The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence (AITI-KACE) has held its first Technology Transformation Seminar (TTS) of 2013 to education people on the importance of Online Educational Resources (OERs).
TTS is an event which is geared towards bringing innovations and emerging issues in ICT to the knowledge of the public and interest groups.
The seminar on theme “Creating and Using Open Online Educational Resources: Opportunities and challenges” was aimed to create awareness about the rewards of active participation in the OER movement by key groups including educational, professional institutions and government.
This was contained in a statement copied and issued to Ghana News Agency on Friday in Accra.
The event brought into focus the importance of OERs and shed light on its creation, use and production, as well as sustainability for the OER movement.
OER is an electronic resource, including those in multimedia formats available in the public domain at little or no cost that can be used for teaching, learning, or research.
The statement noted that the world's most prestigious universities such as MIT, Harvard, U-Mich, professional, training and other institutions were increasingly launching new OER initiatives to make education cheaper and accessible to everyone.
On the importance of OER for educational institutions, the statement said OER helps to reduce the cost of procuring learning materials, marketing and other cost, and bolster a school's global reputation.
It said it could be used to create a better trained, more flexible global workforce that could compete anywhere.
For students, OER provides learning materials that can be accessed, used and transformed by anyone around the globe.
The statement noted that OER was vital in managing the economy since it has the capacity to lower education cost substantially and sustain growth in the sector.
It added it was also a key to solve many challenges facing the country.