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OER stories/Free Courseware Project, UWC

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1 What is most important in your story?
2 The challenge or problem
- 2.1 Objectives of the project
3 Context
4 Action
- 4.1 Key activities during Year 1
- 4.2 Working with partners
5 What did and didn't work
6 Next steps
7 Reference
8 Website and contact information
9 Other OER stories

[edit] What is most important in your story?

The Free Courseware Project promotes the publication and use of free and open educational resources at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), a previously disadvantaged South African university.

We believe that there can be a universal knowledge commons, in which local and global perspectives enrich each other, but that local people are best able to find solutions to their local problems. We study and support "rip-mix-learn" practices and a higher education environment in which barriers between institutions and disciplines shrink, and learners become the creators of content and learning.

To accomplish (at least part of) all this, we use a small budget effectively, rely on collaboration with many partners within the university and beyond, and engage with the international OER community to benefit from other projects' experience and share the lessons that we have learned.

[edit] The challenge or problem

The project aims to help students and staff use existing free and open resources effectively in teaching and learning, and share the wealth of the University of the Western Cape's knowledge with our local and regional community.

[edit] Objectives of the project

Enable UWC students and staff to benefit from existing free and open educational content and courseware
Create local repositories of high quality open courseware materials to reduce bandwidth cost
Encourage and support the use of these materials by lecturers and students
Share with a wider commmunity the educational resources that have been developed at UWC and that are particularly relevant for socio-economic development in the region
Work with individual lecturers and departments to identify and publish the most appropriate courses
Create the infrastructure required to start publishing UWC courses under free and open licenses (as open courseware)
Raise awareness of the ideas and relevance of free and open access to knowledge in the higher education environment in Africa
Establish research capacity in the field of teaching and learning in a free and open education environment

[edit] Context

Tertiary institutions the world over are recognizing the value of sharing educational curricula and content, collaborating in their further development and extension, and doing so under the umbrella of free and open access to knowledge. Unfortunately, so far very few developing country institutions have been active contributors. There has been an implicit assumption that knowledge flows from developed to developing countries, and little attention has been paid to the special needs and requirements of institutions in the South, as well as the contributions they can make to a universal knowledge commons.

The Free Courseware Project is a continuation of UWC's historical role in support of the South African struggle for political freedom. It revisits the political ideals of the past in the context of the knowledge economy, in which access to knowledge and its effective use determine the socio-economic development of people and countries.

Within the institution we are lucky to have the strong support of senior management, and a progressive policy environment that provides a basis for our activities. UWC official policy recommends the publication of all university outputs under free and open licenses.

Financially, the project has been incubated by the Information and Communication Services group within UWC. We are hosted outside of an academic department, which makes working across all of them far easier. We have also had some generous support from the German Government's Center for International Migration and Development, who co-fund the project manager's position. From this foundation we have started moving towards project funding for research projects (more on this below) which allow us to explore new and exciting ideas.

[edit] Action

The project was started in August 2006. Its initial phase is intended to run for two years. The focus in Year 1 was on laying the groundwork, establishing the technical infrastructure, raising awareness, identifying suitable courses and lecturers to work with, and building a project team that could start publishing courses.

The core project consists of only two staff members, a Project Manager and a Junior Software Developer (who was initially hired as an intern), but we collaborate extensively with other groups at the university. We work across all faculties and departments and engage in one-on-one meetings with faculty members. Given our limited resources, we focus on people who are already actively using e-learning, or who are working in the open access field.

[edit] Key activities during Year 1

In April 2006 we launched the websites for the project: a blog and information portal; a local mirror of all open courseware from MIT was set up to overcome bandwidth constraints; a free courseware repository for publishing UWC courses was installed.
We identified three areas in which UWC has unique expertise and that is relevant to the local context (public health, constitutional law, and bioinformatics) and met with representatives to make the case for opening up access to their materials.
We built expertise on copyright law, and created background materials to support the production of free and open content at UWC. We ran a workshop with the e-learning team and prepared a "cheat sheet" that contains the core detail they need when discussing free and open content licensing.
We focused on outreach and dissemination by posting on the project blog and other blogs, set up a mailing list, and published an article in First Monday, an open access journal.^[1]
We created the first set of courses, which will be published in the repository shortly.
In addition, we have been spending a lot of energy on establishing strong links within the institution and with the international open courseware community. We represented the perspective of African universities at the 2007 Open Courseware Consortium meeting and prepared a draft governance model for the Consortium. We are currently preparing a report for iCommons on a potential role the organisation could play in the open education space.
We developed proposals and received research grants and consulting contracts for the coming year from IDRC, UNESCO and The Shuttleworth Foundation.

[edit] Working with partners

Since the project is very small it relies on good collaboration with other initiatives within (and outside) the institution. For training and awareness raising, we partner with the e-learning team, which holds ongoing training workshops, one-on-one consultations, and a monthly seminar series. In addition, we work closely with the Free Software Innovation Unit, a software development group housed at UWC, to shape the development of our e-learning platform to make possible publishing of internal content to external audiences.

Internationally, we are the only African university that has joined the Open Courseware Consortium (OCWC), and participate actively in online discussion with other consortium members. An important role of UWC in the OCWC has been to ensure representation of the developing country perspective, and we have been directly involved in drafting one of the governance models that the Consortium is currently discussing. Other Consortium members have been of great help and assistance, especially with regard to setting up our technical infrastructure. We also partner with UNESCO to produce manuals for other universities in Africa that are interested in embarking on a similar project. In addition, the project is starting to link to 14 other African universities through the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project, which is also supported by UWC.

[edit] What did and didn't work

We have put together some notes on what we have learned over the past year. These lessons are based on learning from the things that did not work, and making sure that we noticed the things that did work - and why.

Identify and work with existing initiatives within your institution. Most especially, if an e-learning group exists, a lot of their activities can be leveraged (for example, by asking lecturers who are actively using e-learning to open up access to their materials). The e-learning team can spread awareness of licensing choices, and can identify "champions" on whom to focus efforts. If there is a legal department that has expertise in copyright law, try to get them on board for advice. There are a number of complex legal issues related to the use and publishing of free and open content in universities - for which legal input is crucial.
Tap into the existing international communities of practice, mainly the Open Courseware Consortium and the UNESCO/IIEP Community on OER, for advice and support.
Get institutional buy-in at senior management level. At UWC, we have an official free content, free and open courseware policy, which provides the political backing for the project. In addition, the Rector is strongly in support of increasing UWC's role in developing the knowledge society. Spend time speaking to the senior-level administration to make sure that they understand the aims of the project, and can provide support when the project needs it.
Be well prepared when you make the case for publishing course materials under free and open licenses. Lecturers have a great deal of scepticisim and are concerned about giving up control - make sure you understand their concens and address them, and hand out a "cheat sheet" with the main points after your conversation.
Make it easy for lecturers to get involved. Provide support services for moving their content online, and implement workflows that include a quality control step for the lecturer.
Get competent help with the technology and look around at what others are using in terms of software platforms and content standards. We use the eduCommons repository, and are focusing on IEEE LOM as the package exchange standard.

[edit] Next steps

We are now at the beginning of Year 2, during which we want to focus on implementation and laying the groundwork for sustainability. We have started to write about our experiences and sharing what we have learned (for example, in this story, on iCommons, and through the Global University Network for Innovation) and want to continue doing that. We are also looking beyond publishing resources, to focus more on the use of educational resources within teaching and learning, and the central role that students can take in the development of the resources. We are doing this mainly through increasing our research capacity; we recently hired two research assistants who will work with a group of lecturers to investigate "educational experience" and "assessment practices" in rip-mix-learn courses. Finally, we are planning to promote OER to other African universities, starting with UWC's network of free and open source developers that currently spans 14 institutions.

During the first year we were lucky to be more or less financially independent, but as we try to expand our activities, fundraising will become an increasingly important aspect of our work.

[edit] Reference

↑ Keats, D.W; Schmidt, J.P. 2007. "The genesis and emergence of Education 3.0 in higher education and its potential for Africa." In: First Monday, 12(3). Retrieved from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3/keats/index.html.