This paper reviews and reflects on institutional OER development practices along the dimensions and models of collaboration and innovation within communities and networks of practice, and provides insights as how to improve the diffusion of OER through institutional networks. It does so by examining two cases:

Case 1 MORIL:
The EADTU has been working on sharing and developing institutional OER strategies by means of a taskforce on Multilingual Open Resources for Independent Learning (MORIL). The US-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation acted as a financial catalyst to initiate a Network of Practice within the participating institutions and which is being extended through a grant from the Erasmus Lifelong Learning Programme in the strand Virtual Campus.

Case 2 TESSA:
The Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa (TESSA) programme is a research and development initiative creating OER and course design guidance for teachers and teacher educators working in Sub-Saharan African countries. TESSA is a consortium of 18 national and international organisations including 13 institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa who are using the TESSA materials in a variety of teacher education programmes. The major funding for TESSA has come from the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Keywords

community · diffusion · OER adoption · OER competence · Open Educational Resources