Development and Delivery of Teaching and Learning Materials

Traditionally, university lecturers are employed in an institution because of their qualifications (usually a PhD) and track record in research, evidenced by large numbers of publications in peer-reviewed journals. During a Saide-led inter-institutional workshop for the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa Educational Technology Initiative (PHEA ETI) held in Johannesburg in March 2012, 37 lecturers from seven universities in Africa debated the issue of quality improvement of the Moodle courses they are developing. Feedback from these lecturers was that the process of developing their own resources was empowering, as they traditionally did not concern themselves with developing resources, or think much about how students learned best. They reported that most lecturers are subject experts who have not been taught how to teach, and therefore do not have a good idea of how to make teaching and learning effective. For most, delivering information is what they are meant to do, regardless of whether students understand this information or not.

Materials development informed by pedagogical principles ought to be a fundamental concern for all lecturers, particularly those developing resources as OER. There are several pertinent issues in the authoring and distribution of effective teaching and learning materials, too complex to be adequately addressed in this article.

One argument is that there are merits to a separate approach, where the subject expert provides content and the instructional designer then packages the content. Our work with the University of Ghana, University of Cape Town, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in their authoring of health OER suggests that a beneficial method is where the two skills sets of subject expertise and technical designer are combined and materials are developed through an iterative process where the designer and the subject expert work collaboratively. IT or multimedia support specialists are usually not informed about pedagogical effectiveness as this is closely tied with subject expertise. The lecturer knows better what emphasis to put on certain aspects of learning, and how the content should be sequenced and paced. This knowledge will assist the IT or multimedia support specialists in the design of more effective resources.

It therefore works well if the lecturer informs the IT or multimedia support specialists what they want done with the content so that the specialists can enhance this content by packaging it in meaningful enough chunks, with features included like interactive multimedia components and assessment activities that enable students to assess themselves as they learn. This becomes critical for materials designed for distance education students who have no ready access to the lecturer. How the materials are packaged for distribution to students should also consider resource constraints. If bandwidth is low, distributing materials on CD ROM would benefit students more than just uploading them on the institutional learning management system. Materials available in printable format accommodate students who do not have access to computers. Word versions of materials will enable those who want to adapt and re-use to do so more easily than when only a PDF version is available.

During the development process, quality assurance should be a central component. Read on to find out how the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana, one of the Network institutions, is addressing issues of quality in OER development.