ABSTRACT
Does adoption of open education resources (OER) lead to the emergence of open educational practices (OEP)? The focus of this chapter is an ICT-integrated teacher education project that was implemented by the African Virtual University (AVU), an organization that works through a consortium of universities in Africa to help them build their capacity to exploit ICTs for the delivery of distance and eLearning programs. This multinational teacher education project was implemented between 2005 and 2011 in 12 institutions across 10 African countries. Six of those institutions are represented in this study and are located in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. A teacher education degree program in math and science was delivered through a combination of online and eLearning programs. A central component of the project was that the course instructional modules be developed as OER textbooks. For that reason, the practice of creation of such open materials took place at the level of the consortium. It was at that level that the AVU OER was created and module authors were faculty drawn from the participating universities. The practice of OER use happened at the level of each institution and was especially facilitated by the fact that they were introduced as instructional resources for a degree program. Faculty used OER as a resource for course development, for training new faculty, for lesson preparation, and for student readings. Use also led to the other practices of repurposing, creation, and sharing, but to a lesser extent. Overall, the practices seemed to happen more at the level of the individual faculty than at the institutional level. Accessibility, institutional policies, and appropriate knowledge were some of the factors considered important in promoting institutional moves toward OEP.
