1. Inaugural Workshop, Cape Town, July, 2009 A Vision for a Health OER Network in Africa

2. The Rationale  Need to scale up training of health workforce – good materials are an essential requirement, but often expensive to procure or develop from scratch, leading to significant duplication in materials development or absence of resources  Wealth of good, available content, but often hard to find  Essential to put mechanisms in place to build capacity to replace ageing academic populations  Ensure OER processes in health are driven from Africa, not imported to Africa and see Africans as contributors to OER Networks not passive beneficiaries 2 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

3. A Vision for the Network  The African Health OER Network seeks to enable participants to develop, adapt, and share health education resources to augment limited human and other resources in the health sector and impact positively on overall health provision in Africa and beyond African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop 3

4. Network Functions  Aggregate the results of multiple initiatives by collecting, classifying, tagging, and then actively sharing Africa-initiated resources with the global health community  Facilitate discussion of how those resources can best be used  Share exemplars of best practice  Work through institutions and associations to advocate the principles of openness and sharing of educational materials 4 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

5. Guiding Principles  The Network will not be owned by any single entity, but rather by all participants  Commitment to link and work with other emerging Regional Health OER Networks where they are initiated, as well as seeking to align activities to enable global integration between networks  Network participants will drive processes based on their needs – Health OER Network participations should not generate additional work load, but rather help people to manage work load more effectively 5 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

6. Guiding Principles  Code of conduct will be established and continually updated through ongoing consultation to set rules of ‘engagement’ between members  Advisory Board to be established to oversee adherence to Code of Conduct by all participants 6 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

7. What the Network will NOT do  Hold funds for disbursement to Network participants  Centralized quality control  Seek to control membership  Develop content itself – only through participants’ activities 7 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

8. Audience(s)  Participation in network will be open – no conditions for joining  Primary target is African health academics and faculties – first focus on English, but open to growing to accommodate other languages if suitable partners indicate willingness to drive process  Network to include individuals, health faculties, NGOs, project teams, associations, consortia, government departments, etc 8 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

9. Audience(s) – ctd  No need to sign anything, but all individuals and institutions will be encouraged to add electronic signature to Statement of Commitment  No policy implications for institutions joining, but it is likely that participation in Network will lead to institutions reviewing key policies (e.g. IPR, rewards/incentives, etc) 9 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

10. Audience(s) – ctd  Learners may become a secondary beneficiary, but Network will assume primary responsibility for communication with learners resides with academics and institutions  Thus no attempt to include additional technologies - e.g. print-on-demand, audio/video streaming, mobile technology – to get materials to learners 10 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

11. Statement of Commitment  Participants will commit to:  Releasing all content to be shared with Network available under some CC or equivalent licence (but no obligation to use one specific licence or to release all content they have available)  Ensuring content released does not breach other copyrights  A culture of constant improvement of curriculum and learning and teaching resources  Recruiting new participants to join and contribute to the Network 11 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

12. Sharing Resources  No attempt to replace existing/ emerging institutional repositories of content  Institutions to be responsible for branding content properly for attribution purposes  Seek to aggregate content housed in those repositories through a Health OER Network online platform, using common meta-data framework  Push content aggregated into Health OER into key OER repositories globally (e.g. OER Commons, OCW Repository, Merlot, etc)  Use XML feeds to seek to automate version control and RSS feeds to provide notifications of new content 12 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

13. Quality Assurance  The Network will not perform any quality assurance function itself  QA will happen at the margins of the Network:  Institutions/individuals encouraged to ensure they only submit work they consider to be of high quality  Institutions/individuals expected to perform QA work when deciding what content to incorporate into their programmes 13 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

14. Quality Assurance – ctd  Network’s online platform will enable rating of content, view of number of downloads, and addition of comments to facilitate Network participants doing community-driven QA  Institutions/individuals will be encouraged to do reviews of content online to make comments on content accessible to all in Network 14 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

15. Next Steps  Agree priority focus areas – Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Nursing, Public Health, Occupational Therapy, etc – and generate generic content categories within each to facilitate sharing of content under common framework  Identify existing sources of content, generate required meta data, and aggregate it into relevant frameworks for shared access 15 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

16. Next Steps – ctd  Set up web space – initially inside OER Africa site, but possibly to become dedicated URL over time – to facilitate sharing of content  Set up discussion list to enable participants to stay in contact 16 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop

17. Our Commitment  OER Africa and UofM commit to functioning as initial Network custodians  Will host online health OER platform  Available to assist where requested with advocacy processes  Will facilitate initial communication to bring Network to life and grow participation  Expect to distribute ownerships of custodian functions to Network participants wherever possible to grow the contributions of all involved 17 African Health OER Network Inaugural Workshop