Open Learning Network

Image CC-BY Natalie Eggleston, OLnet

Name

Professor Fred Keraro

Project Title

The Readiness for Sustainable and Successful Use of OER in Higher Education in Kenya: A case study of Egerton University

Project Summary

This project was intended to develop a more detailed case study on the readiness to adopt OER by focusing on a single institution in a developing country.  His argument is that OER is one way of creating linkages with outside universities. This supports the Kenya government’s policy framework for education, training and research which states that university education and training should be of high quality, technologically informed and globally marketable (Republic of Kenya, 2005) . However, because production of OER has been dominated by a few Western and American institutions, developing countries like Kenya are faced with issues of sustainability and successful use of these resources in the process of adopting them in their education institutions. With this background, he hoped to investigate the following key aspects of OER adoption in his university:

• What motivates academics to use OERs and what are the constraints.
• Institutional Policy and Infrastructure in place to support the use of OERs.
• How academics evaluate and select OERs.
• The perceived benefits of using OERs.
• Academics’ contribution at to the wider OER movement.

Dates visited the UK

15 to 27 May 2011

Institution

Egerton University, Kenya

Biographical information

Fred is an associate professor of science education in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Education and Management, Egerton University, Kenya. He is also the coordinator for Instructional Materials Development at the College of Open and Distance Learning and the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) project at the university.

Fred trained as a science teacher and taught in teacher training colleges before joining Egerton University. Early on in his teaching career, he started interrogating how culture affects the learning of science, hence his research interests and publications in culture and learning of science. He has recently concluded a research project on “Improving pupils’ cultural interpretations of scientific phenomena” which was sponsored by Kenya’s National Council of Science and Technology (NCST). He hopes to do further research on cultural interpretation surrounding reproduction and how this affects the learning of science.

Fred’s other responsibilities at the university include teaching science education courses as well as supervising masters and doctoral students. He has also served in various administrative committees. His research interests extend to environmental education, pedagogy and learning of science, open and distance education, and open education resources (OER).

His interest in OER came out of his involvement in the TESSA project as the coordinator. He has also actively been involved in the TESSA OER development, testing and usage and has participated in a number of TESSA workshops held at his university and in other African universities. It was through this involvement that he came to learn about the OLnet/TESSA fellowship program.

Main output

A report on Egerton university’s readiness to sustainably and successfully use  OER to be shared with academics and the University management

Other outputs

• Presentation at DETA Pre-conference workshop
• Preliminary analysis of a survey conducted in 12 primary schools collaborating with Egerton University

References

Wamutitu, Joseph M; Keraro, Fred N; Changeiywo, Johnson M and Jane Cullen (2011). The context of using TESSA OERs in Egerton University’s teacher education programmes. In: DETA pre-conference workshop, 3-5 August, 2011, Maputo, Mozambique.

DETA pre-conference workshop

Fred co-presented a paper entitled “The context of using OERs in Egerton’s teacher education program”. In this presentation, they looked at how TESSA OER have been integrated in pedagogy courses and the benefits to their Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) graduates. To illustrate these benefits, they presented three case studies of how OER are being used in different contexts. These case studies included a B.Ed graduate teacher in a rural school, a primary school head-teacher and a Teacher Advisory Centre tutor.

Besides making a presentation, Fred was interested in learning from other African colleagues how successful they were in using OER as well as learning how to identify and select quality resources. He wanted to learn how to identify OER from a myriad of online resources. This, he acknowledges was achieved. He had the opportunity to create networks, some of which he expects will develop into some future collaboration.

Fred also participated in chairing some of the workshop sessions.

Update since fellowship

Fred has now completed his research project and is about to finish compiling his research findings. He reckons that one of the major outcomes of the research is that it gave him an opportunity to engage more with his colleagues and learn their perceptions of OER, how they use them in teaching and the challenges they face. A key finding is that most of his colleagues were not aware of other OER beyond TESSA.

Besides carrying out the research, Fred has been actively involved in awareness activities as part of embedding and extending of TESSA activities in Egerton University. These activities have been in the form of three workshops. The first one was organised by his TESSA team as a sensitization workshop for stakeholders in basic education. This involved a total of 47 participants drawn from the Ministry of Education, Kenya Institute of Education and Centre for Mathematics, Science and Technology Education in Africa (CEMASTEA). Other participants included a provincial director of education and five district education officers along with their quality assurance officials and Teacher Advisory Centre tutors, and teachers and head teachers from 12 primary schools. During this workshop, the TESSA project was presented including how OER have been used at the university and schools they have collaborated with. Additionally, participants were shown how these resources can be mapped on the Kenyan school curriculum. This was a significant step towards creating an awareness of OER among basic education policymakers.

Following the success of this workshop, Fred has since been invited to talk about the TESSA OER in two other workshops. The first one was to a group of 90 primary school head teachers organised by the local District Education Officer. The other was organised by CEMASTEA where 31 members were present. CEMASTEA is in charge of in-service training of primary and secondary school science, mathematics and technology teachers and is present in Kenya and other African countries.

Text extracted from pre-publication draft of report by Pauline Ngimwa, "Achieving impact in Africa through openness: OLnet TESSA Fellowships", March 2012. Full details of this publication will be available on this website when available.