The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) conducted a workshop on open educational resources (OER) in collaboration with the Ministry of Education in Victoria, Seychelles on 20-21 May, 2022. The workshop was held as part of the support provided by COL to Seychelles for implementing revised ICT in education policy including the use of OER.

Inaugurating the workshop, Dr Justine Valentin, Seychelle’s Minister of Education thanked COL for support in enhancing the quality of education and training in the country. He encouraged the workshop participants to leverage the power of information and communication technology and use the open resources that are made available to them free of charge to enrich their learning experience.

25 teachers attended the workshop to explore what OER entails, how copyrights and open licenses work and where/how to find and combine OER. The participants also had the opportunity to curate OER for a subject of their interest as part of the workshop.

Dr Sanjaya Mishra, Director of Education at COL stated, “Seychelles is a pioneer in adopting OER policy [in 2014] and has recently revised its ICT policy in education to strengthen implementation of OER and integrate ICTs in teaching and learning. This workshop is part of a long-term capacity development effort to help teachers in the country use ICTs for teaching and learning effectively.”

The collaboration between Seychelles and COL will continue to further help teachers in developing open textbooks for secondary and junior college education.