On Wednesday and Thursday last week (9th and 10th June) we met with representatives of the North West Province to discuss what the next steps would be in our collaboration this year.

We have just finished helping the HOD Science at Bishops Diocesan College, Keith Warne, put all of his 200+ powerpoint presentations for the teaching of Grade 8-12 Science online. They are all freely available to view, use, download and modify!

I forecast a much more responsive authoring experience on Connexions in the near future, the results of a detailed performance analysis are in and some massive potential improvements have been identified. Now to turn my attention to getting them implemented!

We have just completed a series of workshops for subject advisors in the North West Province. We ran 4 two-day workshops. Read about workshops 2, 3 and 4 here.

Some feedback and news from our first workshop for North West Province Subject/Curriculum Advisors. The next workshop is scheduled for the 4th and 5th of March.

We are running a series of workshops in the North West province to train curriculum advisors. We’ve adapted our approach for these workshops and are really looking forward to putting it to the test.

One key part of the overall sustainability of Siyavula is the platform used for the project. Platform decisions are quite tricky to navigate. I’ve made some notes about the things that I think are important considerations when choosing an OER platform, although I’m sure I’ll get some pretty strong opinions from the rest of the community about the most important considerations.

Siyavula intends to create a framework that supports the education system. The framework needs to accept the curriculum, allow swap-and-share groups the ability to share resources and have the discussions they need, allow users like Curriculum Advisors to vet resources and ensure that the isolated teachers can get access to the resources.

The objective of the Siyavula project is to ensure that educators have access to educational resources that comprehensively cover the South African curriculum which they can use, adapt, contextualise, print, and distribute as needed. Furthermore, the resources must form a sustainable, living body of material that continues to grow as technology, curriculum and contexts change. [...]