In this presentation, we share the state of Open Education initiatives in North African countries

1. Open Education Initiatives in North
African countries
Kamel Belhamel
Faculty of Technology, University of Bejaia, Algeria
@kamelbelhamel
kamelbelhamel@gmail.com
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2. The State of Things
● The OpenEducation
● Transition from closed to open
resources
● What is OER ?
● OER Initiatives in North African
Countries
● Case Study of the University of
Bejaia in Algeria
● The promotion of use the freedom
CC licenses

3. Digital technology
Digital technology has changed the world with
new ways to create and disseminate
information, to communicate and to learn.

4. There are a number of reasons why there is an
emphasis on Open Education now!
• The prevalence of digital delivery means that new ways of doing
things are possible
• New knowledge is created through global collaborations
involving thousands of people from across the world.
• Open Education opens up new ways in which research/innovation
are archived, curated and disseminated across the globe.

5. Free vs. Open
‘Open’ has a wider meaning than just
something that is available for free.
There is a wealth of free-to-view content
available online, but the majority of this
content is not free to reuse.

6. What is OER ?
● Open educational resources are materials that come with a Creative
Commons or other relevant open license which allows them to be used
freely and repurposed, normally with an appropriate attribution.
● OER enable people independent of geographical location or institution to
find each other, form communities and work together

7. The UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration states that
UNESCO member states should:
• Promote and use OER to widen access to
education at all levels, both formal and non-formal,
in a perspective of lifelong learning
• contributing to social inclusion, gender equity and
special needs education.
• Improve both cost-efficiency and quality of teaching
and learning outcomes through greater use of OER.

8. ● In contrast to traditional education materials, which are constantly
becoming more expensive and less flexible, OER provide everyone,
everywhere, free permission to download, edit, and share them with
others. David Wiley provides another popular definition, stating that
only education materials licensed in a manner that provide the public
with permission to engage in the 5R activities can be considered
OER.
Why is this important ?

9. The 5 Rs include:
● Retain – permission to make, own, and control copies of the content
(e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
● Reuse – permission to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a
class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
● Revise – permission to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
(e.g., translate the content into another language)
● Remix – permission to combine the original or revised content with
other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content
into a mashup)
● Redistribute – permission to share copies of the original content, your
revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of to a friend)

10. What is the future of OER?
● There will be a growth in national and international repositories or
other means of curating open educational resources.
● The barriers to learning nationally and globally will be broken down.
● New services will emerge using artificial intelligence to harvest and
deliver OER in a much more personalized way.
● Learning materials will increasingly be co-created by teachers and
learners.
● The space that commercial publishers operate in will become a much
more innovative one.

11. Open Education Initiatives in North African countries

12. The countries in North Africa are:
● Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania,
Morocco, Sudan, Somalia and
Tunisia.
● Despite rapid improvements in digital readiness in those
states, adoption of OER is still at an early stage in
universities.

13. ● This is due to several challenging factors facing North African
countries including limited internet penetration, challenges of
piracy, issues related to the rule of law and censorship, and vast
disparities in purchasing power.
● Lack of policies and strategies that support OER;
● Few activities around the creation, use, and sharing of OER;
● Barriers to mainstream OER as perceived by the governments

14. ● Despite rapid improvements in digital readiness in those states,
adoption of OER is still at an early stage in universities.
● This is due to several challenging factors facing North African
countries including limited internet penetration, challenges of
piracy, issues related to the rule of law and censorship, and vast
disparities in purchasing power.
● Another challenge facing the take-up of OER is technical issues
related to the Arab language. The digital Publishing in Arabic
language is Slow.

15. https://openmedproject.eu/home/
OpenMed initiative facilitate the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open
Educational Practices (OEP) in the Arab Mediterranean countries, with a particular focus on
higher education in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Palestine.

16. COURSE OVERVIEW
The online course “Open Education: fundamentals and
approaches”, produced within the OpenMed project with the support
of the Erasmus+ Capacity Building Program of the European Union,
aims to build capacity on Open Education and Open Educational
Resources (OER) among universities’ teaching staff.
The course content is composed of five modules and it is available in a
wide range of platforms and formats
the course is now open to any university and individual learner
interested in it.

17. https://arabic.oercommons.org/EN/

18. https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/ALECSO
ALECSO OER Community: 22 Member States from North Africa and Middle East

19. The Arab OER Hub is an Arab common online platform which aims to
pool Arab digital OERs and to facilitate access to, and the sharing of,
these resources by students, teachers and all those interested in this
field in all Arab States and around the world.
http://www.alecso.org/en/

20. ALECSO is keen on keeping abreast of the latest ICT-related
advances, and anticipating future developments in this field, so
that it can harness this technology to fulfill its mission and serve
its goals through implementing innovative and pioneering
projects.
Cloud Computing for Education
Open Educational Ressources (OER)
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)

21. Initiative Type: Advocacy/Awareness-Raising, Institutional Initiative, OER Development, OER
Repository/Portal, OER Reuse Research
URL: http://acde-afri.org/

22. https://www.oerafrica.org/oer-initiatives-africa

23. openAFRICA is a free public and independent source for open data for Africa,
maintained by Code for Africa. openAFRICA runs with support from the Africa Media
Initiative (AMI), the World Bank Institute (WBI), and Google.
Countries of operation: Africa-wide
Initiative Type: Institutional Initiative, OER Repository/Portal
URL: https://africaopendata.org/

24. Initiative Type: Advocacy/Awareness-Raising, Institutional Initiative, OER Development, OER
Repository/Portal, OER Reuse Research
URL: http://acde-afri.org/

27. The University of Bejaia
• Created in October 1983, is a multidisciplinary public institution.
• 45,700 students,
• 1,714 teachers and 1227 technical and administrative staff
• Eight faculties: Technology - Exact Sciences - Law and Legal and
Administrative Sciences - Sciences of Nature and Life - Letters and
Languages - Sciences Human and Social Sciences - Economics,
Management Sciences and Commercial Sciences - Medical Sciences.
UB is a public university:
- Studies are 100% free of charge
- Finance is secured by the government

28. University of Bejaia and OER Vision
• Encourages staff and students to use E-learning to enhance the quality of the
student experience.
• Digitize, curate and share major collections of archives, study and research
• Enable the discovery of these materials to enhance the University’s reputation.
• Launch open access journals

29. University of Bejaia OER Vision
For the common good:
• OER exchange to enrich University and the sector.
• Support frameworks to enable staff to share OER
created as a routine part of their work.
• Enable staff to find and use high quality teaching
materials developed within and beyond the University.

30. http://univ-bejaia.dz/dspace

32. Open Access Journal :
Algerian Journal of Natural Products : http://univ-bejaia.dz/ajnp/
• Hosting: University of Bejaia : Free
• Plateform : ( OJS) Free
• DOI : Zenodo : Free
• Archive : Zenodo : Free
• Indexation : - DOAJ

35. Breaking down the wall ?
the Wall, by Kamel Belhamel, licensed CC BY

36. Current State of those public universities:
 Use public funds:
* Studies are 100% free of charge
* Finance is secured by the government
 The default terms on those publicly funded
educational resources is typically all rights reserved
copyright.

37. In CC Algeria chapter:
• we suggest that all publicly funded educational
resources should be openly licensed
• We promote the use of the freedom CC licenses:
CC- 0 CC-BY CC-BY-NC CC-BY-SA

38. “The essence of openness for resources is permission
to use copyrighted property”. - Jim Luke -

39. More Reading

40. https://www.opennetworkedlearning.se/

41. https://www.curriki.org/
With a community of nearly 10 million global users, Curriki encourages
collaboration between teachers, students and parents, using their diverse
experiences to develop freely available “best of breed” learning resources

42. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/
The National Archives Education pages contain award-winning resources for students
and teachers. Users can explore the materials by navigating through the various time
periods presented, including Medieval, early modern, empire and industry, Victorians,
early 20th century

43. Teacher Education in sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA).
http://www.tessafrica.net/pan-african-version
— TESSA is an international research and development initiative bringing
together teachers and teacher educators from across sub-Saharan Africa. It
offers a range of materials (Open Educational Resources) in four languages to
support school-based teacher education and training.
SEN Teacher.,
http://www.senteacher.org/
— The SEN Teacher site has printable formats, specialist links, software
downloads and search tools for all types and levels of special education. Most
SEN Teacher Resources are provided under a Creative Commons License.

44. Thank you
Kamel Belhamel
Faculty of Technology, University
of Bejaia, Algeria
Twitter: @kamelbelhamel
E-mail: kamelbelhamel@gmail.com
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.