OER in Africa – the what and the how
Unisa Teaching and Learning Festival, 1-9 September 2011
Overview of Day
9h00 – 10h30 : Finding OER
11h00 – 12 noon : Adapting OER
Lunchtime activity
14h00 – 15h00 : Presentations and discussions
15h00 – 15h30 : Way forward for you
• What potential do I see for the use of OER in my teaching?
• What support would I need for this?
• How can Saide/OER Africa help?
Your situation?
You are an academic/teacher educator engaged in the
preparation of distance education courses
You are aware that there are materials out there on the
internet – Open Educational Resources (OER) – that you
might be able to use or build on.
• How do you find these resources?
• How do you adapt and integrate them into your
courses?
But what are Open Educational Resources?
http://www.wordle.net/create
Definitions
• OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the
public domain or have been released under an intellectual property
license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open
educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules,
textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools,
materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. (Atkins)
• The open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and
communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a
community of users for ‘non-commercial’ purposes. (UNESCO)
• At its core, the concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) describes
educational resources that are freely available for use by educators and
learners, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees.
[Saide]
One definition
OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that
reside in the public domain or have been released
under an intellectual property license that permits
their free use or re-purposing by others.
Open educational resources include full courses, course
materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests,
software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques
used to support access to knowledge.
(Atkins, Seely Brown & Hammond, 2007, p.4)
FREE?
• “Free use”
Free as in no cost
Free as in no permission required
AND/OR
• Some can be “re-purposed”
Adapted, translated, re-mixed…
OPEN LICENCES (such as Creative Commons)
Without pay or permission, these licences allow you
to copy and distribute the material.
Authors retain copyright © …… but agree in advance
to redistribution with attribution
ACTIVITY: Which are the most common Creative
Commons (CC) licences?
Look through you the spread sheet listing Ed Psych
resources
CC BY (only attribution required)
CC BY-NC (not for commercial use)
CC BY-SA (must share back under same licence)
CC BY-NC-SA
CC BY-NC-ND (not allowed to make derivatives - adapt,
revise etc)
What other licences (besides CC licences) are there?
So what’s the difference between searching for
information on the web and searching for OER?
THE LICENCE
BUT
• Not all usable material has an obvious open licence.
Eg Open Access publishing: free online access without licensing fees – but
unless the resource has an open licence, you do need to ask permission to
copy and redistribute.
ALSO
• If it’s on the web, authors may be more open to
requests for permission to use the material
Strategies for searching
1. Start with African OER initiatives that you know
about and see how they can help you, eg
•
•
•
OER Africa
Open Content UCT
African Virtual University
2. Embark on a thorough search for suitable material
using Google, OER search engines, OER repositories
A thorough search
Takes time – you might need someone to help you.
• If you get someone to help you, give them a clear
brief.
• But it’s better to learn how to do it yourself – only
you really know the subject and the angle on the
subject or the teaching of the subject; you also need
to get to know the community out there.
Brief for Saide’s Info Services Manager – Jenny Louw
Spend one day searching for OER for the following Units for a set
of Primary Science OER materials
UNIT 1 - The Human Body (8 pp)
UNIT 2 - Heat (24pp)
UNIT 3 - Sound (27pp)
UNIT 4 - Communication (30pp)
UNIT 5 - Environment (31pp)
UNIT 6 - Water (60 pp)
UNIT 7 - Mining (72pp)
UNIT 9 - Forces (78pp)
UNIT 10 - Density and Pressure (88 pp)
UNIT 11 - Forms of Energy and Energy Transformations (105pp)
UNIT 12 - Light (108pp)
UNIT 13 - Magnets (120pp)
UNIT 16 - Static and Current electricity (127pp)
Jenny Louw’s Search Strategy
• I first visited repositories that I know store OER.
• Within the repository I used the various search terms
outlined in the brief.
• From there I did more general Google searches on
the terms – to find resources that might not explicitly
be licensed as OER, but might allow various types of
re-use.
• I also checked bibliographies.
Jenny Louw’s Lessons of Experience
• Most comprehensive site: Curriki.
• Most OER sites concentrate on higher education.
• There are a number of very impressive science sites for
primary school education but mostly the materials are fully
copyrighted.
• Much of the material is in video format (not always relevant).
• There are lesson plans, teacher guides, assessment, posters,
worksheets on sites, but they were not linked together so it
would take a long time to collect all the “parts” on a topic.
But before you start
Decide how you want to track what you find
• Use a spreadsheet
• Use a social bookmarking tool such as Diigo
What are the pros and cons of each method?
Search on general teacher education topic:
“Educational Psychology”
Summary of findings from Google
See resources 1 to 8 on spreadsheet
• Many references to Kelvin Seifert’s comprehensive
Open Textbook – 3 versions of it (see nos 3, 4, 5)
• Web-based courses (see nos 1, 2, 6) – different levels
and audiences
• A bibliography of web links (Index of professional
resources)
• An Education Encyclopaedia
The Global Text project – involving students …
• The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be
freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper,
CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web
distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate
dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or
inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who
cannot afford them.
• This project started in January 2004 when a graduate class at the
University of Georgia wrote the first version of the book. Subsequent
graduate and undergraduate classes at the University of Georgia and
elsewhere have improved and extended the book. It has been used as the
XML text in a variety of classes, and in each case the class has been
required to leave the book in better shape than they received it at the
beginning of the term.
The Global Text project http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/
OER@AVU – Teacher Education – Psychology
Saide Teacher Education –
www.oerafrica.org/teachered
OER Commons – http://www.oercommons.org/
• Gives same textbook reference
• But also directs to an MIT course in
Educational Psychology, which can now be
downloaded.
www.intute.ac.uk - Subject catalogue and search
engine managed by various UK academic institutions
OCW Consortium http://www.ocwconsortium.org/en/courses
Merlot – Educational Psychology
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
Further search engines to try ….
• Temoa - "a knowledge hub that eases a public and multilingual catalog
of Open Educational Resources (OER) which aims to support the
education community to find those resources and materials that meet
their needs for teaching and learning through a specialized and
collaborative search system and social tools."
• DiscoverEd - "Discover the Universe of Open Educational Resources"
• Jorum - "free learning and teaching resources, created and
contributed by teaching staff from UK Further and Higher Education
Institutions"
• CoL – knowledge finder – for an approach to searching for OER, open
courseware, and other resources for learning
• OER Dynamic Search Engine - a wiki page of OER sites with
accompanied search engine (powered by Google Custom Search)
• JISC Digital Media maintain guidance on finding video, audio and
images online, including those licensed as Creative Commons.