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28.10.2011 - UNESCO

Launch of the UNESCO Open Educational Resources Platform

OER Logo

The UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Platform will be launched by Ms Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO and the Honourable Stanley Simataa, Deputy Minister for ICT of Namibia at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on Tuesday 1 November 2011 (6.30 p.m. - 7.30 p.m., Room X). The OER Platform is a new, innovative online Platform that will offer selected UNESCO publications as fully-licensed OERs.

OERs provide member states with a strong opportunity to increase the quality and access to education and facilitates knowledge sharing, dialogue, and capacity building.

The first UNESCO publication to be made available on the OER Platform is the UNESCO Model Curricula for Journalism Education. The Curricula has been very successfully adapted by more than 60 university journalism schools in over 50 countries. We have agreements with the journalism schools of the Polytechnic of Namibia and the University of Namibia to share their adaptations of the UNESCO curricula as OERs on the Platform.

By persuading and assisting additional journalism schools to share their adapted curricula in OER format on the Platform, we provide the professor, curricula developer, or quality assurance assessor looking to develop their own curricula with an unparalleled opportunity to easily and intuitively select and compare curricula from near-by or international institutions, in their own language. They are then able to easily, legally, and freely “copy” the content closest to their requirements to adapt to their local requirements.

UNESCO will continue to upload new publications to the Platform. For 2012, work has commenced on the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Curricula from the Communication and Information Sector and the General History of Africa Curricula from the Culture Sector.

Special guests at the OER Platform launch include Dr. Tjama Tjivikua, Rector of the Polytechnic of Namibia and Mr Edwin Tjiramba of the University of Namibia.

The Platform was developed with a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) framework by the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa within the Africa Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) Consortium comprising of 11 African universities.

The UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning Policy Guidelines for OER in Higher Education will also be launched on Tuesday 1 November by the UNESCO Director-General and Sir John Daniel, President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning.

The Launch will be live-streamed on the internet:

Floor - mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_floor.wmv
EN - mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_en.wmv
FR - mms://stream.unesco.org/live/room_10_fr.wmv

The Twitter hashtag for the Launch is: #oerlaunch




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