In the current economically constrained environment Open Educational Resources (OER) have been heralded as a way of providing access to relevant and affordable educational resources to learners and educators in both formal and informal learning contexts, including higher education. OER are being created and shared through a range of OER initiatives, repositories and portals (e.g. MIT Open Courseware, OpenLearn, MERLOT, Khan Academy, OER Africa, OER@AVU). Although site statistics provided by these various portals indicate some access to these resources from countries in Africa, the number of ‘hits’ do not explain how these materials are being used, by whom and to what effect to provide empirical evidence for the “widely shared belief that [OER are] going to be a fundamentally important phenomenon for the future of learning and education” (Tuomi 2013:59) and on pedagogical practices in particular.
This keynote address will explain how the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project is using desktop regional reviews, cross-regional surveys, cross regional and country case studies, action research studies and focused impact studies to establish in what ways, and under what circumstances the adoption of OER can impact upon a range of educational aspects. It will focus specifically on conceptual and methodological strategies adopted to tease out the relationship between OER and pedagogical practices in selected countries in SubSaharan Africa.

Keywords

OER Africa · OER pedagogy · OER portals · OER repositories · OER usage