Welcome to the FLOSS4Edu Blog

FLOSS4Edu  has been around for a while. Now in its third year, FLOSS4Edu has been able to achieve a number of things that I shall discuss in the section below. FLOSS4Edu was established through support from the Commonwealth of Learning and incubated within the WikiEducator project.The key vision of FLOSS4Edu is to establish an African wide network of Educational Practitioners participating in the development of sharable Open Educational Resources (OERs). This network is useful to support teachers to develop high quality teaching materials and generally improve, through the use of relevant ICT technologies their teaching and learning experience.

FLOSS4Edu is an African wide Non Profit Organisation with five regional chapters led by regional co-ordinators across the continent who hold these positions as part of an interim board that has been spearheading the activities of FLOSS4Edu since its inception in November, 2007.The need for the interim board was to grow FLOSS4Edu to attain a critical mass of membership to facilitate and African wide engagement.This I would wish to thank the Interim Board for its activities and the tireless effort that has been put todate. The board will continue to direct the foundation as we prepare to hold our first official elections.

FLOSS4Edu has been in the fore-front to advocate for the use of Open Educational Resources which refers to Educational materials that have the following attributes:

1. That access to open content (including metadata) is provided free of charge for educational institutions, content services, and the end-users such as teachers, students and lifelong learners; 
2. That the content is liberally licensed for re-use in educational activities is free from restrictions to modify, combine and repurpose; and consequently, that the content should ideally be designed for easy re-use in that open content standards and formats are being employed; 
3. That for educational systems/tools software is used for which the source code is available (i.e. Open Source software) and that there are open Application Programming Interfaces (open APIs) and authorizations to re-use Web-based services as well as resources."

OER’s will offer the following benefits to Educational Networks and Institutions:

1. Provide a long-term conceptual framework for alliances in the creation, sharing and provision of educational resources based on a strong emphasis of reusability;
2. Allow for a higher return on investment of taxpayers’ money (public funds);
3. Promote digital competence for the knowledge society beyond basic ICT skills ;
4. Enrich the pool of resources (content and tools) for innovating curricula and teaching & learning practices;
5. Lead to a leverage in the educational quality of content through quality control, feedback and improvements;
6. Foster lifelong learning and social inclusion.

To teachers and other Educational practitioners, OER’s will offer the following benefits:

1. Offer a broader range of subjects and topics to choose from and allow for more flexibility in choosing material for teaching and learning;
2. Save time and effort through reusing resources for which IPR/copyright issues have already been resolved;
3. Provide a mechanism for continuous improvement
4. Provide learning communities such as groups of teachers and learners with easy-to-use tools 
5. Promote user-centered approaches in education

The vision of FLOSS4Edu is defined as:

“Making available appropriate educational content and a set of easy to use ICT tools to educational institutions while building the largest community of educational practitioners collaborating on the development of Free and Open Educational Resources in Africa”

This vision has been clearly articulated in FLOSS4Edu two years strategic plan. Over the period of two years since its inception, FLOSS4Edu has been able to achieve the following:

1. Establishment of 4 FLOSS4Edu Regional Chapters in Africa (East Africa, West Africa, Southern Africa and Francophonie)
2. Capacity Building Initiatives- Over 20 Face to Face Capacity building Workshops on OER Content development using Wiki within various countries in Africa. 
3. Over 200 lessons developed by African Educational practioners as OERs.
4. Influenced institutional change in Educational Networks to adopt the development of OERs
5. Established Continued partnership with educational institutions (Universities and Educational Networks) and development partners.
6. Established dedicated office with an Administrator based in Nairobi

This FLOSS4Edu has achieved through the following four (4) pillars:

1. Collaboration4Content: Build a network of Educational Practitioners (Individual and Institutions) willing to participate in the development of OERs ;
2. Access4Content: Adoption of the Open Digital Villages concept and provide access “paid” through content development;
3. Learning4Content: Continue building capacity to Educational Practitioners in developing OER Content
4. Advocacy4Content: Promotional Activities and Advocacy

In line with recent developments and increased membership, it is time that FLOSS4Edu moves to the next level of increased activity at the grass-roots and strengthening of its internal organisational structures. If you would be interested in joining these discussions, please subscribe to the group's mailing list.