 Hello and thank you for providing me with this opportunity to speak with you on the occasion of this OER Africa convening presentation. Unfortunately I couldn't be in Nairobi to be with you, but I was asked to say a few things from my perspective. OER Africa's overarching vision is a vibrant and sustainable African education systems and institutions that play a critical role in building and sustaining African societies and economies by producing the continent's future intellectual leaders through free and open development and sharing of common intellectual capital. Those are very lofty goals and based on these excerpts it's clear to me that an important part of OER Africa's mission is to help address the weakened state of Africa's tertiary education systems. This is not just about embedding OER in African tertiary educational systems. It's about OER Africa aspiring to play a transformative development role in Africa. So it's quite a big vision. The question is to what extent has it been able to play this transformative role from its inception to date? I think that it's been instrumental in evangelizing for OER and has achieved significant impact in reaching out to the higher education constituencies to sell the value added of OER. It's clear that the recognition of OER's value is visibly higher now than before OER Africa started early in the new millennium. Most recently the participation research initiative being undertaken in collaboration with a cohort of African universities has provided an opportunity for a deep dive, an opportunity to ground truth the theory of OER and learn critical lessons about what it really takes to lift the constraints to implementing OER in higher education in Africa. But obviously transforming Africa's tertiary institutions is a massive agenda that OER Africa cannot deliver on its own. In the area of OER remains a pioneer however it needs to connect more systematically and effectively with other Pan-African higher education initiatives that share this overarching vision I just spelled out and that are making progress in working with networks of universities to build capacity. I'll come back to this at the end of my presentation. I first interacted with OER Africa when I was asked to review a communication strategy that had been developed in 2009. So the second issue I'm going to address is the extent to which a communication strategy is important for OER in Africa or for any higher education initiative. One of the key lessons we've learned from decades of engagement with development is that you're only as effective as you are visible. Visibility has many dimensions which I won't go into in any detail but two dimensions are worth mentioning here. One of them is selling the OER concept to key stakeholders and the second one is delivering proof of concept which can then be used to develop further partnerships. In 2010 I reviewed the OER communication strategy and I posed six clusters of questions. The first cluster was whether there was a common understanding within OER Africa and in terms of communication and in terms of how OER Africa was integrated with its parent organization Saidi and I asked how central communication was to the work of the initiative. Secondly I asked how sustainable communication was when it relied very heavily on two people travelling to conferences and to talk to institutions delivering PowerPoint presentations, keynotes addresses and networking as a means of raising awareness of and creating demand for OER. How proven was the OER concept in Africa and to what extent should the strategy be focusing on case studies or stories which would showcase areas in which it was working for example in health OER. The third questions were related to OER Africa's messages. Were they the right ones? Do they clearly and effectively articulate OER Africa's unique selling points and were they appropriate or realistic? So there was a question there about OER saying what it intended to do as opposed to what it could actually prove it could do. Fourth, there was a question about the complexity of the OER Africa offering. It's not an easy thing to explain to people. Do the current materials communicate the core elements of the offering clearly and effectively? Was there a need to simplify and de-jagonize the language describing OER Africa? Fifth, OER Africa had gone through this iterative process of identifying its course stakeholders and potential partners which is extremely good practice as the first thing you need to do for any initiative that's predicated on engagement with others is to be clear about who you want to engage with. And this speaks, you know, this is as true for communication as it is for anything else. To what extent has this process enabled the mapping of key target audiences for the communication work and how rigorously has the strategy matched its products with the audience? And then the final sort of cluster of questions was which stem from the audience question. Should the website be the primary means of communication for OER Africa? Particularly given the fact that a lot of people don't have the bandwidth to access websites to the extent that they should. How much should be invested in the website and web platform as opposed to other communication tools and media of which there are many, including social media and many forms of engagement which don't necessarily rely on technology? How realistic is it to create a platform and expect others to own that platform and to populate it with content? This is a huge problem that most developers of websites and strategic communicators have which is that, you know, you expect ownership to transfer from yourselves to the audience but the audience don't necessarily engage with the platform in the same way that you envisage it. To what extent is it realistic to expect online communities to be self-organizing? And this was a hallmark of the OER Africa kind of offering. And how plausibly can attribution for enabling the work of others be claimed and measured? Can the gathering of statistics on the website be used to generalize into a results culture that sees OER harnessing evidence to inform its communication? Most of the challenges that arose and were implied by these questions seem to have been addressed by the OER Africa team either fully or to the extent possible. Of course a lot of this stuff is at the very technical and operational nature. OER Africa has made great strides in particular by its focus on health OER in demonstrating the power of OER and health being a particular sector where OER is gaining traction. Now I think there needs to be some sort of a shift in this effort. What should now take center stage is the effort to take OER beyond the realm of the converted integrated as a key tool for transforming higher education systems in Africa. For this to happen there is a need to elevate the pitch by sharing lessons of what OER Africa has learned so far with wider audiences. This convening clearly represents an important first step in such an effort. Additionally, however, there needs to be a purposive, well-crafted effort to cultivate partnerships with other actors in higher education in Africa. Some of these are intermediaries who can be critical in ensuring OER delivers on its promise. Others are funding higher education capacity and development. The third question I'd like to try and sort of address is the question of whether technology and innovation amount to the same thing. Policymakers tend to conflate the two things, but when it comes to higher education in Africa how useful is this conflation? If Africa is to revitalize its higher education sector will either technology or innovation suffice? My sense is that there's no either or in determining whether OER's transformative potential resides in technology or innovation. Technology is clearly hardwired into the concept of OER which identifies digital applications such as streamed video webcasts, webinars, podcasts and so on as key educational resources adding to the traditional materials that we commonly associate with higher education. The means of delivery of OER also heavily emphasize the need for reliable and affordable internet something that is now widely recognized in tertiary education as a fundamental condition for effective learning. How technology is applied in higher education makes the difference between whether it is innovative or simply ritualistic. Innovation applies as much to the content itself as to the means of communicating that content. The concern here is that policymakers are still at the stage where they fetishize technology as a solution to all of Africa's problems when in fact the real transformative potential of OER lies in the pedagogical innovations inherent in the concept. The proliferation of ICTs presents an unprecedented set of opportunities to deliver education to millions who in the past have been unable to benefit. Telecoms costs are falling dramatically as access to mobile phones approaches a saturation point. This can only be a good thing for many perspectives. However, more efforts needed to sell the innovative potential behind OER itself how it can revolutionize teaching and learning. At a time when there are existential questions being asked about the relevance and appropriateness of the pedagogy many African universities have borrowed from the Western Academy and are struggling to implement. The innovative power of OER has the potential to change the game and technology is an important part of the story but by no means the full extent of it. The last point I'd like to address is the role or roles that initiatives like OER Africa should play going forwards in transforming pedagogical practices in Africa's higher education sector. I think not being an expert on teaching and learning there's not so much I can say about methodologically or content wise what OER Africa needs to do to actually try and shape the higher education sector substantively. But what I can say is that at the beginning of the presentation I mentioned that OER Africa could not realistically take on the burden of transforming the tertiary education sector in Africa single-handedly and in my work I come across many new and emerging players in higher education in this ecosystem that OER Africa really needs to work with. There are a number of initiatives that typically involve networks of universities which do things like develop common curricula. For example there's PASGA, the Pan-African Social Governance Research Initiative which is working with at least 12 universities that I know of to develop a common curriculum and masters in research and public policy to try and fill the gap in this area. We have masters programs in disciplines such as economics but there is no masters program in research and public policy which A prepares students and graduates to engage in public policy and B prepares them to be potential PhD scholars. So this is something that PASGA is spearheading. It also works on issues such as research methods and has a whole training program for that. I see them as a potentially important partner for OER Africa. If anything, if the partnership is not already being pursued with them it should be. Another important higher education initiative is the public policy schools initiative which I think Vitz University is centrally involved in. It's funded by a number of prominent private donors and it seeks to build a caterer of future African scholars who will not only be very strong in terms of adding to the body of knowledge in social science but will also be practically engaged in addressing Africa's development challenges. Another initiative that I think PASGA, another initiative that I think that OER Africa should be engaged with is something called CARTA, C-A-R-T-A. CARTA is a doctoral training program that was conceived of and initiated by APHRC, the African Population Health Research Center, which is also based in Nairobi. It's been extremely successful. I was privileged to teach the policy influence module with another colleague last year and be exposed to PhD candidates who were almost finished. These are scientists and researchers who are of the highest caliber throughout Africa. I think that they would all benefit from great exposure to OER resources and to the whole OER philosophy and system. There's also the Pan-African University, which most of you would have heard about, which is a recently launched concept supported I think by the Swedes and others. There is ample evidence of a purposive effort to try and rebuild and revitalize the tertiary education system in Africa. There are a number of players based on the African continent with the Pan-African footprint who are working towards this endeavor. I strongly suggest that OER Africa needs to elevate its pitch. If the last 15 years have been a period of incubation, exploration, learning for OER in Africa, then these have been very successful years, but the time is now ripe to take things to a new level. OER Africa as a vehicle, I think, needs to be bigger, stronger and more engaged. In terms of its visibility as an entity, it needs to be able to be the same pitch as some of the other Pan-African initiatives. It needs to engage much more in strategic communication. It needs to also work much more closely on issues such as the uptake of research, which is a growing focus of a lot of universities now in Africa, sort of designing research processes to ensure that uptake is hardwired into the DNA of the research initiatives, making sure that at every stage policymakers are engaged with the research as it emerges. I think that OER as a concept can actually make a huge difference to research uptake. I think this is an area that requires a more muscular presence by OER Africa and a much deeper engagement and a much more visible engagement. Again, please accept my sincere apologies for not being able to be with you in person. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to present to you. Thank you.