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The African Health OER Network is a project within Saide's OER Africa Initiative. Monica Mawoyo and Monge Tlaka who support participants of the Network provide a brief description of the project and what the newly designed website has to offer.
Saide's OER Africa initiative has amongst several OER projects, a dedicated health project, the African Health OER Network, which aims to advance healthcare education in Africa by using OER to share knowledge, address curriculum gaps, and support communities around health education. OER Africa co-facilitates the African Health OER Network with the University of Michigan (U-M).
The role of the Network is to:
- Aggregate the results of multiple health education initiatives by collecting, classifying, indexing, and then actively distributing African-initiated resources with the global health community;
- Facilitate discussion of how these resources can best be used;
- Share best practices, e.g., OER production and advocacy;
- Aggregate content to develop and deliver a critical mass of learning materials; and
- Work through institutions and associations to advocate the principles of openness and of sharing educational materials. This includes helping institutions to create an enabling policy environment for OER production and use.
Network members have a significant role to play towards building the Network. Member opportunities include contributing resources to the database of repositories, thereby expanding resources that can be accessed by the Network. Members can also direct the Network facilitators to good sources of OER that they have used, so that these can be sourced and added to the database. Read more.
Show your support
Participation in the network is open and there are no conditions. However, it is useful for Network participants to demonstrate a commitment towards open education, by signing the declaration. To receive communication on the African Health OER Network, including the quarterly newsletter, you can subscribe to the Health OER Network mailing list. If you would like to learn more about Health OER and how your institution can get involved in Health OER initiatives or the Network, contact healthoer@oerafrica.org .
An important aspect of the African Health OER Network is the website which has recently acquired a new look! The new website makes it easier to:
- View and download learning materials from our collection of resources and browse links to several other repositories.
- Share your own lectures and learning materials by using our tools and guides.
- Use our collection of brochures, graphics, presentations, multimedia, and publications to inform colleagues about OER and help build a case for open sharing at their institution!
- Show your dedication in helping to improve the provision of African health education by signing the declaration, which indicates a commitment to support open education.
We invite you to explore some of the new features and write to us to let us know what you think .
Request for Health OER
In addition to all the features mentioned above, we have a feature where you can ask for assistance in finding specific Health OER through our request facility. The purpose of this facility is to provide an online space for Health academics to solicit health-related OER learning materials and manage requests on a given topic, as well as responses solicited from the network, for this request. Academics or course developers putting together a course for second year nursing students, for example, might submit a request for case studies, lab exercises, and videos to support a class on midwifery. The requestor creates an account on the site and completes the request form. Once the request is submitted, an OER Africa administrator reviews and approves the request. The request is disseminated publicly on the OER Africa website, with the purpose of inviting comments on the request, and providing opportunity for referrals to links with relevant materials.
To date, we have received requests and sourced materials for Kamuzu College of Nursing in Malawi, Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique and Hewlett Packard. To view these requests and the materials we sourced, or to send us your own request, go to the request facility.
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