Case study: Interactive spreadsheets

This paper describes how the Department of Statistics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) currently uses interactive spreadsheets to assist students in analysing and preparing summaries of data. It explores some of the potential benefits of making such resources more freely available to others as Open Educational Resources (OER), and outlines the key issues which would need to be resolved in order to do so. To this end, this paper discusses the pedagogical needs that led to the lecturers using the spreadsheet program MSExcel to encourage students to engage actively with statistical processes. It describes how the lecturers and students use these interactive spreadsheets and examines how well these interactive spreadsheets seemed to have worked, so that others who may have similar pedagogical needs can be alerted to the advantages and disadvantages of using this type of technology. In addition, this paper explores the possibility of these interactive spreadsheets being offered as OER first to other departments at UCT and then to a broader community

Case study: Simulations for visualisation of complex processes and principles in chemical engineering and in physics

This paper describes two case studies where open source software (OSS) has been used to create simulations to assist students in visualising complex processes in university courses. The first case reviews the use of Python to help students visualise the motion of particles or molecules in physical processes used in chemical engineering. The second case reviews the use of VPython to allow students to create their own simulations of abstract concepts in physics

Case study: Custom-designed virtual experiment in fracture mechanics in Mechanical Engineering

This case study describes the development and use of a custom-designed virtual experiment in Mechanical Engineering which partially simulates the concept of metal fatigue to help student engage with a complex practical application. It then explores some of the enabling or constraining structures, policies and practices at a national, institutional and personal level that appear to have an impact on making such a simulation available as an open educational resource

Pedagogic strategies to support learning design thinking in a masters course

The demand for further skills and qualifications in the educational technology field remains strong as the range of technologies increases and their potential use in educational contexts becomes more compelling. Students registering for the University of Cape Town (UCT) Masters level courses are employed in schools, government agencies, universities, non-governmental organisations, or in the corporate sector, where their role in designing educational technology interventions represents part of their responsibilities. Because they have varying levels of experience in designing educational materials and/or using educational technologies, they need to develop learning design thinking and gain practice with a broad range of pedagogic strategies, theories, and technology tools to be productive in the workplace. Over the past four years we have developed and adopted a course for the needs of people who are keen to apply these skills in their work contexts. We describe here, the pedagogic strategies we explicitly adopted to model and support learning design thinking in one of four modules, Online Learning Design. The module adopts a learning design framework developed by Dabbagh and Bannan- Ritland (2005) to introduce students to design processes, and uses the same framework as a loose structure for the module and assignments. We apply Dabbagh and Bannan- Ritland's classification of pedagogic strategies to model and analyse approaches to cultivating learning design thinking amongst the students. As an analytic advice, we draw on Engeström's (2001) Activity Theory to describe the evolving learning context and our changing pedagogic strategies over four years. We focus on key tensions that emerged from the adoption of a range of pedagogic strategies to cultivate the students' learning design thinking when developing learning activities to communicate complex design issues. The key social change highlighted in this paper is that educational technology educators aiming to cultivate students' learning design thinking, need to apply their design thinking to their own practice

Chapter 04. Framework to understand postgraduate students' adaption of academics' teaching materials as OER

This chapter addresses a way of responding to one of the key challenges of OER contribution, namely academics' lack of time to re-purpose teaching materials originally intended for campus-based face-to-face lectures as stand-alone Open Educational Resources (OER). It describes how masters' students, tutors and interns at the University of Cape Town have been engaged to support the innovative practice of adapting academics' existing teaching materials into OER

The role of postgraduate students in co-authoring open educational resources to promote social inclusion: a case study at the University of Cape Town

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Distance Education on 24 Jul 2012, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01587919.2012.692052.Like many universities worldwide, the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa has joined the open educational resources (OER) movement, making a selection of teaching and learning materials available through its OER directory, UCT OpenContent. However, persuading and then supporting busy academics to share their teaching materials as OER still remains a challenge. In this article, we report on an empirical study of how UCT postgraduate students have assisted in the process of reworking the academics' teaching materials as OER. Using the concept of contradictions (Engeström, 2001), we endeavor to surface the various disturbances or conflicts with which the postgraduate students had to engage to make OER socially inclusive, as well as Engeström's “layers of causality" (2011, p. 609) to explain postgraduate students' growing sense of agency as they experienced the OER development process as being socially inclusive

Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South

Education in the Global South faces several key interrelated challenges, for which Open Educational Resources (OER) are seen to be part of the solution. These challenges include: unequal access to education; variable quality of educational resources, teaching, and student performance; and increasing cost and concern about the sustainability of education. The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project seeks to build on and contribute to the body of research on how OER can help to improve access, enhance quality and reduce the cost of education in the Global South. This volume examines aspects of educator and student adoption of OER and engagement in Open Educational Practices (OEP) in secondary and tertiary education as well as teacher professional development in 21 countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. The ROER4D studies and syntheses presented here aim to help inform Open Education advocacy, policy, practice and research in developing countries

Research on open educational resources for development (ROER4D) in the global south : learning to research OER openly

This presentation encourages Research into Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) from teachers, scholars and academics in the Global South. It outlines research proposal timelines, project clusters, networks, OER adoption, and research management in terms of openness, communicating research, and how to share resources. Evaluating research “in the open” is also covered. A stronger evidence base on Open Educational Resources (OER) would allow governments in the Global South to move to evidence-based educational policies

Open educational resources and pedagogical practices in African higher education : a perspective from the ROER4D project - keynote presentation at Transform 2015 Research Colloquium, 7-10 April

Adoption and impact of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the context of Research in Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) are reviewed in this presentation. Reasons for lower OER adoption in the global south include: relevance of OER for various contexts; policy influence - national, institutional and departmental; infrastructural issues - hardware, software, connectivity; institutional support - incentives, recognition, rewards, technical support; facility provisioning - uninterrupted power supply; as well as familiarity with intellectual property mechanisms including Creative Commons. ROER4D research sites and participant networks in Africa are represented

Harmonising OER research across South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia : the case of the ROER4D project

Research into Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) utilizes the term “harmonising” to reflect production of research that deliberately attempts to ‘strike a chord’ with other research, taking researchers’ contexts into account and thereby optimising comparability of data. The presentation provides examples from the global South, and reviews impact and adoption of open educational resources (OER). OER represents a broad variety of digital content, including full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, videos, tests, software, and any other means of conveying knowledge. OER uses Creative Commons and alternative licensing schemes to more easily distribute knowledge