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  • From: Alex Gakuru <gakuru AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: ccafrica-oer AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Cc: Cable Green <cable AT creativecommons.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Ccafrica-oer] African Virtual University reviews strategy
  • Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 19:46:12 +0300

Thanks for those off list comments sent to me.

On the same newspaper reads:--

Yet Chakava is a worried man. He lists four challenges that could choke the  industry.

“The first is the issue of copyright and the advent of the Internet. Copyright has always been used as a means of owning knowledge, but some schools of thought are advocating for creative commons whose aim is to expand the boundaries of knowledge as opposed to limiting it in the age of copyright, and the internet could not have made matters easier for these advocates.”

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Chakava-on-Ngugi-Achebe-Soyinka-and-other-greats--/-/1056/1734046/-/item/1/-/rq5u91/-/index.html

Note:
Six days ago I was on national television live interview where promoted use of Creative Commons licensed Open Education Resources and Free and Open Source Software on free laptops programme recently announced by the government. Absolutely consider this major news media's first-ever mention of OER and CC as great catalysts for Creative Commons conversation locally.

Regards,

Alex 

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 7:10 PM, Alex Gakuru <gakuru AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
....

In the past week, academicians from across Africa were in Nairobi to discuss the challenges associated with virtual universities and to find solutions, one of which has been found to be the need to redesign and harmonise curriculums.

The meeting was hosted by the African Virtual University (AVU), a pan-African intergovernmental organisation established to enhance the capacities of African universities to increase access to higher education and training through ICT.

According to some participants at the meeting, the virtual programmes have been dogged by problems relating to contextualisation of programmes to fit the needs of the specific universities that they are delivered from.

A representative of the University of Zimbabwe, Dr David Mtetwa, said that his university had to tweak the AVU teacher education curriculum to fit its own system.
“AVU aims to strengthen the programmes so that they meet international standards, achieve a unified university system, and strengthened pan-Africanism to enable the building of a system that allows students access to learning and mobility across the continent,” said the AVU rector, Dr Bakary Diallo, at the conference.

He said universities and other experts were holding meetings as part of the harmonisation process in a bid to progressively move away from the use of curriculum entirely designed in Western countries. Dr Diallo further said that AVU was also gearing to assess the quality of distance education and e-learning.

Once the curriculum and modules are standardised, they will be released as Open Education Resources (OER) that can be used by any university in the world, including those that are not members of AVU. The virtual university already has 219 modules as OER hosted on its portal.

The modules have been translated and designed in such a way that they can work across borders and language barriers in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa.

...

http://www.nation.co.ke/Features/DN2/Virtual-lessons-for-AVU/-/957860/1863460/-/9yunr8/-/index.html


--
Alex Gakuru, Regional Coordinator - Africa,
Creative Commons creativecommons.org
e-mail: gakuru AT creativecommons.org

Like what we do? Keep us going: https://creativecommons.net/donate/



--
Alex Gakuru, Regional Coordinator - Africa,
Creative Commons creativecommons.org
e-mail: gakuru AT creativecommons.org

Like what we do? Keep us going: https://creativecommons.net/donate/



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