OER@UCT

A Creative Commons image by F. Montino

I was asked recently about elearning or educational technology conferences in South Africa in 2012.   My colleague Tony Carr pointed me to a global list of conferences compiled by Clayton R. Wright shared on the eLearning Technology blog.  I have extracted the conferences which are in the South African region below.   

January 26-27, 2012 The Southern African ICT for Education Summit 2012, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. http://africanbrains.net/edusa/

April 2-4, 2012 South Africa Basic Education Conference, Durban, South Africa. http://www.education-conference.co.za/

July 2-4, 2012 African Education Week Convention and Learning Expo: Bridging the Skills Gap through Quality Education for All, 6th annual, Johannesburg, South Africa. http://www.educationweek.co.za/en/index.php

July 11-13, 2012 Higher Education Close Up 6 Conference: Challenging Dualisms in Higher Education Research and Practice. Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. http://www.hecu6conference2012.co.za/

July 22-27, 2012 International Conference on Psychology Education (ICOPE), 5th, in affiliation with the International Congress of Psychology (ICP) Cape Town, South Africa.  http://web.mac.com/rvelayo/Div52Announcements/Upcoming_Events.html or http://www.icp2012.com/index.php?bodyhtml=home.html

August 1-3, 2012 E-Learning Update, 5th, Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa. https://sites.google.com/site/elearningatbase/

September (dates TBC) Emerge 2012 virtual online conference, hosted by the Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town.

 Any more to add?  Please leave me a comment.  Last updated January 17th, 2012

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.

On Sunday I attended a workshop which previewed the forthcoming UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Platform.  The workshop was hosted within the framework of the Highway Africa and the Pan African Conference on Access to Information (PACAI) conferences also happening at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) this past weekend. I wanted to share some thoughts on the workshop, in particular: an overview of the UNESCO model curriculum for journalism education; an invitation to comment on the UNESCO OER policy guidelines; an introduction to the UNESCO OER Platform; and some exciting future activities to watch from the UNESCO OER program. 

UNESCO Model Curricula for Journalism Education

The workshop brought together stakeholders from journalism and media institutions throughout Africa in which UNESCO aims to support as they become ‘Centres of Excellence’ in journalism education.   The stakeholders had been involved in developing and using the UNESCO Model Curricula for Journalism Education published in 2007.  The UNESCO Model Curriculum for Journalism provides a model curriculum that any institution around the world can adopt and use in their institution. 

The Curricula is a generic model that can be adapted according to each country’s specific needs. It takes full cognizance of the social, economic, political and cultural contexts of developing countries and emerging democracies, highlighting the connection between democracy and journalism and arguing for a more cross-disciplinary approach within journalism training centres. Source

From what I understand the curricula is an open educational resource, but I did note that it does not contain an open copyright license such as Creative Commons.  It would be great to see an open license on the curriculum as well. 

UNESCO OER Policy Guidelines

Abel Caine highlighted some of the activities which The UNESCO OER Programme are involved in including the recently drafted OER Policy Guidelines for Higher Education and the forthcoming UNESCO OER Platform.

The OER Policy Guidelines for Higher Education are being drafted and UNESCO has asked for comments on the draft guidelines.  UNESCO in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) have developed these guidelines to support governments, teaching staff, higher education institutions/providers, and quality assurance/accreditation and recognition bodies.  If you are like us and have an OER initiative on your campus, and yet no policy to formally support these activities, this document might be worth a review.  I plan to take a close look at the policy guidelines in the next couple weeks and hopefully provide some feedback. 

Introduction to the UNESCO OER Platform

We had a preview of the OER Platform currently being developed by UNESCO in collaboration with the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE).  The platform will be used by UNESCO to “radically “enhance” UNESCO’s Clearing House function by offering “selected” UNESCO publications as OER products and allowing “stakeholders” to freely copy, adapt, and share their resources”. Source 

The platform will host and share open curriculum developed by UNESCO and will eventually move towards hosting more diverse types of OER.  The platform comes with the tagline “Find, compare, build and share”.  Any UNESCO curriculum on the platform can be adapted, localized, translated, or innovated upon directly in the browser.  The adaptation is linked to the original version, as well as any other adaptations of the original (or an adaptation of an adaptation!)  What makes this platform different is that it allows one to then compare revisions of a curriculum document directly in the browser.  Differences are highlighted to show where the content has been revised to match the need of the local context. 

The OER Platform uses similar functionality to the Open University’s LabSpace, which allows one to make ‘revisions’ of content; and Rice University’s Connexions platform, which uses one to ‘reuse / edit’ content on their site.  Keeping track of the versions and adaptations is the real strength of such a system, as it is then easy to see the reuse of content and how it has been contextualized within different contexts.  

It was a great workshop and I was really happy to engage with the other institutions who are looking to open educational content to improve teaching and learning at their respective universites. 

 More information about upcoming UNESCO OER initiatives can be found below:

UNESCO and the Commonwealth of Learning are "planning" to host the 2012 World OER Conference at UNESCO in Paris from Wednesday 20 - Friday 22 June, 2012.

he purpose of the Conference will be to:

1. Highlight global best practices in OER laws or policy, projects or initiatives, and practices;
2. Release the 2012 Paris OER Declaration calling on Governments to support the development and use of OERs

We are planning several lead-up events:

1. UNESCO Forum on OER Policy Guidelines - UNESCO, Paris, January 2012
2. Asia-Pacific OER Policy Forum - India, Feb 2012
3. Africa OER Policy Forum - South Africa, March 2012
4. Latin America OER Policy Forum - Brazil, April 2012

The 2012 World Conference will be followed up by a 2015 Millennium World Conference where we hope to show very strong progress by Governments on OER policies, initiatives, and practices.

Teaching open source in South Africa image by opensourceway shared under a CC-BY-ND license

We have noticed a great interest by students in the omission of open education sites from the UCT student internet quota.   This initiative enables UCT students to access open educational resources from around the world without impacting upon their monthly bandwidth.  We have heard before from students who wanted TED lectures and other educational materials downloaded and made available for local access, so we are thrilled to have been able to get this content more accessible to students. 

We could only make this possible with the help of Information and Communication Technology Services (ICTS).  ICTS recognized the value in increasing access to educational resources from around the world.  The additional bandwidth available in South Africa, made possible via the SEACOM fibre optic cable, has also increased opportunities for this kind of access.   In doing so I believe that UCT as a whole is making its first steps towards open educational practices. 

Open Educational Practices have been defined as:

The use of open educational resources (OER) to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on institutional, professional and individual level.  OPAL - The Open Quality Initiative

Practices which support the production, use and reuse of high quality open educational resources (OER) through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path. OEP address the whole OER governance community: policy makers, managers and administrators of organizations, educational professionals and learners. International Council for Open and Distance Education

By increasing access to educational resources from around the world we can begin to explore new ways of understanding and approaching teaching and learning at our own university.  The university also demonstrates to the entire UCT community that we are committed to giving our students the most modern and current information and communications technology tools to enhance their learning experience. 

Students have responded quite positively to the increased access.  The links from the OpenContent website to the open education sites have been getting lots of traffic.  We have also had a number of requests for additional open education sties to be added to the list.  Among these are the Open Yale University and the Kahn Academy.  We are currently compiling a list of sites which we will take to ICTS with a request to omit from the student internet quota.   Open Yale will be on the list but sadly the Khan Academy will not as the Khan videos are currently hosted in Youtube.  Obviously omitting the entire YouTube site would be impossible! 

There is a possibility of approaching the Khan Academy and seeing if we might host the instructional video files locally.  Is this something the UCT community would find useful? 

Please leave us a comment with any other open education sites which could be included in the access list. 

CC on Orange by Yohei Yamashita (CC-BY 2.0)

We still get many questions regarding Creative Commons licenses from academics looking for ways to share their teaching materials.  In fact we run entire workshops going through alternative and open licenses and introducing academics to Creative Commons.  Unfortunately we don’t always get everyone in the room at the same time, and so sharing the open ethos widely is still a challenge.

I have just stumbled upon a wonderful video introduction to Creative Commons from Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand.  The five minute video introduces the need for alternative license, the process of applying the license to your works, and appropriating open content into your own creative works.  It goes on to explain the various license elements, how the various elements can be mixed, and finally explores where one can go to find openly licensed content.  

The video can also be downloaded for sharing in your department from here.  Thumbs up from South Africa to New Zealand!  Will chat about the rugby later… ;) 
 

We are delighted to announce that one of the resources shared on UCT OpenContent has won a 2011 Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence recognized by the international OpenCourseWare community.  Matumo Ramifikeng’s open educational resource Occupational Focused Conceptual Frameworks has been selected as an exemplar example of open online educational material. 

The courses that achieved the ACE Awards this year are representative of some of the best work being done in the opencourseware (OCW) global community,” said Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of OCW Consortium. “They embody the commitment to open sharing that has allowed the movement to rapidly grow, and we are excited to recognize these higher education leaders for their accomplishments.” 

Source: OCW Website

We are super excited for Matumo and are delighted to again celebrate her excellent materials.  You might recall that Matumo’s material was also selected for publishing late last year.  She certainly has received a lot of attention for her outstanding open teaching materials.

While the international community is celebrating Matumo’s material, I am concerned she may not be receiving the same recognition here at her home institution.  How do these new performance measures and international accolades factor into her advancement as an academic?  We are hoping that successes such as this are also celebrated at UCT, as we believe high quality teaching and the creation of resources such as these should contribute to academic advancement.

Let’s just sum up all of great things Matumo has achieved by sharing her materials on UCT OpenContent:

• She created an educational resource that anyone could access online regardless of being registering at UCT
• Her materials potentially generated domestic and international interest in the subject of occupational therapy (keeping people safe at work!)
• Her materials specifically on The model of creative ability were selected for publishing in the Journal of Occupational Therapy of Galicia
• Her materials have now won the 2011 OpenCourseWare award for excellence
• Her materials have showcased the work being done in the department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Cape Town

Congrats again Matumo from all of us on the OER team.  

Text from the letter of congratulations from the OpenCourseWare Consortium:

Prof. Ramafikeng,

As chair of the 2011 OCW Consortium Awards Committee, it’s my pleasure to congratulate you on behalf of the Consortium board of directors, staff and membership for the selection of your course, Occupational Focused Conceptual Frameworks, as a recipient of a 2011 Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence. 

We greatly appreciate your contribution to the global OpenCourseWare movement.  Enclosed please find your certificate recognizing the award.  Please feel free to contact me directly with any questions regarding the award.  Again, my congratulations. 

Stephen Carson
External Relations Director, MIT OpenCourseWare
Member, Board of Directors, OpenCourseWare Consortium

August 19, 2011 Edit: The University of Cape Town Monday Paper has also written a piece of this wonderful story!  Read it online here.

We are delighted to announce that we have managed to get a selection of open educational resource sites omitted from the student internet quota.  When a student at UCT accesses the web they are using a monthly quota that is allocated to them, and when it runs out they are unable to access global sites.  This is necessary as bandwidth availability has traditionally been an issue in South Africa and it also costs a fortune for the university.

Recently we heard the call from students who have used up their quota accessing educational materials from other institutions.  One such student had been using video recorded mathematics lectures from MIT to supplement his own study at UCT.  The videos had been recommended by the course tutor as a useful resource. 

As you might imagine, videos take a great deal of bandwidth and the student eventually ran out near the end of the month. 

The availability of educational resources from other institutions may enhance the student experience at UCT.  In addition to all of the great books we have in the library and internet journals and databases I believe we should also be making some of the wonderful worldwide OER available to our students. 

And we did it!  We have managed to get a selection of open educational resource sites whitelisted on the UCT network.  This means students will not affect their quota when accessing these sites.

http://ocw.mit.edu  - MIT OpenCourseWare project
http://ocw.jhsph.edu  - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's OpenCourseWare
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk  - Open educational resources from the Open University, UK
http://ocw.tufts.edu  - Open educational resources from Tufts University
http://www.oerafrica.org South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide) open educational resources project

http://www.ted.com/talks - From what I understand the Ted lectures are also omitted from the internet quota!

Most of the resources on these sites are text, pdf, or powerpoint presentations, with the exception of MIT which offers quite a few video lectures.  I strongly believe that whitelisting these domains will increase the quality of teaching and learning at UCT, and demonstrate to students that we are committed to open education and knowledge sharing globally.    

This is a wonderful achievement for the OpenContent project and an incredibly forward thinking move by UCT admin.  Thanks especially to Information and Communication Technology Services (ICTS) for making this happen.

I have been doing some thinking about the OER landscape and how it is developing globally.  For my research I have identified five main strategies for OER sharing online which have emerged. 

Institutional repository

Institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute (MIT) of Technology and the University of Michigan have set up their own institutional repository for curating and sharing educational media as OER.  The materials are typically hosted and shared in a single system.  MIT uses EduCommons and Michigan uses Drupal.  We are also seeing that institutional repositories are moving from closed to open.  This can be labelled the institutional repository approach to curation.  

Institutional remixing platforms

Other institutions have gone for a more broad approach to curation, allowing edits and contributions from authors around the world.  Rice University’s Connexions project allows anyone to create or remix existing content on their site.  Likewise the Open University’s Labspace allows users to create content on request and allows modifications of existing web content.  Connexions and Labspace can be labelled as institutional remixing platforms allowing anyone to revise the content through the web browser.  

Global repository

Many universities still do not have a place to share their open resources online.  For that reason institutions like California State University offer places to share educational materials including the ability to upload the actual content.  The Merlot project provides anyone in the world a hosting option for their OER, thus providing a global repository. 

Institutional referatory model

The referatory model for curation only houses the metadata about resources regardless of where they are hosted.  At UCT, the OpenContent directory directs people to links on the internet or UCT server where resources are hosted, but does not host the actual resources.  The referatory curates a collection of web resources providing links to the content online

Global referatory model

OER Commons employs a similar model albeit on a more global scale, as their site refers to locations from a number of institutions all over the internet where OER’s are hosted. 

Hi everyone! 

Sorry its been so long since our last post, we have been kept exceedingly busy these days.  On what you ask?  Well why not join us on Thursday and find out?  I'll be presenting on the latest UCT OpenContent developments and will share a "behind the scenes" view of the project. Alot of the statistics and metrics I'll be sharing are things we usually discuss at our monthly team meeting, but we thought we would share them more widely.  

Specifically, I will be talking about:

• Details of the UCT open educational resource collection
• Where things are hosted and stored
• How we use and  share metadata
• How UCT OpenContent increases discoverability and exposure for contributors
  
• A summary of web analytics for the past year
  
• A summary of what visitors search for when they come to the directory
• Some real examples of how our content gets used around the world
• Some information on our international partnerships and collaborations 
• A future vision of OpenUCT
  

Please register below: 

Seminar: 365 Days of Openness: A behind the scenes look at the UCT OpenContent Initiative 

 The UCT OpenContent project recently celebrated a year of sharing online and open educational materials from the University of Cape Town.  In this seminar we will share some of our experiences in leading the initiative, discuss some of the significant events and achievements, and demonstrate how we are using web analytics and social media to enhance experiences for people sharing and accessing online resources.

Speaker: Michael Paskevicius

Date: 12 ^th May
Time: 1 - 2 pm
Venue:  Hoerikwaggo Classroom 3C

Click here to sign up

We celebrated our one year anniversary on Friday afternoon in the African Studies Gallery at the University of Cape Town.  It turned into a lovely affair with many contributors and other community members joining to celebrate the first year of UCT OpenContent. 

The team was particularly grateful for the words of Deputy Vice-Chancellor Jo Beall.  Jo congratulated the team on the progress of the past year recognizing our constant battle with intellectual property rights and changing academic practices.  She also recognized UCT OpenContent as one of the best marketing tools the university currently has, giving the public access to some of the wonderful work that UCT academics do.  Jo explained that UCT OpenContent is helping contribute to some of the university’s key strategies including becoming an Afropoilitan University with a socially responsive agenda.   

Having just returned from travel within Africa, Jo emphasised how difficult accessing resources can be at some African Universities.  Some universities lack infrastructure, such as learning management systems (Vula) with which to share resources.  UCT OpenContent can act as an open learning management system for students seeking academic resources.  We would like to envisage that by hosting one of the larger OER repositories in Africa we are contributing to knowledge sharing on the continent as well as around the world. 

Jo made a special thanks to all of the contributors who have taken the time to develop and share their materials.  For the various reasons academics have chosen to share, they have made a significant contribution to social responsiveness.

Jo also mentioned UCT OpenContent as part of the broader initiative 'OpenUCT'.  Through OpenUCT the University of Cape Town will act as an “academic meeting point between South Africa, Africa and the rest of the world.”  OpenUCT will weave together existing and emerging projects including; digital resources from the library (digital archives), UCT OpenContent (open educational resources), Knowledge Co-Op (social responsiveness projects) and open research (open access research).  We look forward in anticipation of this intiative!  

Thanks to all who took the time to join us on Friday afternoon.  A very special thanks to Deputy Vice-Chancellor Jo Beall for her very kind words.  We will be sharing video from the event, including Jo’s speech, in the coming week or so. 

View more pictures from the event here.

Open tools, open source, open education and open mindsets. 
365 days of openness + 673 ways of sharing = 1 goal of open education for all

In February 2011 we celebrated our one year anniversary of OpenContent UCT.  We have been delighted with our first year which included significant growth and engagement with the UCT community. 

When we launched the UCT directory on February 12, 2010 we had 21 resources in the directory and we now have 109.  These 109 resources actually equate to 673 distinct learning objects shared with the community.    

On Friday the 4th of March we celebrate our year anniversary with a small bash on upper campus.  This event is an opportunity to thank all our contributors and showcase the wonderful resources we have shared.  We are please to announce that Deputy Vice-Chancellor Jo Beall is our invited speaker (for 4.30 pm). 

When: Friday 4 March
Time: 4 pm: Snacks and drinks
Note to all OER contributors: Please wear your OpenContent T-shirts!

Please RSVP to Glenda.Cox [at] uct.ac.za ASAP and we will send you directions to the venue.  
 

Yesterday the Mozilla Drumbeat organization launched a new tool to help content users reference openly licensed Creative Commons content.  Referencing openly licensed content has been slightly ambigious in the past with many people adopting their own methods. The OpenAttribute project aims to make referencing of openly licensed content as simple as possible, highly accessible within the browser, and super useful!  

Whenever I use Creative Commons content I always try to include a link back to the webpage where I found the content as well as a link to the Creative Commons license deed online. I have used various open licensing referencing tools in the past, including the Xpert Project Attribution tool which actually embeds the license text and urls into the image - this has been useful for putting images into Powerpoint or some other offline program.  I have also used and blogged about Imagecodr which gives an HTML version of the license with links to the content and the license deed - this has been useful for putting openly licensed content on my blog and other websites.  These tools have been great in helping me get the proper references, but they required that I go visit another site to get the job done. 

Using Open Attribute

What I love about the Open Attribute project is that is a web browser plugin.  So I do not need to navigate elsewhere to extract the code I need to attribute a Creative Commons work.  Once you have installed the plug in (on Firefox, Safari or Chrome) the plugin will automatically sense when you are on a Creative Commons licensed webpage.  

In the image above I am viewing a picture from the World Economic Forum.  The picture is licensed under Creative Commons, so on the right hand site of the URL bar a little CC icon appears.  

When you click on the CC icon a drop down box appears. 

From here you can 'Copy Attribution' as plain text (for documents) and as HTML (for webpages).  You can also click on more information to get a more detailed view of the license panel.  

For this particular image the exported references look like this: 

Plain text reference:
Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 /     World Economic Forum (http://www.flickr.com/people/worldeconomicforum/relationship/) / CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

HTML reference:
<span about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/3613744771/in/set-72157617685533519/" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"><span property="dct:title">Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009</span> / <a rel="cc:attributionURL" property="cc:attributionName" href="http://www.flickr.com/people/worldeconomicforum/relationship/">    World Economic Forum</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a></span>

This HTML will show up as displayed below if embedded in a webpage: 

Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 / World Economic Forum / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Open Attribute tool makes it really simple to extract references from webpages licensed with Creative Commons content.  Great work on the part of the Mozilla Drumbeat team!  This is a real contribution to the Creative Commons movement! There is a lovely summary of the origins of the project on Molly Kleinman's blog.