The Best of Two Open Worlds at the National Open University of Nigeria

Abstract

It will be wise for educational institutions, from primary to tertiary level, globally, to reflect on their position and profile with respect to the new concepts of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Responses will be diverse of course but the potential is so manifest that many institutions probably will consider the benefits to outweigh the barriers. The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) has decided to combine its 'classical' openness with the new digital openness by fully embracing the OER approach and converting its complete course base into OER. Step-by-step, NOUN is currently implementing its strategy towards becoming an OER-based Open University with a special niche for MOOCs. During a launch event in December 2015, the first 40 OER-based courses were presented as well as the first 3 OER-based MOOCs. This paper therefore presents NOUN's OER strategy with insight on lessons learned. To the authors' knowledge NOUN is the first Open University in the world with such a full-fledged OER (& MOOCs) implementation route.