The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project was a four-year (2013–2017), large-scale networked project which set out to contribute a Global South research perspective on how open educational resources can help to improve access, enhance quality and reduce the cost of education in the Global South. The project engaged a total of 103 researchers in 18 sub-projects across 21 countries from South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, coordinated by central Network Hub teams based at the University of Cape Town and Wawasan Open University. This chapter forms part of a project activity toolkit, which is comprised of five documents outlining activities associated with each of the ROER4D UCT Network Hub pillars of project management activity: networking, evaluation, communications, research capacity development, and curation and dissemination. It is hoped that these chapters will be of practical use to other research projects attempting to integrate any of these functions in their operational strategy. The chapter charts the experience of the ROER4D Communications Advisor in developing a research communication strategy for the project. It provides a short overview of the research communication field in order to give context and background to some of the field’s key debates and considerations, with attention given to the specific field of development research communication. Following this, it describes the evolution of the ROER4D research communication strategy.

Citation: Walji, S. (2018). ROER4D project activity toolkit: Communications. Cape Town: Research on Open Educational Resources for Development. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1221329