The University of Cape Town –which is one of South Africa's leading research universities - lastweek became one of the few major universities worldwide to sign theCape Town Declarationon Open Education (previously blogged here and here). The Declaration was signed by  Deputy Vice-Chancellor Martin Hall, at a function in the Senate Room, hostedby the D-VC's office, the Centre forHiger Education Development and the Centrefor Educational Technology and supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation. The motivation for the event camefrom the OpeningScholarshipproject, both because Cheryl Hodgekinson-Williams and I wereparticipants in the inaugural workshop for the drafting of theDeclaration and because it is becoming clear as theOpeningScholarship project nears the end of its first phase thatthere is undoubtedly a role to be played by opening educationresources at UCT. The function was a great success, judging from thecomments of UCT blogger RetroidRaving:

 I just had to comment onthis function: I had ignored what I thought was a boilerplateinvitation, only to be told sternly that they really did want to seeme there...so I went, and I was glad I did.

Prawns.  Seriousthree-corner jobs and hot sauce.  Fruit kebabs.  Sataychicken.  A more-than-passable Merlot/Cab blend....

Oh, and folk from theShuttleworth Foundation, a public signing of the Declaration- and some very interesting conversation with folk that I onlyever meet at occasions like this....

I was very glad to discoverthat the penetration of computer technology in to education at UCThas come a long way since the old M(M)EG days, of which Martin Hallreminded us - and that WebCT, which I found so clunky I never gotinto it, despite trying hard - is completely superseded by Vula.

The reference here to Vula(the UCT version of Sakai)is apposite: in his speech, Martin Hall tracked the impetus for UCT'ssigning  of the Declaration back to  the decision made afew years ago to establish the Centre for Educational Technology as aunit within the Centre for Higher Education Development - thusidentifying it as part of the university's development initiative -and the decision to invest in becoming the first SAKAI partneroutside the USA.

The link between Sakai and OERs was endorsed afew weeks ago at UCT by President Mary Sue Coleman of MichiganUniversity when a Michigan delegation visited UCT to renew thepartnership agreement between the two institutions. President Colemanannouncedthe launch of a joint programme to develop open educationresources in the Faculty of Medicine at UCT: 

Our final area of growing partnershipis knowledge sharing. Of course, everything we have discussed withuniversity leaders this week involves the exchange of ideas andconcepts. This specific initiative combines the dissemination ofknowledge with the immediacy and accessibility of globalcommunication. 

Medical education and research is socritical in today’s world, and we want to collaborate with SouthAfrican institutions to develop and provide open Internet access toeducational materials in medicine, public health and the healthsciences.The soul ofscholarship is research. From the current to the ancient,universities must make all information accessible to faculty,students, and the public.

A point of pridefor us is the creation of Sakai, the first global consortium ofhigher education institutions using the concepts and technologies ofOpen Educational Resources. Open Educational Resources encompass arange of information – such as textbooks, course materials,software and more – that can be accessed and re-used at no charge,and already, more than 150 universities around the world draw uponSakai’s resources. 

We want to createthe same level of exchange between the University of Michigan’shealth sciences schools – medicine, nursing, public health anddentistry – and medical students and faculty throughout Africa, sothey can access materials to supplement their medical educations. 

Speaking atthe signing of the Declaration, Martin Hall said that the freedoms of the internet mustbe protected, or else knowledge will become a heavily-pricedcommodity. 'Universities are not Mickey Mouse', he said, expanding onthe role of big corporates in the extension of copyright protection.'The commercialisation of intellectual property presents difficultchallenges for a university', he argued. 'Universities thrive onmaking knowledge freely available and the Cape Town Open EducationDeclaration establishes important principles for ensuring that thishappens.'

 The function was a useful moment to step back and take stockof how far open approaches are taking hold at UCT. A gratifyingnumber of senior academics and administrators expressed support;attendance from the academic staff included a number of new faces,rather than only the usual suspects; and most gratifying, there wasenthusiastic support from the students. SHAWCO,the long-established student-run NGO, that offers health,educational  and welfare services, signed as an organisation andSHAWCO leaders want to engage further with the potential offered bythe Declaration. 

Given thisimpetus, it will be interesting to see where open education will beat UCT in another year's time.  

Looking back, I see that the last time I posted a blog was in November 2007. It is now April 2008. This should not be read as a sign that things here have ground to a halt. On the contrary, a hectic round of overwork has overtaken our lives, a treadmill of projects, meetings, workshops, and conferences. I hope that this means that South Africa is moving forward in opening scholarly communications. However, South Africa is never straightforward, so in reviewing what has been happening while I have had my head down all these months, I do not expect to report unremitting sunshine - there have been some showers, although overall the signs are good.

This overview of the projects that are in progress right now is the first instalment of a review of the way the year is looking - with quite a few items that I will need to pick up in more detail in upcoming blogs.

Collaborative Projects

In November 2006, in Bangalore, some of us - funders and consultants - got together to propose some collaboration in trying to map across one another to create greater coherence achieving our mutual goals of  more open and effective research communications in Africa. This was discussed again in a meeting at iCommons in Dubrovnik in June 2006 and we are now beginning to see the results. One major benefit that has emerged is that the projects that are now being implemented, because they are built on open access principles, can share each others' research findings and resources, reducing duplication and increasing impact. The projects also recognise that achieving policy change is a multi-pronged process, working at all levels of the university system, from individual lecturers (often young and lively innovators at the junior end of the hierarchy) to senior administrators and government policy-makers.  Leveraging the impact of several projects to achieve this makes a lot of sense.  

The projects I am now involved in, that are part of this collaboration,  include:

• OpeningScholarship, a UCT-based project, funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, is using a case study approach to explore the potential of ICT use and social networking to transform scholarly communication between scholars, lecturers and students, and the university and the community.
• PALM Africa (Publishing and Alternative Licensing in Africa), funded by the IDRC, is exploring what the  the application of flexible licensing regimes - including the newly-introduced CC+ and ACAP - can do to facilitate increased access to knowledge in South Africa and Uganda through the use of new business models combining open access and sustainable commercial models.
• A2K Southern Africa, another IDRC project, is investigating research publication and open access in universities in the Southern African Regional Universities Association.
• The Shuttleworth Foundation and the OSI are supporting the Publishing Matrix project which is using an innovative, wiki-based approach to map the South African publishing industry along the whole value chain in such a way as to identify where open access publishing models could have most impact.  

Some interesting results are already emerging. The sharing of resources is speeding up the process of getting projects off the ground. Researchers are given instant access to background reports, bibliographies and readings and can review each others' tagged readings in del-icio-us. The advantages become obvious as I head off this evening for a planning workshop for the researchers carrying out the A2KSA investigations  with a range of briefing materials and readings instantly to hand.

Even more interestingly, having Frances Pinter of the PALM project explain to South African publishers and NGOs that flexible licensing models had the potential to defuse the stand-off between open access advocates and commercial publishers, and members of the OpeningScholarship team at the same meeting explaining how the use of new learning environments was changing the way teaching and learning was happening, led to some unexpected enthusiasm for the potential of new business models. Then Juta, the largest of the South African academic textbook publishers, asked for a day-long workshop at UCT with the OpeningScholarship and PALM teams to study these issues.  I have little doubt that listening to some of the innovative approaches that are being taken by young lecturers at UCT opened the publishers’ minds to the need to push further their forward thinking about the ways in which their businesses might change in the near future. A similar discussion is to be held with OUP South Africa in the next week.

Open Source and Open Access connect

We have found useful spaces in Vula - the UCT version of the Sakai learning management environment - to maintain project communications and track progress in our projects, using its social networking tools (something we perhaps learned from students who identified this potential for student societies).  Funders and guests from other projects can eavesdrop, creating greater coherence within and across project teams and giving donors a real sense of participation in the projects they are funding.

Vula, by the way has been hugely successful at UCT and there has been a steady and very substantial growth in the number of courses online  - reaching over 800 already this year (from under 200 in 2006) – and enthusiastic endorsement by students of the usefulness of the learning environment. I have little doubt that the flexibility of an open source system leads in turn to the potential for more openness in the use of teaching materials -  but more of that in a separate blog.

Open Education celebration

Right now, to celebrate UCT’s  commitment to Open Education, we are heading down the hill to the Senate Room, where there is to be an official signing of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, making UCT, I think, one of the first major universities to sign as an institution. Deputy Vice-Chancellor Martin Hall will sign for the university and around 50 guests, from senior academics and administrators to students will, we hope, sign individually, before raising a glass of good South African wine to the potential for opening the gates of learning.   

On the second day of the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) Open Access conference last week, the penny suddenly dropped. From the start, the signs were good – the conference, which followed on from the SARUA Vice-Chancellors' triennial congress, was, after all, focused on open access. The Chair of SARUA, Professor Njabulo Ndebele of the University of Cape Town, the Botswana Minister of Education, J D Nkate and the CEO of SARUA, Piyushi Kotecha, opened the conference with strong statements on the value of Open Access in their respective constituencies. This is echoed on the SARUA website which, unusually for a university association site, acknowledges the importance of dissemination as a core value and makes a clear statement of its commitment to Open Access both as one of its programme areas and as a core principle, as well as its policy for its own communications. The central statement is perhaps this:

Promoting Open Access for increased quality research, enhanced collaboration, and the sharing and dissemination of knowledge, is a central principle for SARUA’s work. The Association is already engaging with groups and networks of expertise and good practice locally and globally in order to support the development of Open Access benefits for HE.

At the conference, the comments of these opening speakers did not therefore appear to be glib statements of openness as a worthy value, but seemed firmly embedded in a recognition of the need to create equity for the developing world in its contribution to global knowledge. What emerged, particularly from Piyushi Kotecha, was a vision which could move SARUA universities on from the current post-colonial reliance on the North for standards for research competence, to a situation in which they could promote their own competence as knowledge producers. As Alma Swan commented later in the proceedings, she thought that, with hindsight, the Open Access movement should perhaps have named itself Open Dissemination, to get away from the implicit dependence on access to knowledge from the North-West that can sometimes emerge in development-speak. And it goes further than Open Access alone. Universities in the southern African region, Piyushi Kotecha went on to say, need to explore open research and open science in order to become research intensive in the next 10-20 years, making a contribution not only to global scholarly communications, but also creating links between research, teaching and learning, and ensuring the contribution of universities to socio-economic development in the region.

This is an enlightened view and if it does indeed underpin future policy initiatives by universities and governments in the region, it could well help move the SARUA constituency on from the contradictions and blockages that currently undermine the effectiveness of South African research dissemination policy, to a more effective role in achieving research impact. This could go some way to giving the region a leadership role on the continent.

This was great, but something continued to nag at the back of my mind. In the Minister's speech and in some of the questions and comments from the Vice-Chancellors attending the conference, there seemed to be a slippage between Open Access as I would understand it – dissemination and publication systems that, as Alma Swan summed it up, are 'freely available, publicly available and permanently online' - and another vision that was only obliquely alluded to, of Open Access as access to universities for students. This question continued to hover as Amanda Barratt, of the UCT Law Library (which, incidentally, hosts Lawspace, the UCT law department repository) talked illuminatingly on open access and human rights and the failure of proprietary IP systems to deliver necessary development goals, particularly in an African context. Something began to crystallise as Andrew Rens, of the Shuttleworth Foundation spoke about Text, Hypertext and Rent Seeking, charting the differences between the linear and contained world of printed text and the fluidity of the read-write web, a clash, as he vividly put it, between 'the fundamental concept of the web and copyright as a series of little buckets'.

More connections emerged as Johannes Britz, echoing what Amanda Barrett had said, spoke of the importance of education as a human freedom, citing the unhappy statistics of education and research on the continent. He charted the difference between the old information world in which richness had to be sacrificed for the sake of wide reach and the new digital paradigms in which we can combine reach and richness. However, 80% of the world lives, he said, where infrastructure is lacking for unbundled,digital information and education is therefore dependent on physical objects such as books. He brought this down to a moral issue – the bread principle, as he called it. If we can make information and distribute it for a very marginal cost, then we have a new economic model that could serve those deprived of access to education. This is a moral imperative, but IP gets in the way. What also gets in the way is the excessively high cost of telecommunications in countries like South Africa and many other African countries. This means, he said, that the moral agenda becomes a money agenda. The bottom line, he argued, is that access to information is a basic human right and information infrastructure is fundamental to making access work.

It all came together just after Derek Keats, of the University of the Western Cape, had talked about the ways in which web 3.0 could break out of the narrower confines on university walls and the covers of books, offering abundance rather than the limitations of a physical environment. In addition, social networking environments allow students to become producers as well as consumers of knowledge. This, he said, is a 'rip-mix-burn' environment that allows for the creation of cross-institutional or even non-institutional learning environments. The Vice-Chancellor of the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique responded to this with considerable excitement. 'I was in a dark tunnel', he said 'and now I can see a light.' He explained that his perception of the scarcity/abundance arguement was that in Africa we have an abundance of students and an abundance of thinly populated land. However there is scarcity of lecturers and physical infrastructure. Having listened to the earlier speeches and then bringing to bear what Derek had said, he could now see the potential for ICTs and Open Access to help a country like his. 'We should go where the students are living, take the money that we would have used for infrastructure and reach them where they are.' He could see, he said, how Open Access and social networking tools can fundamentally change attitudes towards teaching and learning.

This linked back to some of the things that Christina Lloyd, of the Open University, had talked about. She described the steps that the OU had had to take over the years to accommodate students who came to university courses without formal entry requirements. This needs very careful curriculum design, introductory courses front-loaded in terms of support - and with continuing high levels of support to meet student needs. Provision needs to be modular and very high levels of assessment are built in. When it comes to technology gaps, she said that she thought that Africa did not have to be held back by infrastructure limitations as it had already leapfrogged in its use of mobile technologies as part of its blend. What she said about the curriculum also resonated for Africa – that we need to maximise the potential of learning online through the use of social networking as part of student support.

This all suggests that in the context of higher education in southern Africa, open access, combined with innovative use of mobile technology and a recognition of the transfomative potential of social networking, offers considerable potential to move research and teaching away from anachronistic hierarchical and locked-in models inherited from the colonial era. Open access can therefore mean not only improved research communications and a greater global contribution by African research, but the use of open education and social networking might offer great potential in under-resourced countries to provide access for greater numbers of students to a well-supported, relevant and effective higher education system.

Judy Breck has acted as guest editor for a special issue of Educational Technology magazine on the theme of Opening Educational Resources. This issue has been mailed to the print subscribers, and is not available thus far online. However, the publisher has given authors permission to reprint their own articles included in the issue. My article can be read here:  The Other End of the Telescope: Opening educational resources in a South African university.

This article explores the question of opening educational resources in the context of an educational technology unit, the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. It describes the impact of a high level of policy intervention for the transformation of higher education and of a diverse, multilingual student body, many with apartheid-inherited deficits in academic preparedness. In this context of very particular needs, the article questions the appropriateness of a focus on content alone, rather than educational process as it addresses particular contexts. Where content does become important is in the need to grow the volumes of Africa-relevant content, something that is inhibited by traditional publish-or-perish policies.

After weeks of intermittent rain, the sun finally came out - bright but chilly - for a gathering of open education activists from around the world, meeting at the Shuttleworth Foundation's offices, set in beautiful gardens in the Cape Town suburbs. We were there to discuss the possibility of drafting a Declaration on Open Education Resources, The model for the exercise was the OSI's Budapest Open Access Initiative, so influential in profiling and driving the Open Access movement over the last 6 years. The Cape Town meeting followed on from the workshop sessions held at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik in June (which are reported on by Mark Surman and Phillipp Schmidt on the iCommons blog), and sought to codify and consolidate the understandings of open education mapped out in Dubrovnik.

The workshop was supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Open Society Institute and was attended by an impressive array of leading names in open education, from Mark Surman, who helped facilitate the workshop, Darius Cuplinskas and Melissa Hageman from the OSI Information Programme, Helen King, Karien Bezuidenhout and Andrew Rens from Shuttleworth, Phillipp Schmidt from the University of the Western Cape, James Dalziel of Macquarie E Learning, Richard Baranuik from Rice University, Paul West from the Commonwealth of Learning, David Wiley from Utah State University, Peter Bateman from the Open University, Delia Browne from the Australian Copyright Advisory Group, Werner Westerman from Chile, student textbook activist David Rosenfeld from the US PIRG consumer group, Lisa Petrides from IKSME – and many more. The proceedings, which were very interactive, were tracked in a wiki during the course of the discussions, as the facilitators used a number of workshop techniques to collectively map the terrain, agree on values, identify strategies and brainstorm the selling points of open education resources.

What came out of this meeting for me? First of all, a realisation that the OER terrain is very complex, from a number of perspectives. Drafting a statement is going to  be an even more complex task than the Budapest Initiative and it will need to incorporate the diversity that emerged across the education system, vertically and geograhically, in the course of our discussions. Most importantly, there are major differences between the provision of resources at different levels of the education system - not always acknoweldged in the OER discussions. At schools level, there are much stronger local differences, of language, curriculum requirements and cultural imperatives. At all levels, it was acknowledged that the provision of content on its own was not enough, but that process and educator support needed to be built in. A revelation was the emerging realisation that, although the emphasis tends to be on textbooks for the classroom, it is in providing resources and training in how to use them for teachers that might have the biggest impact.

Important for me was the issue of local production and cultural diversity. The OER debate has moved on from the early days in which, all too often, an easy assumption was made that the provision of quality content from the North would solve problems of access to knowledge in one easy move. Interestingly, there was some agreement among the workshop delegates, not only that there needed to be globally distributed OER development and collaborative partnerships for adaptation and translation, but that sustainability was perhaps to be found in partnerships with commercial entities in new business models for the production of learning materials. 

Brainstorming on what the world of education would look like in ten years' time produced some really exciting visions of a very changed education system, much more lateral, much more distributed, but one in which the role of the teacher as mentor remained of vital importance. As James Dalziel said, "If we get open education right, we can change the world." Although there was disageement on a number of issues and some robust debate, what emerged in the end was a manageable terrain, where the disagreements could be built into diversity, rather than being disruptive of the consensus that was reached. The most contentious issue turned out to be that of the kinds of licence that would be appropriate and that would signal true openness. This is something on which consensus is going to need to be reached over the next few months.  

The availability of technology in the poorer countries of the world is a major concern and it was clear that this would need to be addressed if the vision of this group was truly to be a global one. Also, the interrelation between open access and open source software is important in education provision, given the role of delivery platforms and content repositories and the need to provide maximum support for teachers and learners.   

The next steps? A draft declaration will be drawn up by Mark Surman, working with three 'stewards', Ahrash Bissell of CC Learn, Delia Browne, an IP lawyer working for the Copyright Advisory Group of the Australian government and  James Dalziel from the E Learning Centre of  Excellence at Macquarie University, also Australia. This will then be circulated to the broader group for feedback before being more widely canvassed. High profile supporters from academe and the educational world will be sought as champions for the initiative. 

As Darius Cuplinskas said, "We're about to launch a wave of creative disruption." I am looking forward to it.