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 NAIROBI, 22 August, 2011 – The African Virtual University (AVU) continues to gain international recognition for increasing accessibility to quality education for thousands of Africans. In the first OpenCourseWare (OCW) People's Choice Awards over 4,000 people voted and awarded AVU Open Educational Resources (OER) the top prize for Best Emerging Initiative. The Awards were organized by the US based Education-Portal.com
The AVU interactive portal OER@AVU http://oer.avu.org is being accessed beyond Africa in 142 countries with a majority from Brazil and the United States. The site, launched in January, 2011, is designed to host free content developed in partnership with 10 African countries and tailored to the African students' needs.
"From an education perspective, this award shows that Africa is moving from a development model that pulls resources from the international community to one that pushes out relevant and interesting content that is contributing to the international dialogue on education," commented Dr. Bakary Diallo, AVU's Head.
AVU's OER is supported by the African Development Bank and hosts 219 open educational modules divided into several topics - textbooks in math and science, teacher education, basic ICT (information and communication technology) skills and four in ICT classroom integration – all of which are freely available in English, French and Portuguese.
AVU has come a long way from its early beginnings as a Washington-based initiative. Created in 1997 to increase African students' access to quality education through the use of ICT, AVU moved its base to Kenya and became a Pan Africa intergovernmental organization in 2003. Since then, the organization has overcome many challenges and set a searing pace for itself.
AVU has graduated more than 40,000 students across Africa and established the largest distance and eLearning network in over 27 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The institution's greatest asset is its ability to work in all political landscapes and across borders and languages in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. AVU's program in war-torn Somalia provides proof that its model is working. Over the past several years, AVU has graduated 4,000 students with women comprising a staggering 30% of graduates.
The Open Education Movement is a grassroots initiative based on the belief that knowledge should be free and open to use and re-use and that it should be interactive using text, images, audio, video, interactive simulations and games. The movement started 10 years ago with the MIT OCW project and now has a global reach. It is supported by institutions such as the OCW Consortium, UNESCO, the Creative Commons and donors.
Other People's Choice Awards winners included MIT Physics in the category of Best OER (Non-Video), the College Open Textbook in the category of Most Open, and the Middle Eastern Technical University for Best Video Lectures. Complete list of winners and finalists
AVU main site http://www.avu.org - AVU OER site http://oer.avu.org
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