Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute introduced me to some representatives from UNESCO who wanted to discuss Open Educational Resources and specifically some the issues relating to the choice of platform. Previously I had met a number of UNESCO people working in the OER space – advocating OERs in teaching etc. at the e-Learning Africa conference in Accra, Ghana in 2008, but this was more to do with an internal UNESCO strategy.

Neels van der Westhuizen and I met with Abel Caine, Igor Nuk and Jaco du Toit on the 3rd of March. The UNESCO initiative they described is different from Siyavula and school OER projects yet highlights some of the benefits of OERs so I thought I jot down some notes about it.