests revealed that these teachers did not have strong literacy skills in their own language. In addition, they have to deal with parents who would prefer English. Although teachers may have a pride in their own language, there is often resistance because specialisation in a particular mother tongue affects their mobility as educators.

Saide’s African Storybook experience of letting the local lead, but at the same time ensuring systemic implementation through advocacy at county and national level in Kenya, featured in another of the sessions entitled, Literacy with Open Resources. Participants were very interested in results of our internal evaluation in 2015 – the numbers of stories read in our pilot sites, as well as the extent to which pilot site teachers translated and adapted stories with the intention of using them in the classroom, rather than simply to add to the store of versions on the African storybook website.

Sharing the platform with us was SIL’s Robert Waliaula, who gave a demonstration of the SIL Bloom tool – a free tool for the creation of decodable and levelled readers in local languages. Until Robert drew our attention to the Bloom Library, we had not realised how many of the African Storybook titles have been re-published there.

Chair of the session was Mignon Hardie of FunDza, who earlier in the conference had shared a fascinating update on FunDza – now available free of charge in an App, as well as on Facebook’s Free Basics. We congratulate them on the extent of use of the stories – 60 000 users per month, but more importantly, an average of 12 minutes a session, which shows that young people are actually reading, not simply flipping through. FunDza’s users range from 13 to 25 years of age, but most interesting is that 43% of their readers are people who are currently unemployed and looking for employment. A good way to prepare for employment is to improve your reading skills on openly licensed content!                             

Alice Barlow-Zambodla chaired a session on Reaping the Rewards of Open. One of the presenters in this session was Wilhelmina Louw from Namcol, who spoke about the online Open educational resources content development on the free eLearning platform Notesmaster. This is tailored to the National Institute of Educational Development (NIED) curriculum in Namibia, providing access to locally authored junior and senior secondary syllabus-specific content. The platform connects all in secondary education across Namibia, empowering teachers by giving them the tools to create and share their own digital content. Worth keeping in touch with.