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face-to-face and online – OER Africa seeks to enable African educators and students to harness the power of OER, develop their capacity, and become integrated into the emerging global OER networks as active participants rather than passive consumers.
To facilitate broad take-up and use of the concept of OER in Africa's education systems, OER Africa's approach is to build relationships with existing networks of educational organizations and/or individuals and provide support of different kinds both to the networks and to individual organizations participating in them. This paper represents a call to the research community to join us to learn more about the ways in which OER can and cannot help us to achieve our shared goals.
TESSA's model of research and development facilitates a rich environment for data collection and analysis. TESSA provides a unique forum for comparative analysis of teacher education across countries and traditions as well as for analysis of OER development and use. TESSA also supports several PhD students and during 2011 supported five OLNet (Open Learning Network) fellows. Members of the TESSA consortium contribute to a wide range of
national and international forums debating and researching teacher education. The TESSA website provides a meeting place for the exchange of research outputs. These are shared under three key themes:
Theme 1: The collaborative creation and adaptation of OERs for teacher development
Theme 2: Engagement with OERs in teacher education
Theme 3: The personal and professional contexts of Sub-Saharan Africanteachers' lives.
We believe similar fora could usefully be established in other domains.
WHAT KINDS OF RESEARCH MIGHT WE CONTRIBUTE? This brings us back to the central question of this paper: Open Educational Resources (OER): do they make a difference and how do/will we know?
Clearly there are different levels at which we might engage and contribute.
Open Educational Resources (OER): Do They Make a Difference and How Do/Will We Know? 133