Open educational resources (OER) are digital teaching materials that are openly available to the community, free of charge. The OER project at the University of the Western Cape shows that a growing number of higher education institutions have recognized the benefits derived from freely sharing their syllabi and course content. The aim of the project is to allow students, lecturers and members of the local and regional community to freely use the resources developed for teaching and learning at UWC. The project is a continuation of the historical social role played by the UWC in the struggle for political freedom in South Africa.
OpenCourseWare (OCW) is digital teaching material that is openly available to the community free of charge. It is generally produced by higher education institutions as it consists of course material for the subjects they teach.
The first university to design and plan an OCW system was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 2002. The system is a large-scale electronic publishing initiative based on the Internet and was set up jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and MIT, with a budget of US$4 million. There are already 1,550 courses from 34 departments in MIT’s five faculties in OCW format. As well as general course content, self-learning materials are also provided. This includes exams and exercises, additional reading material and even video lectures. Some courses also include interactive tools in different formats or programs and digital books written by MIT professors. Materials for all courses are scheduled to become gradually available in 2008. The OCW system allows the general public to acquire the same training as university students at no cost, though there is no official recognition of these studies.
Currently, universities throughout the world are initiating similar programmes. MIT has helped create the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC), which is made up of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations. The mission of the Consortium is to make progress in educating and training people throughout the world using OCW.
This shows that increasing numbers of higher education institutions are acknowledging that sharing syllabuses and educational course materials freely is worthwhile. However, in developing nations very few higher education institutions are making an active contribution in this field. In this type of project, knowledge flows from developed nations to less developed ones. This means that the educational material available is not entirely adapted to the specific needs and demands of developing nations and that in these nations its contribution to society in general will be less.
The aim of the OCW project of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa, is for students and lecturers to make free use of the resources developed for teaching and learning at UWC. This serves the double purpose of providing the university community with easy access to the educational resources that the institution produces and of allowing the local and regional community to benefit from the wealth of knowledge at UWC. The project is an extension of the social role that UWC played in the past during the struggle to achieve political freedom in South Africa. Its ultimate aim is to bring the political ideals of the past up to date. Today, access to knowledge is crucial, not only to the socioeconomic development of a country but also to its human development; universities have an important role to play in this.
The OCW project was set up in August 2006 and the first phase of development and implementation is scheduled to finish in August 2008. In the first year, work was carried out on developing the infrastructure (the software and Internet platform). The second year will be dedicated to disseminating the OCW (publication of courses). Annual funding for the project amounts to EUR 40,000.
The objectives of the project are as follows:
To encourage UWC lecturers and students to benefit from the free open-access educational content of the OCW.
To share the wealth of the educational resources developed at UWC with the local community.
To create a repository of high-quality OCW material that is particularly relevant in the local context.
To create the legal infrastructure needed for publishing the UWC courses using licences for free, open-access distribution.
To raise awareness about the importance of free, open access to knowledge within higher education institutions in Africa.
To work with individual lecturers and departments to identify and publish course material that is relevant to and appropriate for the local environment.
The project is in the first of the two phases of implementation and consolidation. The following actions were carried out in the first year:
1. Setting up of a work team to begin publishing courses All the university departments were invited to participate in order to involve the largest possible number of members of the university community and thus consolidate the project, even though the team currently running the project is small.
One of the groups most closely involved in the project is the e-learning team, which provides support to all participating lecturers. This team organizes workshops and provides individual assistance in order to answer queries made by lecturers and students. Seminars on different themes are also organized every month. The Free Software Innovation Unit also makes a major contribution by helping to develop the e-learning platform, publish the contents and promote the project for users outside the university.
2. Development of the technical infrastructure Knowledge of copyright law is essential for developing a project of this nature. The team backing the project therefore trains in this field and disseminates its knowledge throughout the university community in the form of support material on how to produce free, open-access contents.
The technical development of the Internet platform and the software is achieved through the cooperation of the UWC Free Software Innovation Unit, the OCWC and other international partners.
3. Awareness-raising among lecturers and students Awareness in the university community is raised by means of a blog that disseminates the ideas behind the OCW. Other mechanisms used for raising awareness include e-mail distribution lists and articles in free-access journals.
4. Identifying courses and lecturers likely to contribute to the project The first step in obtaining the cooperation of the members of the university community is to hold meetings with the faculty heads. Lecturers who show an interest in the project receive support and all the information they need to take part in it. A special effort is made to encourage the participation of staff that already have some knowledge of e-learning or that have worked with free software. This is done to reduce the number of problems that may arise while adapting to the technological tools used on the project.
In this first phase, three areas of knowledge were identified that are highly relevant to local circumstances and in which UWC has a great deal of experience. These are Public Health, Constitutional Law and Biocomputing. Staff responsible for teaching these disciplines are encouraged to take part in the project by giving pilot OCW courses at the university.
A great deal of work was likewise done in the project's first year of development to promote links with other institutions at international, regional and local levels. At the international level, the aim was to collect information on successful OCW experiences at other universities. At the local and regional level, the objective was to establish a network of universities interested in developing similar programmes.
UWC is the first African university to join the OCWC, in which it plays a very important role as it expresses the point of view of developing nations in the region. The OCWC's specialized support and assistance strengthens the UWC project, particularly in terms of technical infrastructure.
As this is a pioneer initiative in Africa, UWC has signed an agreement with UNESCO’s open education division to cooperate in developing and publishing specific materials for higher education institutions in developing nations. Other examples of international cooperation include the forthcoming publication in iCommons of a strategic document on open education and on links with NGOs participating in the Creative Commons organization.
Looking to the future, the OCW project is promoting a program that creates links with 14 other African universities. The project is called the African Virtual Open Initiative and Resource (AVOIR), and is directed and funded by UWC.
Further collaboration is being established with civil society at national and regional levels, in particular with the group working in open education at the Shuttleworth Foundation.
Development of infrastructure: The project’s website went into operation in April 2007 at (http://elearn.uwc.ac.za/index.php?module=splashscreen#)
A blog and general information portal were set up.
A local mirror site for MIT OCW courses was created to overcome problems of access from African servers.
A repository, or central database, of OCW course materials was set up for publishing UWC courses.
Publication of courses: The first pilot course in OCW format was published in June 2007 after an agreement was reached with the School of Public Health. A total of 10 courses were published in 2007.
Awareness-raising, training and dissemination
A community of practice has been set up, with an e-mail distribution list that currently has 30 members.
Individual and group meetings are held to provide information and raise awareness in an effort to create the best possible reception for the OCW project.
Support material for using and producing free, open-access educational content is created at UWC and is published on the project’s blog.
One unexpected spin-off of the project was the increase in participants’ skills and knowledge in the area of open-content licences and copyright law within the context of higher education in South Africa.
The project was presented at a seminar on e-learning and at the UWC symposium on teaching and learning—both in 2007.
An article on Education 3.0 was published in volume 12, no. 3 of the journal ‘First Monday’ in March 2007, with the title ‘The genesis and emergence of Education 3.0 in higher education and its potential for Africa’.
A course was given at UWC on free, open-access licences by the e-learning team and the Digital Media Studio.
The project expressed the point of view of African universities at the 2007 OCWC meeting.
It has proposed and developed research assignments and received consulting contracts for the coming years from institutions such as the International Development Research Centre, UNESCO and the Shuttleworth Foundation.
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