Background:
Kamuzu College of Nursing (KCN) a constituent college of the University of Malawi (UNIMA) was upgraded to a full constituent college status in 1979. Its history can be traced back from 1965 when it was called a National School of Nursing.
It has two campuses Lilongwe (LL) main campus and Blantyre (BT), separated by 300kms. Its mission is “to provide quality, comprehensive and cost effective nursing, midwifery and other Health related educational programmes in response to societal needs, utilizing the primary health care and outcome based approaches through teaching, research, service provision and consultancy to promote the health of the people of Malawi, Africa and beyond.”

Open Education Resources (OER) pilot project, is one of the programs for KCN to achieve its mission and vision because its use will improve the quality of teaching material as well as methods of teaching. This program was facilitated by the International Association for Digital Publications, OER Africa. The program was planned in August, 2008, and commenced in January 2009. It had three specific goals;
1. To Increase understanding of OER and address issues common across OER projects, 
2. To build capacity by creating college OER champions that would advocate creation and production of OER and share lessons learned in the creation of OER materials through pilot projects.
3. To develop digital materials from OER that would support the teaching of a Certificate Course of Midwifery using Problem Based Methodology.

Design and Methods:
The pilot project model was based upon the participatory empowerment model by Fetterman. The model is designed to help organizations assess and improve their functioning by establishing mechanisms that allow aligning theory with action.

Findings:
The major findings of the pilot project were that; open education resources (OER) can provide significant components to assist in providing higher education as they benefit both faculty and students (need to elaborate on benefits to the student after you summarize the faculty benefits. specifically faculty preparation time is reduced. Produced materials are of high quality and faculty is able to learn and share with other academic institutions. The pilot provided new knowledge regarding methods for accessing academic information; the creation and production of educational materials for teaching and learning; and for publishing as well as sharing information. Faculty exhibit more confidence when they know that their work is of high quality.
Faculty appreciated the core concept of OER which asserts that the teacher is not the sole custodian of information rather faculty and students learn from each other. Faculty, students and management understanding of the significance of OER was paramount for OER activities, implementation and sustainability. The pilot revealed that sustainability of any project/program is dependent on institutional understanding of its benefits, institution support and institutional commitment. Although, the team faced challenges during the creation and production of the resource, results demonstrate a willingness of the team to continue creating and producing more OERs that are relevant to Malawi. Finally, faculty members expressed a desire to share completed projects with the wider community within and outside University of Malawi.

Conclusion:
The pilot project has shown that the key to success in creating an OER is to understand what is unique about the project/program and build upon that to modify and localize the project. It demonstrated that implementation of new projects is frequently met with faculty resistance unless benefits are clearly identifiable. Furthermore, in light of the participatory methodology used to conduct the pilot project, it revealed the importance of building and maintaining capacity, integrating ongoing assessments and sharing the results with team members.

Keywords

case study · midwifery · nursing · OER research · pilot project