 Open educational resources are critical for the African continent. If we are not part of this, we are going to be left behind. Open educational resources are an idealistic attempt to share knowledge with the whole of humanity. I think it's critical to pay very close attention to open educational resources because they provide us a really effective mechanism for improving the quality and reducing the cost of educational delivery in developing countries. The 2012 UNESCO Paris Declaration was a landmark event for the Open Educational Resources, or OER movement, a global call on governments to openly license publicly funded educational materials. But this movement is still widely unacknowledged and misunderstood. What are OERs all about? Open educational resources are just that. They're teaching and learning resources that have been licensed openly so that anyone can use them without having to pay royalties or license fees. So why are OERs so important in higher education and why on the African continent? It's all about access. If you can't find the latest resources, if you can't afford them, then you're completely out of the loop. So the huge possibility around open educational resources is that you can get them, you can use them, you can adapt them, you can share them back. You can raise the profile in so creating them of African intellectual property as well. The term Open Educational Resources was coined in 2002 at the UNESCO World Open Coursework Conference and high education institutions and organizations have been harnessing this evolution in education across the African continent. Let's take a look at one example. Sadi is a not-for-profit organization with a strong social justice mandate. Our mission is to increase access to educational and learning opportunities for all people throughout their lives. And so when Open Education Resources came around, we were really very happy to take forward this OER movement. And so the South African Institute for Distance Education, Sadi, promoted the OER Africa Initiative in 2008. Headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya and funded by both the Hewlett Foundation and the Gates Foundation, OER Africa has played a vital role in pioneering OER projects across the continent. In all of the areas that we work in health, agriculture, teacher education and foundation courses, as far as possible we work with existing networks. Back in 2008, OER Africa and the University of Michigan jointly facilitated a health OER project, comprised of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the University of Cape Town, the University of Ghana and the University of the Western Cape. At some of the Ghanaian institutions, they had found that they were worrying about whether students were actually getting enough exposure and enough practice with practical things. And this is because the classroom sizes were large. We are using video techniques in other forms like illustration. We're able to demonstrate complex techniques to students that equipment will not be really available. And we also believe that some of the videos we've produced, especially examinations of pregnant abdomen and other things, they are there. Students can study before they touch a pregnant woman, when they go and touch a pregnant woman, when they come back and see what they did right, they just revise it over and over again. What the faculty found is that students who had access to these resources were now performing at a much higher level than students from previous cohorts who hadn't had access. I can foresee a day when we are much more widespread than it is now. Then we are likely to spend less time repeating the adaptive material and more time doing practical and harmful exercises for students. This model that we first worked with in health is a model we have subsequently rolled out in agriculture, in teacher education. And this is the way that we are working going forward. There were also some unexpected and life-changing collaborations that developed out of this Health OER project. We heard from a professor who had created some resources on hematology for some of his students, posted them online on the university website. I was contacted by email, by a Croatian physicist who himself had had anemia for about four years of unknown cause. He had been investigated thoroughly and I took a look. I was convinced that it was an infection. So several tests were done. In the end, he was finally diagnosed as having Lyme disease caused by Borrella. And so he's been treated now for about four to six months and he's doing much better. I've never met him. I don't know what he looks like. All this has been on the internet. Because those resources, those hematological slides that were created for the students had been licensed clearly, this person in Europe knew exactly who to contact, how to contact them and how to use these resources. The essence was not and should not be one's ownership of the fact. But the essence should be the enhancement that the fact brings to academic life and individual lives. Open educational resources seem a natural fit for the higher education sector for one. And the Quamengruma University of Science and Technology has an OER policy in place. Can this relationship be strengthened through institutional policy? There are a lot of reasons that openness is a good thing and they range from transparency, they range from the principle that academics in universities and public universities are paid for with public money and therefore the public beyond the university has the right to access those resources, which is a central issue throughout the Open agenda. But I think in the OER space in particular, it's good for pedagogy because the process of making teaching resources openly available improves them. UCT does not have a policy on OERs in particular. What is much more useful is to develop an institutional position on openness. UCT Open Content was launched in 2010. It hosts UCT academic author material. The way Open Content has evolved has been a sort of middle management incentive where researchers have seen a need and a place for Open Content and it hasn't initiated, hasn't had a top-down approach at all. There's a very interesting thing happening in the global north with the change in the policy environment by government and by funders. Open Access is a requirement in the UK, in Europe, in the States and all of that has a wonderful effect of making a huge amount of academic content available to the global south. But it also has the consequence of drowning what developing content there is online. So we don't make a concerted effort to put our content online and to make it discoverable. We're going to become more invisible. I think that it's clear that in the long run, unless government policies change, we're going to make limited progress with getting open educational resources systematically integrated into the education systems because ultimately governments are by far the biggest investors in education in any country and therefore the policies that they have set the tone for the rest of the system. I think that maybe our role as OEA Africa will become smaller and smaller. It will be more and more around the areas of policy rather than around actual content development. It will be around policy development, policy implementation. It will be around supporting higher education institutions and governments to liaise with each other so that at a national level and at an international level the policies exist. So what lies in the future for OERs? Actually, there's a vast amount of money already being spent on educational resources. If we can shift the focus of that investment rather than it being spent on buying textbooks from publishers that are all largely the same, we invest that money in creating vibrant and open knowledge networks, then I think that there is actually more than enough money available to invest in sustaining open educational resources. We've been talking about higher education but really when you're talking about open educational resources the sky is the limit. I believe that open education resources will revolutionise the education industry in pretty much the same way as changes in technology have revolutionised the music industry. At the University, why do this? The question is actually going to very soon be why aren't you doing this? The global terrain is becoming open. I feel that the idea of having this African content for Africans is crucial and that's where OER Africa comes in, that's where universities in Africa sharing the materials makes a huge impact. It's now time that we share our own useful material in the context that we really need it. We're seeing collaborations growing across institutions so you imagine the quality of a programme that is collaboratively designed by some of the best brains on the continent and then delivered to students wherever they are. Education for all means sharing by all. Open by default. Grow yours in the future.