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