Kenya national symposium on open education/Symposium report



''The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in collaboration with the Kenyan Ministry of Education convened a national and regional symposium on open education on 6 and 7 June 2013 in Nairobi with funding support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The symposium included representatives from ten countries covering both post-secondary and secondary education levels of education with special emphasis on open policy development and adoption at open schools in Africa and South Asia.''

Frances Ferreira, the symposium chair, welcomed participants on behalf of the COL. In her welcome address, Frances reminded delegates that 61 million children of primary school age and 71 million children of lower secondary school age were out of school in 2010. She also confirmed that Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) has the highest drop-out rates of any region in the world and most early school leaving occurred between grades 1 and 2 with one in six learners leaving school before grade 2.

Education is a basic human right. Denying children the right to education or giving up on strategies to address this challenge is not acceptable when there are solutions. ... Open Educational Resources (OER) is definitely one strategy that can assist in dealing with this challenge.

Goals of the symposium

 * 1) consider strategic opportunities and barriers for OER in Kenya and the region taking into account our COMOSA members from Asia;
 * 2) explore policy enablers and practices for harnessing the potential of open education approaches for the benefit of the formal education sector in Kenya and the region; and
 * 3) commence work on proposals for action, building on existing foundations and achievements to planning the way forward for a sector wide  response to open education in Kenya and the Region with specific  plans for OER institutional policy development and implementation.

Opening addresses


COL believes that knowledge is the common wealth of humankind and that all education content developed from public funds must be made available under open licenses so that more people are able to benefit from the initial investment.

Jaco du Toit, Adviser in Communication and Information, UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa stressed the importance of OER as an enabler for realising the four pillars of knowledge societies:


 * 1) Access to information: Open licensing enhances access to information
 * 2) Education for all: OER removes barriers of access and cost to quality learning materials
 * 3) Cultural and linguistic diversity: The inherent permissions to adapt and reuse OER facilitates freedom to express cultural and linguistic diversity.
 * 4) Freedom of expression: OER enables and facilitates freedom of expression.

In the spirit of reuse, Jaco affirmed that the outputs of this symposium will be fed into the UNESCO's National Policy initiative to be convened in Nairobi, Kenya on 19-20 June 2013 following up on implementation activities for the 2012 Paris OER Declaration.

Margaret Murage delivered the official opening address on behalf of Education Secretary for the Ministry of Education. The Ministry underscored the power of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to transform the significant challenges of access, quality, relevance and equity faced by all nations world wide. In particular, the Education Secretary highlighted the obligations of UNESCO member states to progress the implementation of the 2012 Paris OER Declaration.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology looks forward to a stronger partnership with all the Member States in an effort to promote Open Education Resources as we place ourselves on a competitive edge on the global niche market.

The Government ensured participants that they will continue to provide an environment that lays emphasis on importance of free content to meet the needs of learners. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology thanked the COL for choosing to host the event in Nairobi and formerly opened the symposium.

Session 1: International context comparison of participant views, perceptions and expectations
Symposium participants were invited to complete the fair and reasonable practice survey to gauge regional opinion among African and South Asian participants on sharing educational materials which was compared to international data collected from +800 educators worldwide. Survey participants were invited to respond anonymously in their individual capacities. The pre-symposium survey achieved a 50% response rate. A summary of the survey data was compared with international averages.

The overwhelming majority of respondents (94%) agree that educational content funded by taxpayer revenue should be released freely for use by everyone in accordance with the principles of the 2012 Paris OER Declaration. Moreover, 87% of the respondents from Africa and South Asia do not think that education institutions who give away teaching materials will loose competitive advantage through reduced student enrolment. However, while 86% of participants indicated that they were aware of the concept of OER, the overwhelming majority of respondents (86%) reported that they had not applied a Creative Commons license to their own work before. This highlights the need for capability development in open content licensing in the region.

During the introduction session, each participant was invited to share the most important objective the symposium should address. Deserving particular mention is that the majority of listed objectives focused on implementation issues. This suggests that the conversation has shifted from why should we engage in OER? to how we will implement OER? signalling progress in the maturation of the open education concept in the region.

Session 2: Selected national, regional and international case study examples
Favouring pragmatism above pretence, the symposium agenda chose to focus on open education in practice. Regional and international case studies demonstrating open education in the real world world were selected for the symposium. The case studies covered both school and tertiary education sectors. Each of these international case studies included African and/or South Asian institutional partners. The purpose of these case studies was showcase regional progress and to serve as a catalyst for participants to identify opportunities, barriers and policy issues for Africa and South Asia.

African showcase and sharing




Session 3: Identifying and classifying opportunities, barriers and policy issues for open education
Drawing on ideas generated from the three case studies and discussions during the African showcase, each participant was asked to identify the most important opportunity, barrier and policy issue taking their own context into account. Participants were divided into three groups to review and classify the submissions and identify any missing issues of importance.

These contributions have been recorded in the wiki.


 * Opportunities
 * Widening access
 * Building capacities
 * Provision of teaching and learning resources
 * Collaboration, partnerships and networking
 * Improving equity
 * Barriers
 * Cultural
 * Policy
 * Infrastructure
 * Attitudes
 * Capability development
 * Policy issues
 * Fostering open policy development and adoption
 * Encouraging digital and open content development
 * Absent/ inadequate policy
 * Advocacy and awareness
 * Value proposition (gains and losses)
 * ICT infrastructure
 * Requirements for successful open policy development

Session 4: OER legal and policy context


Participants expressed the need to learn more about OERs and Creative Commons. The UNESCO-COL OER Chair network will be facilitating a Open Content Licensing Course from 4-8 September 2013 and participants were invited to join the workshop and they agreed to distribute information about the workshop through their networks to increase levels of participation from Africa and South Asia in this free capability development initiative coordinated by the OER Foundation with support from the COL.

Open policy exemplars including a national, school and tertiary education example were distributed. Participants reviewed the:


 * New Zealand Open Access Licensing Framework,
 * OER and Copyright Policy for the Commonwealth Open Schooling Association (COMOSA) and
 * Otago Polytechnic's open intellectual property policy (see also Otago Polytechnic: An IP policy for the times).

Participants observed that each of the policy examples are openly licensed and therefore the text can be copied and modified for local institutional policy developments. The symposium noted that only relatively small changes would be required to change the existing intellectual property policies from the default position of all rights reserved to a default using open Creative Commons licenses because ownership of intellectual property would remain unchanged and institutions will still be able to protect the cost of their investment in the development of teaching materials. Options for closed licensing alternatives can still be accommodated as exceptions where commercial interests are warranted. Moreover, the cost of implementing an amendment to existing policy for open licensing would not require "new money" and could be adopted using normal policy ammendment procedures. The OER Government Policy Development Template hosted by the COL was distributed as a resource for national policy development.

Session 5: Developing proposals for action
The majority of time during Day 2 of the symposium was allocated to commencing work on proposals for action. Participants divided into three groups as determined by interest and institutional affiliation to work on proposals for action. The symposium decided to focus on the institutional policy level as UNESCO will be convening a session for national OER policy development. The group identified three proposals for action and initial drafts have been posted in the wiki for ongoing refinement and implementation:


 * 1) Open policies for open schools
 * 2) Higher education and capability development
 * 3) Kenya Ministry of Education proposal for action