Towards the development of a framework for open courseware for public Universities in Kenya.

Abstract

Open Courseware (OCW) refers to university course materials which may includes lecture notes, presentations videos, syllabi and course outlines that are shared for free on the web. Open courseware concept has gained popularity especially in developed countries. However, this is not the case with developing nations such as Kenya. OCW provides opportunity for less developed nations Kenya included for increasing more ways to learn and research for its citizens. A number of underlying factors seem to hamper any effort towards this direction. It is for this reason that this has become an interesting topic of research. The purpose of the study was to develop a framework for implementation of open courseware for Kenyan public universities. Towards achieving this goal, the research set to investigate the factors that discourage or/and encourage open courseware in Kenyan public universities and what needs to done to improve the implementation. Through the guidance of African Virtual University (AVU) framework of Open Education Resource (OER) model, a survey was conducted on three public universities to find out the factors influencing implementation of Open courseware in public universities of Kenya. Data was collected through questionnaires administered to students, lecturers and university administrators, although interview and observation were also used to gather information. In total 630 questionnaires were distributed to the three public universities 522 valid responses were received. The result of survey was used to propose a framework for open courseware suitable for Kenyan public universities situation. The framework was validated by use of data collected from 91 students, 23 lecturers and 8 university administrators across the three public universities. The findings of study uncovered extent of popularity of open courseware in Kenyan public universities and the range of issues that affects implementation of open courseware. The study was also able to explore the readiness of public universities to offer open courseware in terms of available ICT infrastructure and human capacity. The findings show some significant factors that influence implementation of open courseware in public universities of Kenya. The study further provides a generic framework for implementation of open courseware in Kenyan public universities and can be utilized by other universities in developing nations as guide of open courseware implementation. The major limitation of the study was that it only concentrated on the public universities of Kenya.