Open textbook authorship, quality assurance and publishing: Social justice models of participatory design, engagement, co-creation and partnership

This is a presentation that was given by the DOT4D team as part of the CHED seminar series in June 2022. The presentation demonstrates how academics at UCT are embarking on open textbook initiatives in response to a largely mutual set of social injustices they witness in their classrooms related to affordable access, curriculum transformation and multilingualism. With a focus on student co-creation and inclusion, it presents models that address social (in)justice in the classroom and explores ways in which institutions can address sustainability in order to support open textbook development activity

Detecting bias arising from delayed recording of time

Sometimes in studies of the dependence of survival time on explanatory variables the natural time origin for defining entry into study cannot be observed and a delayed time origin is used instead. For example, diagnosis of disease may in some patients be made only at death. The effect of such delays is investigated both theoretically and in the context of the England and Wales National Cancer Register

Open Textbooks for Curriculum Change and Student Co-Creation: Collaborative models of open textbook production and student co-creation (Workshop 2)

This is the second of two workshop presentations by the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) initiative team as part of the Siyaphumelela Workshop Series in September 2022. This session introduced participants to practical ways in which to initiate open textbook production and engage students in authorship, quality assurance and publishing processes

Open Textbooks for Curriculum Change and Student Co-Creation: Introduction to open textbooks for social justice (Workshop 1)

This is the first of two workshop presentations by the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) initiative team as part of the Siyaphumelela Workshop Series in August 2022. This interactive session provided an introduction to the concept of open textbooks, with a particular focus on the affordances they provide to address social injustice in the classroom

Student co creation of open textbooks to address sense of belonging and student success

There is considerable debate around the role of collaboration with students and how it is enabled by trust, respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility. Collaborative open textbook development processes that include students as co-creators present a means to building a truly inclusive, democratic classroom environment where students feel a sense of belonging, which is acknowledged as a key factor in student success.   This interactive workshop by the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) initiative as part of the Siyaphumelela Service Workshop series introduced participants to open education practice as a means to address social (in)justice in the classroom, particularly as relates to students’ sense of belonging. Student attribution and acknowledgment is a crucial aspect and participants were introduced to Creative Commons and ways to attribute students. The workshop also provided practical insights into initiatives at UCT that are exploring strategies for student co-creation to aid student success

Open Textbooks, Intuitive Pedagogy and Social Justice

The Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) project is a grant-funded research, advocacy and implementation initiative based in CILT. This presentation provides insight into the DOT4D project’s recent work at UCT exploring the nexus between social (in)justice in the classroom, the textbooks and resources used in teaching and learning, and the pedagogical approaches of open textbook authors

Ontologies for the study of neurological disease

We have begun work on two separate but related ontologies for the study of neurological diseases. The first, the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND), is intended to provide a set of controlled, logically connected classes to describe the range of neurological diseases and their associated signs and symptoms, assessments, diagnoses, and interventions that are encountered in the course of clinical practice. ND is built as an extension of the Ontology for General Medical Sciences — a high-level candidate OBO Foundry ontology that provides a set of general classes that can be used to describe general aspects of medical science. ND is being built with classes utilizing both textual and axiomatized definitions that describe and formalize the relations between instances of other classes within the ontology itself as well as to external ontologies such as the Gene Ontology, Cell Ontology, Protein Ontology, and Chemical Entities of Biological Interest. In addition, references to similar or associated terms in external ontologies, vocabularies and terminologies are included when possible. Initial work on ND is focused on the areas of Alzheimer’s and other diseases associated with dementia, multiple sclerosis, and stroke and cerebrovascular disease. Extensions to additional groups of neurological diseases are planned. The second ontology, the Neuro-Psychological Testing Ontology (NPT), is intended to provide a set of classes for the annotation of neuropsychological testing data. The intention of this ontology is to allow for the integration of results from a variety of neuropsychological tests that assay similar measures of cognitive functioning. Neuro-psychological testing is an important component in developing the clinical picture used in the diagnosis of patients with a range of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, and following stroke or traumatic brain injury. NPT is being developed as an extension to the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations

Student co-creation of open textbooks for social justice and belonging

This is a online keynote presentation by members of the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) initiative, Dr Glenda Cox and Bianca Masuku, at the the Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association (OTESSA) conference in May 2023