|
During 2009, SAIDE has engaged on how to pull together its
many activities in which it engages that are focused on development,
adaptation, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in a way
that will maximize their impact and contribute more systematically
towards advancing SAIDE’s core mission. In this article, Neil
Butcher provides some context to these discussions and reports on
SAIDE’s new policy on OER.
Since its inception, SAIDE has been actively involved both
in supporting and driving development of high quality educational
materials, using experience in distance education materials design
to help with the creation of excellent resources for use in both
distance and face-to-face education programmes. During its existence,
it has played an important role in modelling effective materials
development processes, while also often being at the forefront of
innovations in use of Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT) of different kinds to support delivery of resources to learners.
Even before the term was coined, SAIDE had implemented or participated
in many projects which had a philosophical commitment to the principle
of releasing the resulting intellectual property so that it could
be used and shared by others once it was complete. Indeed, the concept
of OER is strongly aligned to and supportive of SAIDE’s mission
statement and its core aims. Specifically, SAIDE is ‘committed
to increasing equitable and meaningful access to knowledge, skills
and learning through the adoption of open learning principles and
distance education methods’. Open licensing of materials is
designed specifically to deepen equitable and meaningful access
to knowledge by reducing the cost of access to Intellectual Property
that has been developed in education systems and prevent unnecessary
duplication of efforts.
In recent years, SAIDE has become involved in many projects with
a specific OER component, such as:
- A research project funded by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the
Netherlands resulting in Managing ICTs in South African
Schools: A Guide for School Principals.
- A collaborative development project funded by the Swiss Development
Aid Cooperation resulting in Being a Vocational Educator:
A Guide for Lecturers in FET Colleges.
- Household Food Security Programme funded by the Kellogg Foundation,
that has been developed together with Unisa and is currently being
piloted in the Eastern Cape.
- Advanced Certificate in Mathematics Education Project, a collaborative
project between seven universities and managed by SAIDE.
- Teacher Education in sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) project, in
which SAIDE staff members have been involved (although the project
is run by the Open University in United Kingdom); and
- International Association for Digital Publications project,
which has a thematic area of focus on promoting OER and in which
SAIDE is intimately involved.
In early 2008, SAIDE was asked to provide a home for an innovative
new initiative called OER Africa, which is funded by the Hewlett
Foundation. OER Africa’s mission is to establish vibrant networks
of African OER practitioners by connecting like-minded academics
from across the continent to develop, share, and adapt OER to meet
the education needs of African societies.
Given this emerging portfolio of project work, SAIDE decided to
initiate an ongoing thematic discussion around OER, with a view
to ensuring that the whole of these activities equates to more than
the sum of their parts. Consequently, a series of internal meetings
have been held to work out how to coordinate the various OER-related
activities and what broader implications this might have for SAIDE.
The result has been the creation of a SAIDE Policy on OER. In formally
endorsing an OER position both by releasing its own Intellectual
Property under relevant Creative Commons licences and encouraging
others to do likewise, SAIDE believes it will be able to work to
further open learning in African education systems. This will facilitate
dissemination of information and growing equity in access to knowledge.
SAIDE sees the concept of OER as being of particular relevance in
its primary field of distance education, because distance education
systems and programmes are so heavily dependent on use of educational
materials for communication of the curriculum. Investment in materials
development is thus a key cost driver for distance education, and
the economies of OER can serve to reduce the scale of investment
required. Of course, SAIDE is aware of the risks of OER being co-opted
in a simplistic fashion as yet another cost-cutting strategy. Consequently,
there is critical work to be done to ensure that educational decision-makers
understand that open licensing of materials does not change any
of the requirements for investment in course design and materials
development as necessary prerequisites for effective education.
However, releasing the results of such investments under open licences
can serve to improve quality and reduce cost over time.
As part of this process, OER Africa has now been adopted as a SAIDE
‘brand’, which comes to incorporate all of SAIDE’s
OER-related activities. This will serve to ensure that there is
no confusion beyond SAIDE about the relationship between the two,
while providing a potentially powerful marketing mechanism for aggregating
the substantial OER-related work that SAIDE has done – and
continues to undertake. The result of this re-positioning is that:
- OER Africa will become SAIDE’s organizing framework for
its OER-related activities, with a cluster of relevant SAIDE projects
connected to it.
- The OER Africa website will be transformed from a project website
into SAIDE’s primary online OER vehicle. All online, OER-related
activities and resources in which SAIDE is engaged will become
primarily accessible through www.oerafrica.org.
- SAIDE will become a member of the Open CourseWare Consortium
and other relevant fora as appropriate in order to ensure that
it becomes increasingly connected to networks of common interest
in the area of OER.
The full SAIDE policy on OER can be downloaded from the home page
of OER Africa.
We would value any feedback on this policy as we see this as a work
in progress. If you have any thoughts you would like to share, please
send them to neilshel@icon.oc.za.
| 
