By: Dr Ephraim Mhlanga

Dr Ephraim Mhlanga — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 16:06:05 +0000

Open Education in the South African Higher Education System.
Other than the few higher education institutions mentioned in Glenda Cox’s blog, the voice of the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide) in debates and innovations on Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education in South Africa and in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot be ignored. Besides contributing to the policy on the Provision of Distance Education in South African Universities (http://www.saide.org.za/sites/default/files/37811_gon535.pdf ) in general, and the specific section on OER, Saide was also instrumental in ensuring that the use of open educational resources was incorporated in the White Paper for Post-School Education and Training (http://www.dhet.gov.za/SiteAssets/Latest%20News/White%20paper%20for%20post-school%20education%20and%20training.pdf#search=white%20paper )
Saide has been working with various higher education institutions on OER. Most of the initiatives were implemented under the umbrella of OER Africa, a ground-breaking initiative established by Saide to enhance its leading role in supporting higher education institutions across Africa in the development and use of OER to enhance teaching and learning: http://www.oerafrica.org/ . Initiatives implemented so far have mainly been on advocacy for OER, creating an enabling environment through policy, and building an African OER network. Saide’s OER strategy is aimed at improving access and quality of higher education in African higher education institutions.
Examples of Saide’s OER initiatives include the following:
African Health OER Network whose mission is to advance health education in Africa by using open educational resources (OER) to share knowledge, address curriculum gaps, and support communities around health education. Detailed information about this network and its work are available on: http://www.oerafrica.org/african-health-oer-network/about-us
African Teacher Education OER Network (ATEN) whose goal is to assist African teacher educators inform and influence policy in their own institutions in respect of OER, and share expertise, experience and resources to improve teacher education in local contexts. ATEN’s work is aimed at encouraging understanding, use, and sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER) to support teacher education and development in Africa. Details of the Network’s work are available on: http://www.oerafrica.org/teachered
AgShare, an alignment initiative aimed at leveraging the attention of existing organizations to create and openly share different types of OER that strengthen agriculture faculty and curriculum and create downstream uses of the OER for other stakeholders in the agriculture sector. This initiative was implemented in two phases. The first phase was a pilot phase where partner institutions were supported to understand OER and their value in teaching and learning, and producing OER products to support their academic programmes. The second phase involved using a research-based approach (the Agshare method) for the co-creation and release/sharing of purposeful agricultural knowledge within and across stakeholder groups. The following site provides details about this initiative: http://www.oerafrica.org/agshare
OER Africa Participatory Action Research project is a three-year project that is being implemented in four universities, two in South Africa, one in Tanzania and one in Kenya. The project involves supporting the four institutions in the development and use of OER to enhance teaching and learning. The specific goals of this project are to institutionalize OER practices in project universities, develop capacity of university staff in the institutions to make use of OER in ways that support pedagogical transformation, foster critical reflection of OER practices through the implementation of Participatory Action Research (PAR) activities, and support pedagogical transformation through effective communication and advocacy that shares institutional lessons learned through the PAR processes at the four institutions. More information about this project is available on: http://www.oerafrica.org/keywords/participatory-action-research
The African Storybook Initiative is another ground breaking Saide initiative which is making a contribution to the improvement of early literacy among African children by facilitating availability, access to and use of sufficient good stories that are contextually relevant and are in familiar language for early reading practice for African children. The initiative is unique in that it uses a digital publishing model to publish openly licensed reading resources for various reading levels. Through the use of specially designed tools that are available on the website, the initiative encourages translation and/or adaptation of stories into a familiar language and context, or creation of own stories and uploading them on the website. To date, the project has generated 741 unique titles and 2899 translations/adaptations in 98 different languages all of which are openly licensed and are available on the website. Several higher education institutions responsible for teacher training have registered interest in integrating African Storybook stories in their teacher training programmes for early literacy development. The African Storybook resources can be accessed on: http://www.africanstorybook.org/
The initiatives described above are a few examples of the work Saide is doing to enhance the quality of higher education provision in through OER.

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By: Dr Ephraim Mhlanga