African Storybook vs OER Commons

African Storybook develops and publishes picture storybooks in African languages to support children’s literacy, enjoyment and imagination. Its stories and tools are intended for children aged two to ten, including early childhood and the first three years of primary school. The free Reader app lets parents and children access books offline. With the free Maker app, people can create storybooks offline on a phone or tablet, then publish them to the website once connected. Website tools also support creating, translating and adapting picture books, and readers can download titles for offline reading or print them. Stories may be read, copied, adapted and translated without payment or permission, subject to attribution and any non-commercial restriction attached to a particular story. Creating, adapting or translating requires registration; users must be at least 18 or have parent or guardian permission. The site distinguishes ASb-approved stories from those made on the website or in the Maker app that have not been checked. It also offers video and written guidance on using and developing picture storybooks. The initiative is free, with Android, iOS and web access.

OER Commons is a free web-based digital library for finding open educational resources and collaborating on their use, evaluation and improvement. It serves K–12 and higher education educators, librarians and homeschooling parents. A free account, priced at free, provides library access, Open Author for creating or publishing resources, groups, collaboration to curate or remix content, and a personal profile for saved resources. Organizations can use Hubs to develop collections, manage content and facilitate conversations. Custom microsites can have their own libraries and domains, tailored metadata and content creation, and analytics dashboards. Open Author includes an accessibility checker, requires alt text for embedded images and automatically captions videos uploaded to a resource. ISKME offers data and API integration services for learning management systems; its tools can receive and provide harvestable content feeds in Dublin Core, IEEE Learning Object Metadata and RSS. ISKME reports completed accessibility audits and another review underway, but authors and users remain responsible for resource accessibility, and many indexed materials are hosted externally. Resources created in legacy Open Author 1 are scheduled for removal on December 31, 2026; Open Author 2 resources are unaffected.