Have you ever wondered why the government doesn’t just produce a generic set of history resources for each topic and then share them with us? There is a plethora of different textbooks, charts, study guides, videos, worksheets etc. for our subject. Affluent schools can afford to acquire the best of these resources and the learning environment they create for their learners is supposedly rich and engaging. Less affluent schools might wonder why the government strictly sets out the curriculum yet leaves each school to scramble around looking for suitable resources limited by their meagre budgets and availability in their district. This begs the question, “Why isn’t there at least a set of quality resources available to us all?”
You might also take this question and expand it. Why do affluent universities and educational institutions throughout the world create their own course materials and then hoard them? This means that each institution that wants to offer a 1st year Historical Studies course has to develop its own learning programme from scratch. Talk about re-inventing the wheel! Should they not take a course being offered by a respected institution elsewhere in the world and then adapt it so that it considers local needs and differences?
I think you can guess the reasons why. Motivators such as institutional prestige, academic rivalry, and of course economic benefit lie at the heart of this traditional set of behaviours. The publishing of textbooks is in itself a multimillion Rand industry and publishers, while they want national endorsement from the education departments, don’t want to be locked out of this lucrative market. But does it need to be like this? Not everyone thinks so.
Open Education Resources, or OER for short, might offer the solution. The thinking on how we should handle the creation and sharing of educational resources in the future is being shaped by a similar debate being waged between proprietary software vendors (Microsoft is an example) and the Open Source community. In this debate the Open Source community argues that core sections of computer code should be offered free to the wider community. Developers should take this code and add value by building additional functionality to the source code. Over time the free code is improved and expanded because of the large community that supports it. Proprietary software vendors on the other hand argue that code they have developed belongs to them and is used to create revenue. They hoard and protect their code.
The new thinking in education circles is that we also need an ‘Open’ community of materials developers. We should build up a store of quality education resources that are free for any educator to take, customise for their learners and then share the enhancements. Certain initiatives have already been set up to coordinate these efforts. The Open Courseware Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ) is a group of universities who are trying to do just that. Members include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Open University (UK) and our own University of the Western Cape. Various university courses and even whole learning programmes are collected by the consortium and then offered free to other institutions to use, adapt and then share again. A quick look at the repository shows a growing library of materials with courses ranging from Photography to Polymer Physics.
So if the universities are getting themselves organised why don’t us schools? Well, Thutong (www.thutong.org.za) is doing something similar. Each subject or Learning Area has been allocated a ‘Learning Space’ that contains a set of tools to encourage the sharing of materials. We need to start the OER movement at school level right here and now using the resources we produce every day to support our lessons. Does it really make sense that every history teacher creates a lesson plan and materials to teach Grade 12 Globalisation from scratch! Surely we should pool our materials and when we start a new section we can first check the Thutong database for materials already developed by our colleagues. It will be our task to adapt and enhance them before we put them back for other to use.
Previously we were always restricted from sharing materials because of strict copyright rules. While most published materials are still subject to ‘Full Copyright – All Rights Reserved’ denoted by the ubiquitous © symbol there is now an alternative way to copyright our own materials. Now, however, Teachers can copyright their work using the more flexible Creative Commons Copyright system (CC). This system protects your work by reserving some rather than all rights. It’s worth having a look at their website at www.creativecommons.org to understand the various combinations. The Attribution-Share Alike copyright condition does allow others to change and adapt the work to suit their purposes. This is perfect for the OER school movement.
Feeling rebellious and want to champion improved teaching and learning in South Africa? Join the OER schools movement and share your lesson plans, worksheets, tests and exams. Upload your resources now and have a look to see what is already there!
Andrew Moore (andryn@iafrica.com)
An edited version of this blog article appeared in the
