Professor Geesje van den Berg and Professor Patience Kelebogile Mudau (Department of Curriculum and Instructional Studies) head a significant project that has been accepted as part of the Digital Huminites Open Educational Resources (OER) Champions Initiative.  Their project is titled: DIGITAL HUMANITIES OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER) CHAMPIONS PROJECT.

This project is Funded and led by The UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and OER at Northwest University in collaboration with the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLAR).  

Prof Jako Olivier, NWU UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning explains that “OER include any teaching, learning and research materials that are available in the public domain and permit no-cost access, use and adaptation and redistribution” (NWU, 2022). 

The professors had the following insights to share about this prestigious achievement for their project: 

With the needed support and training, the project provided us with the opportunity to develop an OER. The exciting part of our OER, is that we involve our previous and current MEd in ODL students as co-developers. In the OER, we are touching on pertinent issues in ODL and plan to include the content and activities in our modules in future.

The main problem we are addressing in the OER is that the existing open-access material we currently use in our modules is not necessarily developed in the African context. Because our students are from South Africa and the broader African continent, a contextualised OER on pertinent issues in the open distance and e-learning space will address the needs of our students.

Another problem we are addressing is creating one text students can refer to for basic information in the field. Currently, we use different open texts linked to the various modules.

According to our knowledge, this is the first OER at Unisa developed by lecturers and students, and we are drawing heavily on a similar example from UCT.

We are looking forward to the product and will share the OER will the broader CEDU community. The envisaged date of completion is 30 November 2022.

This project will contribute to the research and knowledge in the field of OERs and digital humanities at Unisa.

Congratulations to the two remarkable Professors for this ground-breaking work!