TO ensure the main thrust of open and distance education does not end with the provision of access to education, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) on Tuesday consolidated their plans to convert all NOUN’s courses to fully licensed Open Educational Resources (OERs).

 The courses, when converted to OERs will be delivered as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), where millions of learners can have access to them. 

 The collaboration, which is a three-year plan according to UNESCO OER Specialists, Mr. Abel Caine, is funded by the European Union (EU), with the aim of triggering the development of institutional OER policy for NOUN, among others.

  Speaking at the second sensitisation workshop for NOUN staff, held in Lagos, Caine hinted that the first edition was to introduce the concept of OERs, which succeeded very well. “This edition, however, will be sensitising at least 200 academics on the meaning of OERs, how they can find, adapt and share OERs on the global knowledge platform.

  “What we achieved last year was to identify the first 10 courses from NOUN’s 1, 800 courses that were going to be transformed into OERs and the hands-on workshop in this edition will be to go over those 10 courses and certify that they are fully qualified OERs, after which we identify the next 30 courses to be transformed.”

  He said the exercise has become imperative in addressing the access need of the country and increasing the literacy level of the citizens, while keeping an eye on quality.

  His words, “Several sources from Nigeria, including the Ministry of Education and National Bureau of Statistics, informed that in the 2013/2014 academic year, 1.6m children passed university entrance examination. Of that figure, 400,000 managed to get into the university, and that leaves, 1.2m young, smart, energetic, motivated kids who could not get into the universities. So you ask yourself this question, where are they supposed to go? 

   “So OER and MOOCs are opportunities to try to get to those 1.2m kids, it is also going to target those in the university and millions of those kids who did not even pass the university entrance examination. They didn’t pass not just because they weren’t smart, but because may be their materials were not the best, the teachers were not the best, or they are facing circumstances that didn’t allow them to go to school. Education is a right, it is for everybody and it is the responsibility of UNESCO and institutions like NOUN to ensure they provide same opportunity for all to access that level of higher education.”

   On how long it will take to transform all NOUN’s courses to MOOCs format, Caine explained, “UNESCO’s help is always like this. I will help you start the project, give you all the training, and you will become actually as smart as me and hopefully smarter than me, and then do it yourself. UNESCO is not going to be able to help NOUN with all of its 1800 courses that is for NOUN itself to do the job, therefore the NOUN team must have confidence and skills to transform the remaining courses. So, we have a three-year plan, in the next six months or so NOUN will have 40 courses transformed to OER format. Forty divide by 1,800 is tiny. So, our plan is to solidify our training and know how long it will take NOUN to covert other courses.”

  He further explained that MOOCs, “are courses offered by many of the world-based universities targeted at kids who cannot ordinarily get into the universities. So, it is a fantastic opportunity for young people everywhere in the world and even people who have jobs and desire to increase their knowledge in higher education.”

  Caine stressed that open and distance learning is a very important part of UNESCO’s work, since it’s a proven mechanism for increasing the number of students with access to higher education.

  “It has evolved over the years. Twenty years ago, it was mostly prints, now in 2015, it is mostly online. If students have some form of internet access, mostly on their mobile phones, they should be able to also have the same quality of education.”

  Vice Chancellor of NOUN, Prof Vincent Ado Tenebe, in his address informed that OERs and MOOCs have emerged as concepts with great potential to support educational transformation in NOUN and beyond.

  “If NOUN continues to base its business model on protecting and copyrighting all its teaching and learning contents without keying into the philosophy underlining OER, it will become a progressively less appealing place to study and might be overtaken by other providers who are more proactive and more responsive to current realities.”

  “And so, by establishing an innovative policy towards the creation and use of OERs as well as contributing to MOOCs, NOUN will entrench itself as a major knowledge production and distribution hub for higher education in Africa and beyond. This will also serve as a major marketing tool for NOUN.

 While charging the participants comprising senior staff of the institution, who are mainly course writers, developers and prospective developers of MOOCs to make good use of the training opportunity, he commended UNESCO and the EU for their technical support and sponsorship.