Berlin, Germany / Accra, Ghana. The MERLOT Africa Network (MAN) Council announces the First Africa Forum on Open Educational Resources (OER), to be held during the eLearning Africa Conference 2008 in Accra, Ghana, May 28th to 30th (cf. conference announcement at http://ways.org/en/events/2008/may/27/elearning_africa_2008 ).

MAN is a network of African higher education institutions affiliated with the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT). The organisation works collaboratively with partner institutions to conduct educational research that leads to best practices in the scholarship of teaching and learning using electronic resources. MAN also strives to enhance the usability and quality of the MERLOT e-learning repository for global access.

The First Africa Forum themes focus on global awareness of OER, universal access for all to high quality teaching and learning resources, equal access through internationalisation of resources with multi-language capabilities and research, as well as OER Global Communities of Practices. The event is organised by MAN in collaboration with eLearning Africa and the African Virtual University.

The forum targets all education professionals from all disciplines, including educational researchers, educational trainers, faculty members and teachers from the secondary and higher education sectors.

Open Educational Resources - educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use - are becoming increasingly important for education in Africa.

Because of the respect the eLearning Africa international conferences have garnered, the various MAN institutions have decided to use the gatherings as the hub for their efforts to initiate international collaboration and networking among African Higher Education Institutions. The annual events will serve as a venue for the organisation’s discussions and a locus for its activities related to dissemination of best practices and promoting the adoption of e-learning repositories to support education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

For more information on the First Africa Forum please go to http://man.merlot.org/research/MAN%20at%20eLA.html .