Open education resources (OER) are taking centre-stage in many higher educational institutions globally, driven by the need to raise institutional profiles, improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning and achieve universal access to education. Many academics attracted to the idea of turning teaching materials into OER have, however, found the experience challenging and daunting. This article puts forward a workflow framework that provides guidance for evaluating existing teaching materials and turning them into OER using indicative questions against which they can be assessed on quality, ease of access, adaptability and potential usefulness. Recommendations are also made for moving the OER agenda forward, including changing institutional cultures, designing for openness, quality assurance and sustainability.
This article is about the information behaviour of non-governmental organizations. Despite their rise to development prominence since the 1980s and their growing importance in the socio-economic development of many developing countries, studies focusing directly on the information activities of NGOs have received tangential treatment. The findings presented in this article are based on a qualitative study carried out between 2001 and 2005 to investigate the information behaviour of NGO development workers in the northern region of Ghana. Three major dimensions of need emerged from this study: sociological, cognitive and ecological information needs. The article concludes that instead of the purely cognitive viewpoint which has dominated user needs studies within information science over the years, studies into human information behaviour should take as their starting point a socio-cognitive and political perspective.
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