OER@UCT

The OpenContent UCT project at the University of Cape Town tries to encourage academics to create resources which can be shared and reused by their colleagues as well as other educators or self-learners.  These resources, shared openly on the internet, can then be discovered, used and remixed by teachers around the world.

In order to make resources openly available we must adhere to issues of copyright.  We encourage academics to source and use works licensed under Creative Commons whenever possible so that we can legally share the resulting materials more widely.  Creative Commons provides an alternative legal framework for specifying conditions for reuse of creative materials.  Creative Commons provides the vehicle for content creators to specify a licence for reuse of their content with “some rights reserved”, thus providing an alternative to the “all rights reserved” model of traditional copyright. 

This video attempts to bring awareness to some of the implications in sourcing materials online without considering the copyright on the material.  If we can transform teachers practice so that they use Creative Commons materials exclusively, we can legally share much more of our teaching and learning content!  

How do we make rights real for students in the Health Sciences?

This was the burning question that led me to explore ways of teaching human rights to future health professionals beyond the traditional assumption that assessment drives learning.

It seemed that students were finding difficulty in making the connections between real life experiences and the legal instruments that contain the standards for human rights entitlements.  There appeared to frequently be an emotional detachment from the harshness of inequality and discrimination.

I began with an infographic of a wheel supported by a foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This developed into the head of the Key which then took shape into its present form. Feedback from students and guest educators was positive. They liked the visual learning tool and the connectivity of the different concepts.

With the assistance of graphics professionals and with funding from the Centre for Educational Technology, the Key has moved from paper templates to animated visuals placing more emphasis on the agency that each student has in their potential to advance the rights of others

and promote transformation.

Open Educational Resources offered me the opportunity to publish my teaching resource without gatekeepers and time lags. I am now able to share it with others and update my information easily, and can market the resource through social media and several communities of practice.

 

Veronica Mitchell 

School of Public Health & Family Medicine

University of Cape Town

We are pleased to share the news that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town Dr. Max Price has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge.  This marks another milestone in UCT’s move towards open practices in scholarly communication.  Furthermore it represents UCT’s commitment to increasing access to education and knowledge in Africa. 

From the declaration’s preface:

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.

We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.

In signing the declaration, UCT joins a number of other leading institutions around the world committed to supporting open access to research and knowledge produced at the university.  UCT has joined a global community of educators and researchers who recognize the enormous opportunities presented by the internet.  Signing the declaration indicates a commitment to supporting open practices by:

• encouraging our researchers/grant recipients to publish their work according to the principles of the open access paradigm.
• encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the Internet.
• developing means and ways to evaluate open access contributions and online-journals in order to maintain the standards of quality assurance and good scientific practice.
• advocating that open access publication be recognized in promotion and tenure evaluation.
• advocating the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access infrastructure by software tool development, content provision, metadata creation, or the publication of individual articles.