Welcome to the Pan-African Forum on OER/OA 2009 Moustapha. Diack, (Southern University System, Baton Rouge & Director of MERLOT Africa Network) -Baton Rouge - LA – USA Interview Youtube 1 Interview Youtube 2 I want to thank you on behalf of the MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) Executive Council and to welcome you to the 2nd Pan-African forum on Open Education Resources (OER) and Open Access (OA). The Pan-African forum is jointly hosted by the MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) and the Africa Virtual University (AVU). I believe that Open Solutions, in particular OER and OA can play a critical role in solving the Development Equation and providing higher education around the globe with economical and sustainable means to face the global crisis. I urge our communities and network partners to embrace and advocate for the OER and OA movements. These movements afford opportunities.  I contend that the adoption and deployment of OER and OA within our institutions is among the keys for facing the current global crisis. The 2nd Pan-Africa n forum will feature and celebrate the role of Women in ICT for development .Two excellent workshops will be offered that will focus on: (A) Best practices for designing and producing quality OER and (B) Integrating OER and the Merlot Community in Institutional Learning plans. I want to thank the local committee of the 2nd Pan-African Forum, | Alioune Moustapha Diouf, FASTEF, UCAD, Senegal | Ibrahima Niang, UCAD Computing Center, UCAD, Senegal | Nafissatou Bakhoum, Conservateur des Bibliotheques, chef Projet "Biens Culturels Africains', UCAD, Senegal | Mangary Ka, FASTEF, UCAD, Senegal | Youssou Diop, FASTEF, UCAD, Senegal | Moustapha Diack, SUBR, Louisiana, USA | The MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) and the Africa Virtual University (AVU) would like to thank the University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) and its Chancellor, Professor Abdou Salam Sall, for the sponsorship and for hosting the 2nd pan-African Forum on Open Education Resources (OER) and Open Access (OA). We want to stress that UCAD is among the first African Universities to join the MERLOT Africa Network. The two institutions have on-going eLearning and educational research collaborations. UCAD is also member of the AVU institutional Network. Thank you to the 2009 sponsors: The University Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal Lodestar Learning Asylum Markbook NComputing Affiliations - | Southern University | MAN | MERLOT |
	Bakary Diallo, Rector, Africa Virtual University (AVU) (Headquaters, Ring Road, Kilimani) -Kenya - East Africa We at the African Virtual Virtual University are extremely proud to be co-organizers of the 2nd Pan African Forum on OERs in May 2009 in Dakar, Senegal.  In order to attain socio-economic development through education, it is quite urgent to provide teachers and students with programs and learning tools that will support existing curricula. It is estimated that Africa’s contribution to the global knowledge is less than 1%. There is therefore a need to increase access to local content and that of African academics to participate in contributing to global knowledge. The AVU, Merlot and the Merlot African Network are working closely to promote and publish African based OERs. The OER@AVU teaching commons project is underway and will fill a gap by making available authentic and quality African OERs. By co-organizing the Pan African Forum on OERs and collaborating on the OERs@AVU teaching Commons, the partners are working toward reaching assisting the African Government to reach the Millennium Development Goal. Affiliations - | Africa Virtual University - AVU |
	Gerry Hanley, Executive Director, MERLOT (Multimedia Education Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) & Senior Director California State University -CA, USA - & MAN Council MERLOT: More than OER – Open Services to Support Education MERLOT as OER: MERLOT has been developing and sustaining its collection of OER for over 10 years, providing access across a full range of academic disciplines (e.g. art to zoology). Having free access to educational resources over the web is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the dissemination and transformation of the educational enterprise across nations, cultures, economic and social environments. Users can be faced with the challenge, “I found something terrific, now what do I do?” Users need free, web-based services to create learning/teaching curriculum from OER. MERLOT: More than OER – Open Services to Support Education MERLOT provides free building blocks for a simple learning management services that combined the library of OER and the Open Educational Services into a single, free, and easy-to-use system. The following use case describes how MERLOT’s currently available OES can be used for free to support educational transformation. Bineta is a secondary school science teacher at the “Pedagogues” high schooL IN DAKAR - SENEGAL Bineta is a secondary school science teacher at the “Pedagogues” high school located in the suburb of Dakar, in Senegal, West Africa, that has Internet access at the local “Internet Café” and library. She wants to develop curriculum for her 10th grade biology class using open resources. She’s heard about MERLOT and goes to http://www.merlot.org to build her course for her students. She clicks on “Join for Free”, and completes the registration process within 1 minute. She browses through the biology collection, reviewing the peer reviewed learning objects as her first choice for quality materials. Each time she finds a free learning material she feels is right for her students, she clicks on “Add to my Personal Collection”. By doing this, Bineta is provided a webpage that lets her add information about how she wants to use the material in her course. For example, for “DNA from the Beginning”, she writes, “This material is part of Bineta's 10th grade biology course for the “Pedagogues” high school. This material will be covered in week 6 of our course. Your assignment which is to be handed in on May 6th can be found in MERLOT. The assignment will describe the learning objectives, the instructions on how I want you to use “the DNA from the Beginning” website to write a report on DNA. Bineta is able to personally add this type of annotation for each of the materials she finds in MERLOT and organize them into a “Personal Collection” that Bineta names “Pedagogues’ 10th Grade Biology – 2008-2009”. Bineta’s personal collection contains 10 learning materials with their associated learning assignments. She has also contributed 2 new materials into MERLOT that she found on the web. She took the 5 minutes to add the new materials into MERLOT so she can integrate the new OER into her MERLOT curriculum. She realizes that MERLOT has substituted for a “Learning Management System” that she’s heard about but is too costly or too difficult to install and maintain in her suburb. Bineta has her students become members of MERLOT and write about how they learned using the materials in her course. Doing this lets her students develop some information literacy skills and her students can read what their peers are learning. Affiliations - | MERLOT |MAN Concil | California State University |

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