First open courseware initiative in Africa

Laura Grant, Open university courseware trend comes to SA, Tectonic, February 21, 2006. Excerpt:

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) has made a policy decision to make its course material freely available over the Internet. This is believed to be a first for an African university. Material that will be made available includes courses, syllabuses, lecture notes and exam papers. UWC's "free content and free open courseware strategy" was approved by the university's senate in October 2005. It marks what Derek Keats, the executive director of information and communication services at UWC, describes as "the beginning of a journey". "Tertiary institutions the world over are recognising the value of freely sharing educational curricula and content, collaborating in their further development and extension, and doing so under the umbrella of free and unrestricted access to knowledge," the strategy document states. UWC is following a precedent set by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States....Other universities in Japan, France and the US have followed suit. But, says Keats, to the best of his knowledge, UWC is the first in Africa to adopt a free and open courseware policy....Unlike MIT, which received $11 million in grants to get its OCW initiative going, UWC's free and open content project has no outside funding, says Keats. "It's a UWC initiative. We see it as part of our normal university function."...Unlike MIT, which uses a restrictive Creative Commons licence, UWC licenses its material under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) licence because it promotes greater freedom, says Keats.