In the true spirit of Ghandi, the Unisa delegates were welcomed with open arms. The hospitality from the University of Mumbai was humbling. In true Indian style we were even invited for supper at the Vice-Chancellor’s house and taken for dinner by Hon Mr Satej D. Patil, the Minister of State for Home, Rural Development and Food and drugs Administration.

The schedule was very busy with visits to university departments for example the Law Department, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), Extramural Department, Department of Psychology, African Studies and Nanotechnology Department.   A number of institutes affiliated with the University of Mumbai were also visited.   These included the Mumbai Education Trust (MET), Welingkar (We School) and the Sydenham Institute of Management Studies (SIMS).  These institutes provided an eye opening experience to the UNISA delegates.

MET has a vibrant campus with student activities that goes on late in the night, the campus with its multi-disciplinary culture is holistic in its approach that it even provides staff and students with a relaxation room.  Welingkar Institute refers to lecturers as mentors since it is the role of lecturers to mentor and guide students through their studies. What was clear from the visit to the various institutes was the holistic approach enshrined in their academic and daily operations. Although curricula and teaching was the core business of these institutes, they made sure that both the intellectual as well as spiritual and/or psychological aspects of students were taken care of.

Entry to study at the University of Mumbai is extremely competitive with only the best students being accepted.  Students from the University of Mumbai were always professional and it was clear that the University of Mumbai fosters hard work, creativity and innovation in all its students. We also had the privilege of visiting the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE) which aims to promote equity and excellence in science and mathematics education from primary school to undergraduate college level, and encourage the growth of scientific literacy.

Some of the fundamental lessons learnt from our visit to the University of Mumbai are that Industry plays a big role in academia. Universities have strong working relationships with Industry where high profile industry leaders act as guest lectures and provide training for graduates. Industry plays a crucial role in the curriculum development of certain courses so as to keep the skills that students are equipped with relevant therefore making graduates more marketable.

Apart from all our meetings and the presentations that each delegate from Unisa had to make on their research interests, we also had the privilege of visiting Mani Bhavan, the house in which Ghandi lived after he returned from South Africa. Ghandi did not only preach humbleness, he lived it.  The Gateway to India and the Elephanta Caves (a world heritage site located on Gharapur Island about 10 km from Mumbai) exposed us to Indian history and culture.   In addition, we were very excited to experience shopping in India and were overwhelmed by the lovely clothes, spices and books. The Indian people strictly observe their culture and spirituality in all if not most areas of their lives. This could be seen everywhere that we went including the University of Mumbai and its various Institutes. In most buildings, one often noticed a sacred corner with spiritual significance where incense and flowers were put to honour Deities and Divas.

Overall, the trip to India was a once in a lifetime experience that enriched our view of life in general but specifically, the role, function and responsibility of a university.  We learned a lot and made new friends and collaborative partners. We now look forward to increased collaborations (research and projects) and exchanges with the University of Mumbai and the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education.

Around 40 courses, covering a wide variety of subjects, will be available free of charge and in 12 different languages. The initiative is led by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) and mostly involves open universities. The partners are based in the following countries: France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, UK, Russia, Turkey and Israel.

Detailed information about the initiative and the courses on offer is available on the portal www.OpenupEd.eu.  A press release about this initiative was published on April 23 by the European Commission and is available in 22 languages at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-349_en.htm.

This initiative will officially be launched by an international online press event on Thursday, April 25.
You can view the event online at www.ou.nl/moocs.

At the start OpenupEd will offer around 40 courses, covering a wide variety of subjects, will be available free of charge and in 12 different languages.

Currently, the portal http://www.openuped.eu/ is already approachable providing some background information. The list of courses and other information will be available on April 25.

The good news is that YouTube has now updated its license to allow uploading of materials under a Creative Commons Attribution license, otherwise known as CC BY, the most open of the Creative Commons licenses.  In addition to uploading new materials under this license, you may also review and change your previously uploaded materials to be licensed as CC BY. Users may now also choose to license their future videos under CC BY as a default.

To help you to reuse and remix materials, you can use the YouTube Video Editor and specify that it only search for materials carrying the CC BY license on YouTube. This is when the fun starts: there are handy tools to help you edit, remix and create your very own video using the more than 4 million CC BY licensed videos already uploaded to YouTube!  Just make sure you acknowledge the original creators. For more information, visit YouTube’s Creative Commons page.

This move by YouTube provides tools to help remove barriers to use, re-use and remixing of open materials. Other platforms such as Vimeo  and Flickr have also followed suit. What barriers do you find still hinder your ability to fully engage in the OER movement? Which new tools and technologies are facilitating your participation in the OER movement? We’d love to hear from you, so send us your thoughts.

Dr Liz Archer

archee@unisa.ac.za

Oksana - 2006 CC Attribution, Non-comercial

The University of South Africa has demonstrated its commitment to Open Access to research output produced by members of the Unisa community by becoming the most recent signatory of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (Berlin Declaration).

The Berlin Declaration was drawn up during a conference hosted by the Max Plank Society in Berlin during October 2003. It supports open access to scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material. More than 380 institutions which support the principles of open access have signed the Berlin Declaration. These institutions include governments, universities, museums, archives, libraries, funding agencies, research institutions and professional associations.

Through signing the declaration, Unisa is indicating its commitment to supporting open scholarship by:

• encouraging development and growth of Open Educational Resources (OER).
• encouraging 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.

Furthermore, signing the declaration expresses Unisa’s commitment to providing access to education and knowledge in Africa.

Signing the Berlin Declaration offers Unisa a unique chance to raise its profile as a progressive institution that is visible to the outside world and which recognises and adds value to research output and as more and more institutions join the Open Access effort, the greater the access to research across the world in general and to African research in particular.

There are 6 South African institutions that have signed the Berlin Declaration, and now, the University of South Africa has joined this list!

Dr B. Mbambo-Thata

ED: Library  Service

The end of teaching as we know it - slideshow

I hope this bold statement by Professor Rory McGreal, the COL/UNESCO Chair in OER at Athabasca University in Canada, gets your attention and persuades you to read on. You can read the full post here.

I agree, partially, with Rory on this one.  Where I differ is in my belief that we all have choices, especially as educators. We can choose to tuck our heads down, stare at our screens, edit our documents, in short, go on with our business as usual.  We can continue to submit articles to journals managed by publishing companies that are in the business of learning for profit, we can publish like crazy in closed circuits of rhetoric because we know there will be financial rewards, we can close our eyes to the brave new world out there that is asking us to change.

Of course, we have a choice.

A day on the internet A Basic Guide to OER

But there is a growing band of pilgrims who are following a new pathway in education (yes, the metaphor is deliberately evangelical!).  In each conventional university, higher education institution or school there will be a group of teachers and academics, small at first but expanding each week, who are called to a new philosophy, one that considers education as a free and open resource for all. I have heard it said that the University of Stellenbosch has pledged funds to reward academics who publish on open scholarship.  I applaud this innovation and sincerely hope that Unisa can follow suit.  No-one denies the compelling allure of financial reward for publishing articles, chapters in books and monographs.  What we need is an institutional push that encourages more and more academics to use open publishing resources for the simple reason that they disseminate knowledge quickly, reach more people and have a potentially powerful social impact.  Be honest, how many people do you think read your article once you have managed to publish it in a conventional journal? Five? Twenty-five?

Now think of the power of social media. If you remain unconvinced, check out this link on the power of the internet.

As is customary in every field of study, there is confusion and contention around the definition of terms. I prefer to call OER (Open Education Resources) the blanket or umbrella term for a range of initiatives.  These initiatives or branches of OER are:

• Open Scholarship: Changing the way we think about research and doing research by making our research open to all;
• Open Learning: learning materials available freely and openly for adoption, adaptation or remix;
• Open Content: ‘the broad term for free sharing of intellectual property online’ quoted in the Mail and Guardian article.
• Open Access Publishing: usually refers to the worldwide electronic distribution of peer-reviewed journal literature in order to give free and unrestricted access to it (Guidelines for Open Educational Resources, 2011, COL);
• Open Licence: a standardised way to grant permission and to state restrictions to accessing, using, repurposing, reusing or redistributing creative work (whether sound, text, image, multimedia, etc.) (ibid. COL. 2011);

Neil Butcher has produced A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER) (Butcher, 2011, published by UNESCO and COL) which should be standard reading for anyone interested in open educational resources.

So, to rephrase Rory McGreal:

We all have choices as educators: let’s choose wisely, intelligently and ethically by making our work meaningful for not just ourselves, or our immediate colleagues, or for the money we may get if we publish, or for future promotion, or for our academic reputations, but for those who may not be able to be part of an elitist insider group but who still deserve to have access to knowledge. Let’s go OER!

Pamela Ryan

Dr Liz Archer, Dr Judy Henning, Prof Rory McGreal, Prof Pam Ryan and Prof Peter Havenga.

OER & Mobile Learning at Athabasca University Part 1 Part 2

Unisa has recently had the good fortune to host the COL/UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources, Professor Rory McGreal, who hails from Athabasca University.

Professor McGreal spent four days at Unisa meeting different portfolios, having crucial conversations with academic and professional staff, delivering two lecture presentations in the Senate Hall and meeting with the Pro Vice Chancellor, Professor Narend Baijnath and his OER Steering Committee.

Professor McGreal’s presentations can be accessed by clicking on the pictures at the bottom of this post.

I would like to mention here some of the key moments I took away from the four day visit. Here followeth a few of Rory McGreal’s choice quotations (not quoted verbatim, I hasten to add):

• Be satisfied with “good enough”: if course material has been prepared by a number of experts in the field, let that be good enough for your students’ use. This was said in the context of Canadian academics not trusting or wanting to use course material issuing from the United States and bearing in mind that open-source materials can be adapted by the user to suit local conditions.
• Be wary of proprietary materials. Always go for the open source. This was said in the context of educational materials that have been designed by ‘for-profit’ organizations, which then place heavy restrictions on how, when and where the material can be used.
• Make sure that you use the Creative Commons license for your open source materials. This simple action allows others to use your material freely but, depending on what conditions you insert in the license agreement, also allows for your name to be lodged as the owner of the material. This is sensible advice especially in a context in which academics are sometimes jittery about allowing their intellectual “property” to be made open and free. The word “property” is encased in quotation marks to indicate the absurdity in the idea that knowledge can be owned. But there it is!
• We are on the side of the angels! This is my favourite Rory aphorism, said at a dinner, but emphatically stated.  I like this because it picks up on the altruistic fervor which OER practitioners feel and demonstrate by being part of an awe-inspiring and revolutionary educational movement, one which speaks so forcefully to a socially responsive agenda; one which truly wants to change the world.

You go, Rory!

Pamela Ryan

Unisa has shown its intent to embrace Open Educational Resources and there has been encouraging growth in OER use and production in pockets at Unisa. Members of the Unisa community have not only employed existing OER to improve their own curriculum design and research, but some have also ventured into producing OERs for others to use (e.g. MathsEdge and Learn an African language online). Judging by the vast array of OER materials available, OERs are changing the face of education and Unisa intends to play its part. In order to increase Unisa’s involvement in OER though, we need a coherent institutional position statement and strategy. So, here we are – at the beginning of the process of developing such a strategy.

OERs are vehicles to improve curriculum development, share resources and collaborate, but becoming fully involved with OER presents challenges, such as those related to intellectual property, copyright, ICT infrastructure and quality assurance, to name just a few. You can actively contribute to the drafting of our OER strategy and help us address these issues. Did I hear you ask, “How?” Well, it’s simple: start contributing to the conversations in this blog and make your voice heard.

Opening the book on OER:

We are in no doubt about the powerful potential of OER to change the nature of our social relations. By radically reconceptualising normative educational practices in our schools and in our universities, OER will change the way we think about education in the future and on our continent, but it will do so only when we have carefully considered its distinct advantages and usages for Africa.

(Personal communication from Unisa Chancellor, Prof Makanya to Minister of Education, Dr Nzimande, 7 December 2011)

The OER phenomenon has grown in leaps and bounds since the concept of OER was codified at a UNESCO forum more than a decade ago. Recently, the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) also identified OER development as a component in “…increasing and assuring the quality of provision [of education] across the entire post schooling system” (Department of Higer Education and Training, 2012, p. 59). In accordance with this, the DHET has committed to funding and supporting the development of shared learning materials. In addition, the Department is considering the adoption or adaptation of an appropriate Open Licensing Framework (Department of Higher Education and Training, 2012). It is clear that OER do not present a passing fad in education, but are here to stay. It is time for Unisa to leave its mark on the movement.

The OER road so far:

Unisa has been exploring various means of engaging with OER in an organised manner. These efforts, guided by the Pro Vice Chancellor, Professor Narend Baijnath, include, but are not limited to:

• The establishment of an OER steering committee
• A request to the Commonwealth of Learning to institute a Chair in OER at Unisa
• Focussing on OER at the Teaching and Learning Festival in September 2011 by careful selection of keynote speakers (Catherine Ngugi, OERAfrica; George Siemens, Athabasca University) and by hosting an African Roundtable on OER (including Dr Gilbert Hpangyewi from University of Zimbabwe and Ms Glenda Cox from University of Cape Town)
• Engaging the Department of Institutional Statistics and Analysis (DISA) in an OER Feasibility Study. This was completed in November 2011 with three phases of reporting. (Reports can be accessed on the Institutional Information and Analysis Portal)
• Becoming a founding anchor partner in the OER university initiative

The question now is, how do we proceed further towards the African university in the service of humanity?

Where do you fit in OER?

At the heart of the movement towards Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use and reuse knowledge.

(Atkins, Brown, & Hammond, 2007, p. 5)

The success of OER at Unisa is dependent on each one of us. What do you think should be our next step? How can Unisa successfully and appropriately engage with OER to both improve Unisa and contribute to the OER movement in a meaningful way? What would you focus on in the Unisa OER strategy if you were to write it?

For more information, please contact:

Dr Liz Archer
Specialist: Institutional Research
Department of Institutional Statistics and Analysis (DISA)
Email: archee@unisa.ac.za
Tel: 012 429 2035