With funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and as part of its work on the early literacy ecosystem and open licensing, Neil Butcher & Associates (NBA) convened a small workshop, which brought together key players in early literacy in Africa.
Open Licensing
Understand open licensing, types of licenses, issues and challenges, the impact of open licensing and digitization of intellectual property, as well as different business models associated with open licensing.
A Creative Commons guide on how to share resources and creativity, but also maintain a sustainable organization.
Open Licensing and Publishing in Africa: What is open licensing and why is it topical to authors, publishers and illustrators? This presentation was created for the Association for the Development in Africa (ADEA) and Global Book Alliance Seminar on Open Licensing in Accra, Ghana on 2 September, 2018.
This study was conducted as part of the OER for Skills Development project of Commonwealth of Learning (COL), supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The objective of the study was to collect baseline data from Commonwealth institutions with respect to the development, use and reuse of OER; the availability of support; and challenges faced in fostering the use of OER.
In 2015, NBA received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to explore the potential for open licensing in enhancing the availability of mother-tongue early-literacy reading resources in the developing world.
Open Educational Resources (OER) offer a powerful means of expanding the reach and the effectiveness of education worldwide. For this reason, COL and UNESCO co-organised the World OER Congress in 2012 in Paris, which resulted in the OER Paris Declaration: a statement urging governments around the world to release, as OER, all teaching, learning and research materials developed with public funds.
Openly licensed resources are ‘free’ to access, but there are significant creation, adaptation, production, and use costs. The long-term sustainability of local-language publishing requires that these costs be met fairly, using financial models that will enable people to establish, grow, and maintain effective content creation organizations.
Openly licensed resources are ‘free’ to access, but there can be significant user, creation, adaptation, and production costs. The long-term sustainability of African publishing in local languages requires that these costs be met fairly and completely, using models that will encourage people to establish, grow, and sustain excellent content creation organizations.
The Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), through its Working Group on Books and Learning Materials (WGBLM), teamed up with the Global Book Alliance (GBA) to dialogue with African book industry stakeholders about publishing and use of materials in mother-tongue languages, and to come up with a way forward.
The Impact of Open Licensing on the Early Reader Ecosystem examines how to use open licensing to promote quality learning resources for young children that are relevant and interesting.