On 24 February at 14:30 WAT, COL will kick off its new bimonthly webinar series with What incentives drive the creation of Open Educational Resources? Insights from Nigerian Universities.
Designed for practitioners to exchange ideas, share experiences, and strengthen OER practice across West Africa, the new series emerges from last year’s West Africa workshop on Open Educational Resources (OER) Practices in the Age of AI, facilitated by COL and the Regional Training and Research Institute for Open and Distance Learning (RETRIDOL).
OER enables the contextualisation of teaching and learning materials to reflect local realities, curricula, and examples within educational systems. From a social justice perspective, OER also addresses affordability challenges by reducing student reliance on costly learning resources. Can these advantages be leveraged to drive greater adoption of OER in African tertiary institutions? What specific incentives can governing authorities introduce to encourage wider uptake?
Drawing on evidence and experiences from Nigerian universities, the first webinar examines a range of incentives that can stimulate OER creation in higher education.
Programme:
- Welcome Remarks: Professor Jane-Frances Agbu, COL
- Presentation: Dr Sadiat Adetoro Salau, Director, Centre for Open Distance and eLearning, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria
- Reflection: Professor Dorothy Ofoha, RETRIDOL
- Question and Answer Session: Moderated by Dr Nkem Osuigwe, African Library and Information Associations & Institutions
- Closing Remarks: Professor Jane-Frances Agbu, COL
Presenter Profile: Dr Sadiat Adetoro Salau
Dr Sadiat Adetoro Salau is an academic librarian and the Director of the Centre for Open Distance and eLearning at the Federal University of Technology Minna, Nigeria. She has contributed significantly to the advocacy for open access at the national and institutional level in Nigeria. Her advocacy is driven by the belief that librarians should be at the forefront of expanding access to knowledge to advance research and development. She is a recipient of the 2016 INASP/UNESCO Open Access Grant and the 2023 Wikimedia Alliances Open Climate Fellowship.
At the national level, she leads activities on research assessment reforms to support open science through her membership of the LIBSENSE Open Science Nigeria. She actively leads advocacy efforts through publications and presentations to the members of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities (CVCNU) and the Association of University Librarians of Nigerian Universities (AULNU) on aligning research assessment practices with open science trends. She also contributes to the deployment of open science policy and infrastructure of other institutions. Her research interests include open science, digital technologies for knowledge management, scholarly communication, and usability studies. She has authored and co-authored publications in these areas.
