The first workshop was organized for participants from Kigali and neighboring districts and took place on 19^th and 20^th of March 2009; the second workshop was at the National University of Rwanda (UNR) in Butare on 31^st March, 2009.

These capacity building workshops were organized by Open Learning Exchange Rwanda in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP PERI).

The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education (Dr Mathias) made official opening remarks during the Kigali workshop. A total number of 45 people attended both workshops exciding 40 participants initially planned for. Participants came from the Ministry of Education, 10 different High Education Institutions across the country (Universities, Colleges) and 10 organizations promoting ICTs in Education and libraries such as One Laptop per Child (OLPC), National Curriculum Development Center (NCDC), Global e-schools and Communities Initiative (GeSCI), INASP,National Agricultural Research Institute (ISAR) , Center for Geographic Information System (CGIS), AVU e-learning Center, Center for Conflict Management (CMG), Institute of Scientific and Technological Research(IRST) and the National University of Rwanda Research commission. Representatives from these organizations were Head of Departments of Computer Science, Lecturers and Researchers, Librarians and Coordinators of Organizations promoting ICTs in Education and few students.

Participants leant different tools and techniques to access e-resources (INASP PERI and others) in order to increase the understanding (access and use of e-resources) and to boost applied ICTs in education research. The workshops also provided an overview of Open Education Resources (OER) and opened up the debate and research perspective on the potential of OER in the Education system in Rwanda; more importantly raising the need for a collaborative approach between Universities, Research Centers, Open Learning Exchanges Centers and Schools in ensuring that Rwanda benefit from Open Education resources for quality universal basic education in the future.

Group works suggested ways forward to strengthen ties between partners to vulgarize access and use of INASP PERI resources and to engage University communities in research supporting access and use of Open Education Resources in Rwanda (full report and recommendation shall be available soon).

Modeled after Consumer Reports, each innovation in the Review will include a narrative report describing the innovation, its demonstrations and the outcomes from those demonstrations.  Each review will highlight the evidence that a given innovation is effective for a given purpose in a given setting.  Reviews will include overall approaches to learning, specific subject matter course materials and information and computer technologies that are appropriate for basic learning.

A key feature will be a summary template with standardized ratings covering several dimensions of the innovation including results related to students, teachers, parents, community and the nation. This will enable users to compare the relative effectiveness of different innovations.   Each review will also provide an estimate of the total cost per student and the scalability of the innovation.

Dr. Richard Rowe, President of Open Learning Exchange (OLE), and Larry Direnger, Executive Director of Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR) National met in ESR’s Cambridge offices on August 14 to sign an important and far-reaching Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The agreement permits OLE to distribute through the Billion Kids Library all of ESR’s materials on conflict resolution and aggression mediation, which have been used successfully in urban school systems throughout the United States.

Once the materials are in the Library, they will be available for use and adaption by teachers and leaders all around the world.

The agreement also anticipates OLE and ESR working jointly to provide training for OLE centers in Rwanda, Ghana, Haiti, and other locations where conflict and civil turmoil have been a key issue.

Plans are underway to help ESR localize their programs in these international areas through the inclusion of local content and references to local issues. The content of Connected and Respected a nationally respected K-6 curriculum, and ESR’s equally acclaimed Conflict Resolution in the Middle School and Conflict Resolution in the High School will become available to OLE members around the world as a complete K-12 curriculum.

–Joe Rappa

Looking around the web, the open educational resources available out there appear to be growing by leaps and bounds. The OER Grapevine maintains a “neutral” list of OER projects online, and there are a number of interesting and notable projects, like the California Open Source Textbook Project. The COSTP has a project with Wikipedia to create a history curriculum for 9th graders that is based on California State Curriculum Standards.

The tools for sharing educational resources online continue to emerge. EduCommons is an open source courseware management system pioneered and maintained by the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University. And while EduCommons is designed to manage catalogs of courses, Moodle is an open-source software platform designed to facilitate actual online learning through the creation of online learning communities.

Yahoo! has just launched a new online site design to help teachers “create, modify, and share standards-based curriculum”. Maggie Mason describes it:

You can drag and drop any element of a web page while you’re researching, then search for other people’s lesson plans by grade, subject, and state standards. You can even locate nearby teachers who have to teach around the same local events (Chinese New Year in San Francisco, for example). It shows you top-rated, most recent, and most copied lesson plans, and lets you build a network of teachers whose work you trust.

Yet, with all these announcements, we can’t help thinking some things are still missing from existing OER packages. Clearly, there is a vacuum of original, high-quality content for primary school children, and an even greater absence of basic educational curricula sourced from the developing world – but what else is missing out there? What does the world need? What are you looking for?