AVU Releases Hundreds of New Open Educational Resources

The African Virtual University (AVU) has released 1,335 Open Educational Resources (OERs) under the Creative Commons license CC BY 2.5.

The new materials include 234 open textbooks or modules, 83 videos and 945 learning objects extracted from the modules. All resources are freely available online at OER@AVU http://oer.avu.org , an initiative launched in 2011 with some 288 open resources. OER@AVU has been a great contribution to the African and global OER communities; as of July 2018, it hosts a total of 1,623 resources available in English, French and Portuguese.

Noting that university enrolment is about 7% in Sub-Saharan Africa, the AVU is addressing the critical issue of the availability of quality content, one of the barriers to accessing quality education in Africa. Institutions and individuals like faculty and learners can access the materials freely. They can share the materials by copying and redistributing them in any medium or format. They can also adapt the materials by remixing, transforming them and be able to build upon them for any purpose, even commercially. The subjects included in the resources are mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, informatics, administration, linguistics, teacher education professional courses, and ICT in education.

“We are grateful that this collective effort has yielded such significant impact with some 2.8 million online accesses from African and beyond, and we are glad to note that OER@AVU has been largely recognized by the global OER movement. I would like to thank all partners who have made this possible, with a special mention to the African Development Bank” said Dr. Bakary Diallo, the AVU Rector.”

The AVU developed the new set of OERs jointly with 27 partner institutions located in 21 African countries within the framework of Multinational Project II funded by the African Development Bank. Since its launch in 2011 the AVU OERs portal has been accessed at least 2.8 million times from 225 countries and territories.

The AVU has also received 5 international Awards that include the 2017 Open Education Consortium (OEC) Individual Leadership Prize, the International Council for Distance Education (ICDE) Institutional Prize 2015 and 3 other OEC prizes related to OERs in 2013, 2012 and 2011.

AVU is a leading Pan-African eLearning organization and one of its strategic objectives is to increase access to high quality Open, Distance and eLearning resources that are relevant to Africa. The interactive portal http://oer.avu.org therefore furthers the AVU’s substantial commitment to open education and is an investment in the effort to create a shared collection of open educational resources.