African Health OER Network: Policy for development and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) - KNUST

In August 2010, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) passed a landmark institutional policy in support of OER. As is the tradition in many universities, faculty performance evaluation at KNUST was originally based largely on publication in peer-reviewed articles. The OER team at the College of Health Sciences knew the reward structure needed to be revised in order to provide an incentive for faculty to devote time to creating teaching materials as OER modules. In early 2009, the College of Health Sciences (CHS) established an interdisciplinary committee of faculty, other staff and librarians across the university to examine the existing faculty development and intellectual property policies. The committee drafted a new policy and began the process of moving the policy through three committees at different levels of the university administration. Both OER Africa and University of Michigan provided input on the draft policy.
The new policy formalises the role of the OER coordinator, as well as the technical support role of the Department of Communication Design (DCD). The university maintains copyright ownership for OER and other instructional materials developed. An instructor may, however, select the Creative Commons licence that he or she prefers. Most notably, the policy establishes a reward structure for OER production; it proposes that faculty receive the same credit for OER modules as for peer-reviewed publications and that the university allocate time for faculty to create OER. The committee recommended that the university continue seek external funding for this, and also encouraged departments within CHS to earmark some funds for OER production in their budgets.
The policy was approved in August 2010 and made public under a Creative Commons Attribution licence in May 2011.
Institution: Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology