OER at Unisa – the what, the why, and the how

Tessa Welch, 30 November 2011DCLD, Unisa, TvW 4-112

Overview of Day

Look at the Wordle on the next slide -

Use it to trigger a discussion of your understanding of OER

What are OER?9h00

What are Open Educational Resources?http://www.wordle.net/create [an OER tool]

One definition of OER

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 costFree as in no permission required

AND/OR• Some can be “re-purposed”

Adapted, translated, re-mixed…

OPEN LICENCES (such as Creative Commons)View the Creative Commons Kiwi video for a good explanation

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: Varieties of LicenceLook through the spread sheet listing Ed Psych resources downloaded from the Web: 1. Which are the most common Creative Commons (CC) licences?

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)

2. What other licences (besides Creative Commons) are there?3. What further questions do you have?

Practise using the Creative Commons licensing tool – an OER!

www.creativecommons.org/choose

See the OER Africa website for a range of material, but

particularly the case study of OER use at the

University of Malawi

Why would we want to

use OER?

How do we find OER ?

Strategies for searching

1. Google + Creative Commons2. Look at the categories and tips in the

Basic Guide to OERhttp://www.col.org/resources/publications/Pages/default.aspx

3. Ask people who do this regularlyParticularly people who specialise in a certain subject eg Teacher Education Or tutorial websites eg JISC on digital media

4. Record and remember your lessons of experience

Jenny Louw’s Search Strategy

• I first visit repositories that I know store OER.• Within the repository I use the various search terms

outlined in the brief.• From there I do 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 check bibliographies.

Finding OER activity

Part one (30 mins) •do the activity that you are givenPart two (10 mins)•find one person that did the same activity as you and compare notes Part three (10 mins) •find one person that did a different activity from you, and discuss what you found with each other

Finding OER group activitiesGroup 1:

See what your competition internationally and locally is doing!http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/http://opencontent.uct.ac.za/http://ocw.tufts.edu/TuftsOERhttp://web.knust.edu.gh/oer/pages/

Explore each of these sites to find one or more OER that would be useful to you in your work.

Group 2:Work through one of the tutorials on the JISC Digital Media site.

http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/blog/entry/new-online-tutorials-on-finding-video-and-audio-resources/FirefoxHTML%5CShell%5COpen%5CCommand

Find and download at least two digital media resources that would be useful to you in your work.

Group 3: Make a list of all the Open Textbooks sites you can find.Describe how at least two of them work.Find at least one textbook that could be useful to you in your work.

Group 4: Explore the websites of three of the largest general OER repositories :•OER Commons•Merlot•ConnexionsBe prepared to explain some of their key features.

They already have been used at Unisa! In Saide’s ACEMaths project,

starting in 2006

How could

OER be of use at Unisa?

The UNISA module Learning and Teaching of Intermediate and Senior Mathematics (ACEME1-C), with the permission of UNISA, was •adapted by a community of 14 Mathematics and LSEN teacher educators from six South African institutions, •into a six unit module integrating Mathematics and LSEN, and called Teaching and Learning Mathematics in Diverse Classrooms, •released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial South Africa 2.5 licence first as a draft for pilot testing (2007) by the participating institutions, and •then posted on Saide’s OER Africa website.

Saide’s ACEMaths project www.oerafrica.org/acemaths

Saide’s ACEMaths project

Saide’s ACEMaths project: varieties of use by seven different institutions since 2007

Existing distance material (UNISA module) with some adaptation • Reuse (Site B): Single unit as a whole, un-adapted, used as reference

material. • Reuse (Site A and C): Single unit as a whole, un-adapted, used as course

material. • Reuse (Site D, E and F): Full set of units, un-adapted, used as course

material.• Remix (Site C): Combination of unit(s) (un-adapted) with other material,

used as course material. • Remix (Site A): Combination of unit(s) (adapted) with other material, used as

course material. • Rework (Site D): Full set of units, adapted, used as course material.

Versions shared back on OER Africa• Learners with Special Educational Needs (LSEN) ACE module

material (Six units) (University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa)

• Further Education and Training (FET) Maths Literacy ACE (Two units) (University of KwaZulu (UKZN) Natal, Pinetown, South Africa)

• Foundation Phase Wrap-around Guide to accompany the ACEMaths materials (Six units) (Wits, Johannesburg)

But most important:Further Education and Training (FET) Mathematics Certificate

Course (Six units) (University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria, South Africa)

With ACEMaths, we went through the whole OER Life Cycle!

OER at Unisa ? Ideas of participantsPolicy Quality Staff

developmentCourse design Collaboration HR implics

OER should be/are part of Unisa’s policy – fits with mission/slogan

Could use OER in order to benchmark the quality of Unisa’s courses

Need to educate lecturers on how to find and integrate OER

Integrate open tutorials and e-media /RLOs into online module resources

Encourage more collaborative research

Library to coordinate OER sites

All/some modules open? All textbooks open (and part of package)?

Can use OER for staff training

Argue that OER resource development is a R&D exercise

Encourage collaborative course development

OER resource and information manager needed

Get DHET to allow accredited journals to use CC licences

Encourage integration/ad-aptation of OER modules for courses

OER researcher per college