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On the 22^nd and 23^rd February, the Siyavula team ran a workshop at the ATKV Buffelspoort for Mathematics and Languages Subject Advisors for the North West Province’s Department of Education. This workshop was a joint undertaking in partnership with the Department of Education. They are providing the venue and catering as well as coordinating attendance.

The workshop was well attended with 50 subject advisors (also often called curriculum advisors) participating. We were missing some of the Mathematics advisors, as there was a parallel mathematics workshop elsewhere, but are expecting them to attend our next workshop.

Technical / Content Training

From the team’s side the event was a resounding success. On the technical front the stand-alone server and wireless network worked extremely well and we were able to conduct our training with more fluidity and focus than in previous workshops where internet access challenges had proved a large distraction.

A particular highlight of the opening technical session, our hula-hoop activity in which we explain all the Connexions concepts with rope, books and hula-hoops, was when one of the advisors pointed out that this was the ideal technical approach for realising the objectives of the outcomes-based national curriculum.

Community Building

The community-related activities of this workshop were different from our previous Siyavula workshops in that we focused our discussion more on what it takes to support a community as well as giving the participants an opportunity to discuss and present their own strategies for taking things forward. Subject advisors support many teachers in a learning area so they are in a superb position to create an enabling environment for communities to form.

The formation of communities, and ultimately communities of practice, amongst the teachers they support will have many benefits beyond improved sharing of content, classroom-practice, and ideas. Communities of practice provide a powerful support structure for participants as well as being a powerful vehicle for professional development. Subject advisors that are able to support the formation of communities of practice will automatically be working towards their mandate for curriculum delivery in the classroom.

Many of the advisors asked for more information, material and training sessions on how communities work and how best to support them, another highlight of the workshop.

The Way Forward

The participant had many group discussions on various topics. In the final session where they were discussing the way forward the groups unanimously identified the following needs:

• department support,
• recognition for participants,
• resources, and
• senior managment team (SMT) support.

The particularly exciting part was that all groups committed to:

• distributing the workbooks using the provided DVDs,
• introducing their teachers to Connexions, and
• supporting their teachers to form communities.

The participants remained engaged and enthusiastic right up until the end and my favourite piece of feedback during the closing session was when one subject advisor said it was the first workshop he’d been to where everyone had stayed until the very end.

Special thanks to Quinton Davis for all the photographs, click on any of them to browse the full set on flickr

I have made a quick slideshow tour of some of the functionality of the alpha version of the FullMarks site. The site is extremely simple yet offers powerful reports to help support learners effectively, especially in the current environment in South Africa where classes are large and teachers don’t have enough time to consider individual needs.

I have finally upgraded the FHSST website to Drupal 6.15. This took me a lot longer than expected because the year got off to a completely rampant start and “spare” time just didn’t exist. I also had fallen very far behind on Drupal upgrades so I had to start with an upgrade to Drupal 5.

Now we can revisit the new functionality I mentioned in a previous blog. The idea was to make it much easier for people to submit errata and manage the corrections, submit contributions and capture testimonials. This will require significant theme changes which is why the site is currently using the default Drupal theme.

I’ve learnt not to even attempt to suggest deadlines for the new functionality to be rolled out and the new theme designed and implemented but it’ll be there as soon as I can get it up. The functionality was being looked into by Telementa and I hope to resurrect that as it seemed like the functionality would be quite quick and simple for them to implement. The bottleneck was myself upgrading the site to Drupal 6.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of work on the FullMarks front, much more than has been reported here. An alpha version of the site has been available for a while now and I’ve been using it to gather support for the FullMarks project launch. The official launch will take place after an uploading sprint.

The purpose of the sprint is to ensure that at the site isn’t empty at the launch event which would disappoint everyone and knock the project’s momentum. Participants in the sprint aren’t expecting a website full of content so there will be no disappointment there. They will know that they are leading the way in setting up a site that captures the attention of many other teachers, something they will benefit from as users of FullMarks, when it is launched.

Having an upload sprint means that the relatively mundane task of uploading thousands of questions into FullMarks becomes a shared burden in a very tangible way, it focuses the effort into a single day and makes the process a much more sociable exercise. In this way, not only are teachers sharing with each other in a structured, categorised and efficient way, and laying a platform to help many isolated and under-resourced teachers, they are also strengthening the teaching community.

I’ve approached a number of schools about an opportunity to present the project to a representative of the school and have so far visited (in order of first visit):

• Westerford High School
• Pinelands North Primary School
• Wynberg Boys’ High School
• Wynberg Girls’ High School
• Pinelands High School

The reason I am approaching schools first rather than subject focus groups is that I want the maximum breadth of questions entered into FullMarks so that it is of interest to the widest possible spectrum of teachers. Sufficient schools participating will give the bank the depth it needs. I will definitely still be approaching the subject focus groups that I know of once I have confirmed the participation of a number of schools.

I have had the opportunity to return to Wynberg Girls’ High School and Pinelands North Primary School to demonstrate the scope of functionality of the alpha version of the site to interested members of staff. At both schools the principals have sanctioned the participation of their teachers in the sprint. However, I still have to convince teachers to participate. Pinelands North Primary is the first school to go the next step and to confirm that they have a set of teachers who will participate which I am very excited about.

I will be approaching more schools in the coming weeks and contacting the mathematics and physical science swap and share groups that I became aware of through the Siyavula project. My ambitious goal is 150 participants in the upload sprint and hopefully 10 000 questions. That would get the project off to a flying start!

Upfront Systems, the team that is developing FullMarks, also confirmed today that they will provide the technical support at the sprint event which is great because they know the site better than anyone. It will also help future development of the site because it will give teachers the opportunity to talk directly to the developers making sure everyone is on the same page. It is crucial that FullMarks be aligned with teachers needs as well as being as easy to use as possible so that it gains real traction and has a positive impact in South Africa.

Things are really starting to fall into place for FullMarks and the next 6 weeks will be very exciting for this project.

If you are reading this and you or your school are interested in a demo just leave a comment or send me an email and I’d be more than happy to show you the site and give you more details about the project.

Over the last two weeks we’ve been working hard to plan the next large scale training exercise for Siyavula. We are going to be training the curriculum advisors of the North West Province in South Africa. This opportunity came after Mathusi Sebogwa and Jors de Ridder participated in the first Siyavula workshop held in September in Cape Town last year. We find that one of the most effective ways to convey the Siyavula message is to invite people to participate in one of our workshops.

The training will focus on:

• How to grow and facilitate groups of teachers working together as communities to support one another and share their material such as lessons plans, exercises and solutions.
• The free and openly licensed workbooks available to advisors and educators on-line and on CD.
• How to search, download, modify, print and share these resources for a specific grade, subject, language and learning outcome.

Originally we were going to run workshops in Mafikeng, Rustenburg, Vryburg and Potchefstroom, which would have been an interesting logistical exercise. Now we will be running all of our workshops in Rustenburg. There will be 4 workshops, 3 have final dates confirmed: 21^stand 22ⁿ February, 3^rd and 4^th March and one on the 17^th and 18^th.

The agenda for these workshops will be a little different and tailored to the audience we have. In our first Cape Town workshop we focused on the formation of new communities as we had a collection of teachers that hadn’t worked together before. In our Kwa-Zulu Natal workshop we focused on the managing a community and how to allow participants to get involved because the teachers were already part of a community. In this workshop we’ll be focusing on how communities can be supported and an enabling environment for their formation can be created because we will be working with curriculum advisors that support a group of teachers.

We have also adopted a new strategy for providing technical training and internet access. In the past we’ve tried using the internet provided by the venue and renting computers, we’ve tried bringing our own 3G wireless routers to provide our own access with rented laptops. We’ve also tried asking participants to bring their own laptops.

None of the internet solutions have worked effectively and reliably for us so far. We also found that participants bringing their own laptops actually increased the need for technical support rather than reducing it. Personal laptops are often unknown quantities to the owners when used away from home. It also increased the number of laptop/operating system/hardware permutations we had to deal with which also slowed things down further.

In the upcoming workshops all the laptops will be rented. This means they’ll all be the same model (or at most 2-3 different models) of laptop, running the same operating system. This will reduce any technical support complications. In addition, we have put together a server with a complete copy of the Connexions site running on it and purchased a number of wireless access points and a switch so that the server has its own wireless network. This means we can plug the server in and turn it on and all the laptops can connect to our wireless network. Our wireless network is configured to ensure that all siyavula.cnx.org (our local proxy server for the Connexions site) requests go to our local server.

Now we know the site will definitely be responsive and we can get the laptops working quickly while still using the proper site URL. This is so that we train everyone to use the correct URL from the beginning. The more responsive the site we use during the training the easier it is to maintain momentum and reduce distractions.

We are really looking forward to the training in the North West province and trying out our new approach.

The development of the FullMarks open assessment bank is well underway. We’re on track for a launch early next year. Without a beta version of the site up it is hard to show you the progress at this time but we’re about 20 man-days away from the website being ready to show you.

We have got the look of the front-page tied down though and here is a screenshot of what www.fullmarks.org.za will look like early in 2010:

Once the site is up we’ll be organising some content uploading sprints to make sure we get the breadth of subjects covered as quickly as possible.

We’ve chosen the covers for the science textbooks as part of our experiment of using crowdsourcing versus traditional design. We’re still waiting for the traditional design covers to come in for the maths books but I thought I’d share the science ones so long.

We had many submissions and there were some great ones but these were the most popular amongst members of the FHSST and OpenPress teams. I’ll write up a more detailed follow-up post when we’ve got the maths ones in.

At the risk of adding to the world of “list-of” blog posts, I wanted to share some of the things that have come up in conversations with many people lately around choosing an OER platform. More important than things like allegiance to a programming languages, wikis, content management systems, or some particular software framework, a platform choice has to be sensitive to the context in which you wish achieve the OER-related impact.

Just for interest, my off-the-cuff list of the big OER platforms is (apologies to those not mentioned):

• Connexions
• Curriki
• CK12
• WikiEducator

I’m the first to admit that it would be an incredible amount of fun and possibly extremely satisfying (assuming success) to try to build a new, better, slicker, faster solution from scratch but the OER world has some pretty significant players now and there is little to be gained from additional fragmentation. In fact, consolidation may be one of the best things we could see in the OER space now that governments are starting to take OERs seriously.

Context: Education in South Africa

A quick context description is the best place to start and I’ve put some of the context information down in an earlier post about the Siyavula strategy.

The four key features that the Siyavula software framework needs to provide are:
Importing – the ability to import already existing material so that teachers and organisations can share easily
Editing – the ability to edit, adapt, enhance and reorganise resources
Vetting – the ability to flag content as approved by either an individual or organisation
Typesetting – the ability to produce print-ready material because the vast majority of South African learners need hardcopy material, this is the primary accessibility requirement in South Africa

As part of our sustainability model Siyavula did not want to be responsible for building another web-portal from scratch and maintaining it. We sought a platform that we could use or partner with that embraced openness. We chose Connexions as our platform and have been working with the Connexions team for well over a year now.

Apart from ensuring that the platform had a strong team backing it, good governance and other due-process related things, we considered:

Open Licence

Connexions demonstrates an extreme commitment to openness in all aspects. The software that is used on www.cnx.org is an extension of Plone and is available as a separate open-source project called Rhaptos.

The content on Connexions is licenced under Creative Commons By-Attributions licence. This licence ensures that the content is compatible with all other projects using Creative Commons licences, even those that have chosen more restrictive ones and also enables the possibility for the exploration of commercial enterprises based on the open content items. Many other projects use more restrictive licensing constraining use and innovation.

Homogeneous vs. Heterogeneous Repositories

For communities with real diversity to form rapidly within the body of content it should be rapidly re-usable and re-mixable. For this to be possible the content needs to be edited and mixed easily and rapidly online, imposing the requirement that the content be homogeneous in a number of respects.

Format

Repositories that allow users to upload files in a random selection of formats do not promote rapid re-use and re-mixing as users are required to have all the relevant software packages (many proprietary) to make adaptations. This places an unnecessary burden on the users and hampers content adaptation and enhancement.

Connexions imports all text-based content and homogenises it, storing it in XML. This ensures that all content in the repository can be re-mixed without users requiring any special transformations or software packages. XML also allows proper semantic mark-up which has many additional benefits, for example equations stored in MathML can be imported into the vast majority of maths packages allowing users to interact with the content.

Licence

Repositories that contain content of mixed licensing can be frustrating for users as they are often not clear what content can be re-mixed, even if the format is compatible.
All Connexions content is licensed under the same copyright licence ensuring maximal mixing.

Structured Content

The vast majority of K-12 (known as R-12 in South Africa) content requires structure. Wiki-based platforms, based on a model involving a flat structure of individual pages are not well suited to the collaborative development of cohesive, coherent structured texts (see FHSST How-To for detailed anecdotes of WikiBooks usage). It is possible to restructure wiki software to behave more like a content management system with structured content but the simpler solution IMHO is to begin with a content management system.

Connexions provides the ability to develop structured content in the form of collections, ensuring that small units can be developed, modules, as well as books or entire courses.

The full revision history of any published resource is also permanently available on Connexions allowing courses, books or sites to reference specific versions of resources even though new editions may exist.

Editing

To simplify the content creation process and ensure that once a user had access to the content repository they were able to adopt an authoring the platform had to provide both authoring as well as a solid repository.

Connexions is such a solution, allowing users to edit content that has been imported or create content from scratch online.

Permissions

Although all content can be re-mixed by all users on Connexions, users still have control over their own versions of a module. This in fact increases freedom as users produce their own versions of content rather than entering into flame-wars around controversial resources, particularly prevalent in wikis where a single page exists on a topic.

A solution was required that would allow different versions of resources to exist in parallel. This is particularly important in a context like the South African context where we expect many parallel versions of a resource to exist to cater for the vast number of cultural and social contexts that need to be catered for.

Workgroups

The sustainability of content in the Siyavula project will be ensured through communities of practice. All candidate platforms needed to provide organic communities with a space in which to exchange content, ideas and collaboratively develop new resources.
Connexions provides this through workgroup functionality.

Vetting

To ensure credibility with the vast majority of the teaching corps, content vetting is required. Connexions provides light-weight lens functionality which easily allows for multiple vetting agencies to approve the same content items.

Typesetting

The primary accessibility requirement in South Africa is still hard-copy. A solution that allows for the typesetting of content is needed to gain real traction.
Connexions provides a typesetting solution which handles mathematics well, something most solutions aren’t capable of handling.

Decision

The primary platform discriminators for the Siyavula project were:

• homogeneity of format and licence,
• structured content, and
• typesetting.

Serious consideration was also given to choosing a platform and deploying it ourselves but this was shelved for sustainability reasons. For reference, some platforms considered were:

• Plone / EduCommons
• Drupal (extension of www.fhsst.org)
• MediaWiki

Topics like homogeneity of repository and requiring structured content (to wiki or not to wiki) eliminate many of the candidate platforms. Coupling the need for proper typesetting ensures that Connexions is the only sustainable solution that simultaneously:

• allows external development on the underlying platform,
• imports content into a homogised format,
• provides an authoring platfrom with the relevant permissions and structure,
• supports the organic growth of virtual communities with their own space,
• enables effective solutions for vetting, and
• is coupled to an effective typesetting engine.

The goal of Siyavula is to ensure that teachers in South Africa have access to a comprehensive set of free and open educational resources that are curriculum-aligned and sustainable. Key to the effective roll-out of such a project is ensuring that the project aligns with the needs and realities on the ground.

How is Siyavula going to achieve its goal?

The short answer is we will enable the appropriate use of technology to support the formation of new and enhance the process of existing communities of practice of teachers that share, adapt, develop, enhance and redistribute resources.

A simple schematic of the education system shows how the curriculum is determined by the Department of Education (DoE) and then propagates through the provinces, districts and ultimately to the Curriculum Advisors who are charged with ensuring and supporting its delivery in the classroom. When we look at the landscape of teachers we find that the majority of teachers feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of them. Issues like insufficient support, resources or training contribute to this and makes them feel isolated.

We do find groups of teachers (communities of practice) that come together to share resources, discuss curriculum and content and support each other. These groups swap and share information, resources and support. One notable feature of these groups is that they often seem to be formed by reasonably well-resourced teachers, so the access to resources is not the sole driver for their existence, and the sharing of information and support is important too. Sharing is fundamental to teaching and a core part of teachers’ values.
To enhance the effectiveness of groups and support the isolated teachers, given the the ideas Siyavula is building on, we need to provide:

This will allow Siyavula 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.

One of the beautiful features of using a web-based platform to support the sharing is that the teachers who are creating material aren’t impacted by others downloading it whereas, with paper resources, they’d need to produce extra copies, transport them and actually push their content out. Now the resources can be accessed when and as needed with no extra work required by the original author.

To support as many teachers as possible from the launch of the project, Siyavula has acquired a set of curriculum resources which teachers can use, adapt, print and enhance in addition to adding their own resources to the project. The material that Siyavula has acquired so far covers:

• Foundation phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• Intermediate phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• Senior phase – workbooks for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans
• FET phase – textbooks for Physical Science and Mathematics

The acquisition and sharing of this content allows Siyavula to engage with teachers as a sharing partner, in contrast to seeking donations of content in good faith or adopting a pure advocacy role.

Over time isolated teachers will also begin to share resources back, ensuring that their latent knowledge, especially around context challenges, starts to be shared, and then either form their own communities or join existing ones so that we eventually have communities of practice that are adapting and enhancing resources for all the imaginable contexts that exist within the South African education system. The wide variety of contexts is something that the traditional publishing model is unlikely to address and requires very localised and specific knowledge. This enabling feature of OERs is likely to have even more of an impact than the cost savings that are possible.