Africa Virtual University - AVU

After a long, fascinating day one, the Education-Portal.com team began day two of the OpenCourseWare Consortium conference with high hopes. The line up of events and speakers did not disappoint! Read on to learn more about what we've learned about free education around the world.

By the Education-Portal.com Blog Team

Learning About OCW Users

The OCW Consortium's Executive Director, Mary Lou Forward, began the day by unveiling the results of a survey that the consortium ran. Education-Portal.com also ran the survey, and we've discussed our results in a series of blog articles, including this one on the types of OCW resources people are looking for. In addition to unveiling the survey results, Mary Lou Forward shared that there are currently 18,000 OCW courses, including translations!

Collaboration, Localization and Certification in OCW Initiatives

We were blown away by the morning panel session, which featured representatives from three emerging OCW projects.

Bakary Diallo of the African Virtual University spoke about his organization's efforts to bring open learning to students and faculty across the African continent. Since 1997, the African Virtual University's e-learning network has trained 40,000 students! The training focuses on teacher training in subjects like math, physics, chemistry, and biology as well as computer science, business studies, information technology, linguistics and professional development. As of January 2011, the African Virtual University and its partner universities have 4,000 students enrolled in the teacher education degree, certificate and professional development courses.

Read More [link this to http://eduport.al/m1IhyM]