Communities of Practice

The IADP envisages that the development of academic communities of practice will provide an arena to share existing relevant eLearning material and will facilitate the creation, adaptation and sharing of new, open content. The IADP also envisages that the system will be used to support student networks by enabling them to share their work and build common pools of learner-generated resources. As work progresses on system development, the IADP will continue to identify academic staff with common educational interests, and assess their needs in the context of potential participation in the growing OER “movement”.

Affordable Access Project Teams
This space is being made available to all project team members from participating universities, SAIDE and IADP to discuss for example, success stories in the piloting of the Affordable Access Project within their programs, useful tools they may have developed, issues or problems that they may be experiencing. Forums and blogs can be set up at a macro-level for all institutions to participate in, and then moving to forums for specific institutions and at a program level. The focus of this community will be on management of the pilot within institutions, rather than on a curriculum focus. Click here to visit the community.

Agriculture Community

Sustainable agricultural development is particularly important in development countries, especially as there has been a greater focus on commercial farming over the years. As a result agricultural extension/support services have primarily focused on the needs of commercial farmers while not taking into consideration the needs of the majority of people who fall into the category of merging farmers, households and schools, many of whom include women and children. IADP has seen the importance of the education of the latter and have included three agricultural programs in the Affordable Access pilot. While this community will be primarily for the engagement of these programs participation from all interested parties in the open forums is most welcome. Click here to visit the community.