Supported by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), the University of Rwanda’s College of Education (UR-CE) hosted a regional workshop on Open Educational Resources (OER) Co-Development for Teacher Education in Kigali, Rwanda. The three-day hybrid event brought together 40 participants – including 30 attending in person and 10 online – from five schools of education across Africa. The workshop forms part of COL’s ongoing efforts to enhance institutional capacity for open, collaborative approaches to teacher education in the region.
This event was a key milestone in the COL-supported project on OER in Teacher Education, jointly implemented with the University of the Witwatersrand and North-West University (South Africa), Botswana Open University, and Federal College of Education (Technical), Gusau (Nigeria). The workshop had significant local and remote representation, indicating a growing interest in cross-border collaboration on OER development and open teacher education.
The workshop aimed to strengthen institutional capacity for developing scalable, contextualised OER aligned with national education needs and policies. Participants were guided through sessions on learning design, OER policy frameworks, and module co-development by COL’s specialists, alongside international facilitators from the University of South Africa (UNISA) and The Open University (UK).
The Principal of the University of Rwanda’s College of Education, Professor Nsanganwimana Florien, who addressed the participants during the opening session, said, “Bringing together five higher learning institutions, this project lays a strong foundation for a sustainable continental partnership in OER development. Such partnerships are critical, as many academics and students still require more competencies in OER to effectively make knowledge more accessible and impactful.”
The workshop encouraged interdisciplinary collaboration through structured group work, peer feedback, and virtual facilitation. Participants also expressed interest in follow-up training, digital infrastructure support, and institutional policy alignment to enhance OER adoption. Key outputs of the workshop included initial drafts of five teacher education module outlines across STEM and non-STEM disciplines.
COL’s Education Specialist: Teacher Education, Dr Betty Ogange, observed, “This workshop is significant in strengthening ongoing co-creation and capacity building among partner institutions. An important next step is to consider how the resources might be finalised and aligned with the national curricula, how to identify additional resources teachers may need in classroom settings, and to explore how best to support them in contextualising OER for their students.”
This project forms part of COL’s broader initiative to incubate the Network for Open Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (NOTES) – a Pan-African effort focused on co-creation, cross-national collaboration, and the localisation of OER for teacher education and classroom teaching. NOTES contributes to COL’s strategic goal of advancing quality teacher education through open and distance learning in support of Sustainable Development Goal 4.
