I am looking at this as a potential consumer in an East Africa development education environment.  The characteristics of the environment are:

• Strong state control, little local autonomy
• Fixed curriculum, text books, didactic pedagogy in primary and secondary education
• Small but well developed tertiary education
• Low level of personal access to PCs/net, improving level of school access to PCs/bandwidth
• Significant differences between urban and rural access to technology
• High mobile ownership, low smartphone ownership
• Strong personal improvement culture, outside formal education

Typical Big OER is going to be a difficult fit with this environment:

• Most units will have been produced for a western/developed audience
• The content will make a lot of assumptions about existing knowledge, resources, web access
• Most content will be aimed at HE, which is arguably the least needy part of the ‘market’

There are two sources of Big OER which are likely to add value:

• Material from specialists such as Commonwealth of Learning (e.g. http://www.col.org/resources/crsMaterials/osoer/Pages/default.aspx)or South African sources (e.g. http://www.oerafrica.org/, http://projects.siyavula.com/history/) which will have been produced with the needs of the target market in mind
• Material produced or intermediated by local universities (e.g. http://www.acde-africa.org/sources-oer).  The context will be more relevant but there may be a mismatch in level between producer and consumer

This material may be most useful for ‘self improvers’ beyond the state secondary provision and/or to fill gaps in education for those who were not able fully to access formal education.  Individual units may be useful as revision or for enhancement of curriculum topics but are unlikely to replace textbooks as the core interpretation of curriculum into teaching materials.

Little OER may be able to support but not replace traditional sources for some areas of curriculum.  Typically the curriculum is delivered through use of prescribed text books but these are often out of date or are not available in many schools.  There is scope to support defined topics (e.g. theories in geometry, visual support for Geography) with resources produced elsewhere.  This may provide a richer learning experience than the textbook approach alone.  However, it will be important not to create a mismatch between teaching and assessment.  While assessment is still largely a memory and ‘fill in the gap’ test, it is important that these facts are still taught and not entirely replaced by a more enquiry based approach.  Teachers will continue to be conscious of how they are assessed themselves and will tend to default to the way they have been taught, and taught to teach.  Significant support both from Headteachers and from the government (who employ and deploy all teachers) will be necessary to encourage use of OER as supplementary teaching materials.