We recently did a little travelling around South Africa (Durban/Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg) running events where we raise awareness of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, the shared resources that are available, the tools that can be used and the communities that develop and support them. We are often asked why people should share. My intention was to spend a lot of time composing the perfect blog post about why sharing is a brilliant idea for everyone and why everyone benefits.

Circumstances haven’t played along so I’m putting some thoughts down and, in the spirit of openness, I hope there will be some discussion and even better arguments forthcoming from the broader community.

In this blog I would like to answer the question: why should the very best schools share their resources?

First, My Conclusion

For a school to continue to compete to be the best it is essential that they participate openly in the global education movement. In fact, the top private/public schools can benefit more from the open educational resources movement than the under-resourced schools because they have strong educators with excellent content and pedagogical knowledge who have the resources and technology around which to innovate.

How do I get to this conclusion?

A Little Context

I happen to have a background in science so I’m going to have a significant bias towards mathematics and science examples. I promise to spend some time looking for the Arts equivalents but they’re out there I just haven’t filtered them effectively yet.

Now to the schools, normally, in South Africa, our team is faced with schools struggling for resources. For them the benefits of the OER movement, primarily openly shared resources, are quite straightforward:

• increased content availability (Connexions,Mindset, CK12, Curriki etc.);
• a multitude of formats print, online, PDF, ePub, and mobile are all available for the same book;
• content can be adapted, contextualised and enhanced (yes because these aren’t the typical audience for which resources are created);
• massive cost savings (~ 1/5 price of publisher’s alternatives) ; and
• a massive reduction in workload for educators.

In our recent travels we’ve also encountered some schools that are the best resourced in South Africa (probably Africa) and would do pretty well by any global metric. Hence, the need to answer the question addressed in this blog. These schools aren’t particularly swayed by:

• the fact that they’ll have a textbook as they already have many;
• the increased content as they can buy rich-media supplements, assessment banks etc.;
• the variety of formats as they can deliver whichever format suits them without accessibility concerns;
• the adaptability of someone else’s content as they typically use their own notes anyway as their departments are strong in content knowledge and pedagogy;
• the cost saving as, let’s face it, they can afford the most expensive premium content; and
• the massive reduction in workload as they are well managed and their departments already collaborate quite well.

So why should these perfectly functioning institutions participate in the OER movement (I’m being serious not sarcastic). Let me be very clear that this isn’t about one school we encountered, there are a few and they’re in very much the same boat.

Consider the School’s Mission

Firstly, any reason I give should be aligned with the schools’ mission statement. For reference here are a number of schools linked to their mission statement. There are two sets of schools listed: those government schools chosen by the Sunday Times in a recent study to be the best in the country and those ranked in a Serve Africa 2011 ranking. I don’t give any particular weight to these metrics, I just needed some way of showing a list of schools where I could blame the bias on someone else!

I won’t analyse these in detail but I challenge you to randomly pick a few and read them. None of these mission statements states a primary objective of getting their learners to pass a matric exam with 50% (or even the minimum which is, sadly, lower). These mission statements talk about providing the best education, supporting the development of responsible, well-rounded, individuals who can participate meaningfully and effectively in society and striving to ensure they fulfil their potential.

The World is Changing (Fast!)

The world is a rapidly changing place, for any school to be providing the best possible education the educators must be up to date. The rate of change has been accelerating because of the internet and rapid advances in technology. This is the world for which learners need to be prepared.

There are some concrete examples that show that society will be different in future just look at the recent events(1, 2) in the Arab world, look at how transparency and open governance are taking hold, how the movement for open data is getting stronger, how governments aren’t able to keep secrets in the same way, how municipalities are being more effective by opening up their data (1, 2) and allowing the public to provide innovative solutions and uses of the data.

My only point here is that the world that educators need to be preparing learners for is changing so rapidly that it absolutely dictates education evolve so you can’t possibly rely on what you did 5 years ago, the world has changed too much.

Openness in Science

Thanks to Francois Grey for a nice sketch of this content.
The increase in connections amongst people provided by the internet has led to many opportunities, most importantly an increase in participatory culture and openness with incredible results.

Grid computing, as it is now called, can best be explained by a famous project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home). Volunteers download a simple computer program which analyses bits of radio data collected by a giant radio-telescope and sends back a short summary of the result to a central server in California. The biggest surprise of this project was not that they discovered a message from outer space. In fact, after over a decade of searching, no sign of extraterrestrial life has been found, although there are still vast regions of space that have not been looked at. The biggest surprise was the number of people willing to help such an endeavour. Over a million people have downloaded the software, making the total computing power of SETI@home rival that of even the biggest supercomputers in the world.

A software platform was built so that this model could be used to solve many other problems. You can read more about this platform, called BOINC, and the many different kinds of volunteer computing projects it supports today, at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ . There’s something for everyone, from searching for new prime numbers (PrimeGrid) to simulating the future of the Earth’s climate (ClimatePrediction.net). One of the projects, MalariaControl.net, involved researchers from University of Cape Town as well as from universities in Mali and Senegal.

But in recent years, a new trend has emerged in citizen cyberscience that is best described as volunteer thinking. Here the computers are replaced by brains, connected via the Web through an interface called eyes. Because for some complex problems – especially those that involve recognizing complex patterns or three-dimensional objects – the human brain is still a lot quicker and more accurate than a computer.
Volunteer thinking projects come in many shapes and sizes. For example, you can help to classify millions of images of distant galaxies (GalaxyZoo), or digitize hand-written information associated with museum archive data of various plant species (Herbaria@home). This is laborious work, which if left to experts would take years or decades to complete. But thanks to the Web, it’s possible to distribute images so that hundreds of thousands of people can contribute to the search.

Not only is there strength in numbers, there is accuracy, too. Because by using a technique called validation it is possible to practically eliminate the effects of human error. This is true even though each volunteer may make quite a few mistakes. So projects like Planet Hunters have already helped astronomers pinpoint new planets circling distant stars. The game FoldIt invites people to compete in folding protein molecules via a simple mouse-driven interface. By finding the most likely way a protein will fold, volunteers can help understand illnesses like Alzheimer’s disease that depend on how proteins fold.

Volunteer thinking is exciting. But perhaps even more ambitious is the emerging idea of volunteer sensing: using your laptop or even your mobile phone to collect data – sounds, images, text you type in – from any point on the planet, helping scientists to create global networks of sensors that can pick up the first signs of an outbreak of a new disease (EpiCollect), or the initial tremors associated with an earthquake (QuakeCatcher.net), or the noise levels around a new airport (NoiseTube).

Open science is really taking off, just watch the video in this article to really open your eyes.

My point here is that if you happen to be a science educator and you don’t know about these opportunities then are you not only not up to date but you are missing incredible opportunities to expose your learners to real science and you are missing the opportunity to let them actually PARTICIPATE in real science – I can’t stress this enough, as an educator you must be using these tools to give your learners a real world perspective of how science is changing if your goal is the best possible education.

Open Educational Resources

There is an ever increasing community of educators sharing content openly, not just freely, but under copyright licences (written by Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation etc.) that let you use it, change it, distribute it and remix it.

In South Africa, Mindset has created a lot of content and I don’t think most people appreciate that it is under an open copyright licence. Add to all their content the fact that our little team at Siyavula has managed to write and edit 6 textbooks (9-12 Mathematics and Physical Science), rally volunteers around translating them plus we’ve made workbooks for all learning areas in R-9 (K-9) available in English and Afrikaans. I think there may be a greater percentage of the curriculum covered by open content in South Africa than anywhere else in the world.

Globally we’re seeing huge repositories of content become available like Wikipedia, YouTube and Slideshare which are more general tools but also more school specific ones like the Khan Academy videos, TeacherTube, Veritasium Science Videos, the PhET Simulations, CK12 Flexbooks, Curriki and of course Connexions.

So far all I’ve done is make a case for getting connected to the internet and consuming what is available!

Finally, Benefits of Sharing

The quality of this content is increasing all the time as well, especially in the cases where communities are forming. Consider the huge amount of content for Mathematics teaching Dan Meyer (algebra and geometry) has made available. The best part is that Dan releases many of his lessons on his blog where people discuss, debate and even improve them. I find the comments on Dan’s blog one of the most interesting mathematics teaching resources around (for educators at least). Consider this lesson idea posted by Dan and look at comments like this, this or even this. Thats just a random sampling. No, I’m not on a retainer from Dan, the reason I like to point at his stuff is because he made a nice 88s video explaining what it is all about for him – take a look here.

Is there only one Dan? Well yes, but there is more than one educator participating in a vibrant virtual community, sharing their content and benefiting from peer-review and an ever expanding community of practice. Not convinced, try following the any of the Blogroll links on Dan’s blog, if you’re a science educator start with Rhett Allain for some physics ideas and discussion. Each of those blogs will link to more blogs, browse around till you find the people you think are worth following.

Why is this happening? The answer is simple, peer-review in a real community works incredibly well!

But, to really benefit from a community of practice, to really harness that community to innovate around the challenges and context in which you work, you have to put your best material out there for them to see, to review and to improve and innovate around. You can’t passively watch their discussions and benefit from the full power of a community of practice. The best thing to do is to play a leading role in the community by participating and sharing on a large scale. Then the content you’re producing and the challenges you’re facing will benefit from the innovative power of the community.

You really need to be participating in a community of practice that is large and diverse enough to keep up with the rapid developments in all spheres of life so that you can provide the relevant education to your learners.

Keeping Ahead – Teaching vs. Content

Will you lose your edge? Absolutely not! In fact, this is the only way to keep your edge. Schools not participating in this process will be overtaken, firstly by the quality content that is becoming available and secondly by the rapidly changing environment for which they need to prepare learners.

The strong communities of educators have a much better chance of making sense of all the opportunities and changing technology and are too effective, too open and too innovative for the isolated schools to keep pace. Even if the schools buy the latest products from commercial publishers they’ll fall behind because of the slower pace at which publishers develop resources and the length of time they have to spend selling the content to cover their costs. Large, effective, open communities will beat them hands down.

Furthermore, I think the education you receive at one of those top schools is not defined by the content on the desk and neither is the teacher who puts it there. Those teachers identify and empathize with their students, guide them to make sense of the vast world of content, not just by acting as filters but by harnessing critical thinking and discourse. Those teachers need to fine tune, adapt and contextualise the learning experience for the needs of their specific learners. That is what will make them great educators and no matter how much content and how many ideas their community comes up with, the person who needs to take it the “last mile” is still the in-classroom educator.

A Couple of Additional Benefits

Firstly, there are, in our context, many schools where better content would still make a remarkable difference. By sharing quality resources openly, learners at those schools have opportunities to access better resources. They will never have the experience of going to a top school but everyone in the world benefits when more people have a better schooling. Doing anything to raise the bar for everyone is a worthwhile exercise.

Secondly, sharing quality resources actually increases the profile of a school. It certainly didn’t undermine MIT‘s reputation when they put up hundreds of their lectures for free online in their OpenCourseWare project.

Conclusion (Again!)

If you want to be the best you need to be up to date on all fronts and I believe that it is impossible to remain at the forefront of education if you remain in a silo, you just won’t be able to keep up.

Maybe we should be doing things radically differently anyway, if you’re bored or not at all convinced then try watching Sir Ken Robinson’s two TED talks, Do Schools Kill Creativity and Bring on the Learning Revolution.

My blog has been very quiet for the last couple of months. It is not that I’ve not had anything to blog about but rather the contrary, I’ve just been too busy. I have spent some time creating two summaries of what I’ve been up to in 2010 so you can get a sense of the bigger picture. It also shows you what has happened in the last 2 months that I just haven’t had time to blog about.

The first resource is a video where I work through my various projects and present the highlights of the year.

MarkHorner, Fellow: Open and Collaborative Resources, 2010 Summary from Shuttleworth Foundation on Vimeo.

I’ve also created a Dipity timeline that shows the activities in chronological order.

I intend to catch up on blogging about some of the activities from the last few months in more detail but the year is coming to an end and it is appropriate to present a picture of everything that has happened this year.

For the Siyavula project we partnered with Connexions as our online content platform (some of the reasons can be found here). As part of this partnership we try to do more than use Connexions as a repository but also support the continuous development of the repository through sourcing more content and helping enhance technical offering as much as possible. There are always many potential avenues for development in any software project and we’ve been trying to help on those that make life easier for teachers in South Africa to be more effective and efficient when using the site.

One area that has been flagged by a number of people, not just our teachers at workshops, is that the authoring side of the site can be very slow at times. Some people just say that it is because the site is built on Plone but that isn’t fair so, to support our teachers, the broader Connexions community and the Connexions Consortium, I commissioned Upfront Systems to do a performance analysis of the authoring side of the site.

Before we get into details, the bottom-line is that Upfront Systems have shown that there are massive potential performance improvements (in some cases 5 times faster) for Connexions on the authoring side and analysed what it will take to implement them. I estimate that the total cost of implementing the specification is $7500.

This should make it a lot easier to raise the money needed to implement the fixes as we know where the problem lies, we have a detailed specification on how to fix it and have a proper analysis of the expected improvements so funders know what their return on investment will be.

The Gory Details As Reported on the Rhaptos Mailing List

The posts about the last 3 workshops (first post here) in the North West Province are long overdue and so I’ve decided to consolidate them into a single post.

For those only interested in the big picture it’s fair to say that all the workshops were very successful! All the workshops were intended to be two days long and were held at ATKV Buffelspoort which turned out to be a great venue for us.

All participants (approximately 60 per workshop) were engaged, enthusiastic and lively right until the end. The feedback we received was excellent with participants really enjoying both the community/group psychology side as well as the technical training. The level of engagement was so high that in all sessions participants were left asking for more but we had to cut things off as we just ran out of time or would have had to sacrifice our program which covered:

• challenges and needs in the North West province,
• workbook review,
• Siyavula and OERs introduction,
• Connexions introduction,
• communities of practice,
• group dynamics with introductions to edge, rank and containment,
• using Connexions to create accounts, workgroups and upload content from Word correctly, and
• brainstorming around needs, issues and ideas for taking things forward.

This left all advisors with a clear idea of how, in our work to support teachers and curriculum/subject advisors to be more effective, we adopt an approach that focuses on the use of Open Educational Resources, which immediately allows for the re-packaging, contextualisation and improvement of educational resources, by communities of practice, which supports load-sharing, professional development, empowerment and the development of a sense of belonging for the participants.

The advisors also identified practical ways that they could use the resources, tools and concepts in their work, identified potential challenges they could face, shared ideas about how to overcome those challenges and gave us great feedback on what challenges stand in the way of complete, province-wide adoption of the ideas.

We’ve had an opportunity to establish a superb relationship with the curriculum/subject advisors and give them enough information to get started as well as lay a solid foundation for any future work in the province.

Although each workshop began with the same plan they didn’t all turn out to be identical and so each one deserves some discussion.

Workshop 2 – 4 & 5^th March 2010

The Foundation Phase and Arts and Culture advisors were the primary attendees at the second workshop and made this our liveliest workshop with the most arts and culture in terms of singing and dancing at the workshop.

All the photos from the workshop, taken by Quinton Davis, are online – click here to see them.

Guests

• Dr. Johlene de Villiers, who is helping start a senior phase science club with teachers from the towns of Sutherland, Fraserburg, Williston and Carnarvon in the Northern Cape Province.
• Nico Sauer, Subject Advisor Senior Phase Physical Science Namakwa Region, Northern Cape Department of Education, who is working with Johlene in her efforts.
• Susie Crossman from the Royal Bafokeng Institute who is coordinating their efforts on the science education front.

We invite guests to attend and participate in our workshops because it allows them to experience the blend of communities of practice, technology and OERs we are providing and is much more effective than any explanation we can give them. The guests we invite are potential partners, practitioners or advisors. We didn’t have any guests at the first workshop as we were still finding our feet and the workshop details were finalised quite close to the actual workshop date.

Changes

In this workshop we were able to complete the Word uploading to our standalone server (this hadn’t been possible at the first workshop) and all participants went through the process of constructing a document, importing it into our stand-alone server, and publishing the content.

Some participants had the opportunity to import the content into workgroups that they had formed earlier in the day, demonstrating the technical solution for having a restricted, collaborative workspace online where discussions can happen and content can be imported/created before being released to the broader community.

Workshop 3 – 18 & 19^th March 2010

For this workshop the Life Orientation, Technology and Social Sciences advisor joined us at Buffelspoort. This workshop was the hardest one for our team as we were involved in a relatively serious car accident just outside OR Tambo late the night before on the way to Buffelspoort and so the team had very little sleep. Thankfully the participants provided the energy and the excitement for the team and the workshop went off well despite some very tired facilitators.

All the photos from the workshop, taken by Quinton Davis, are online – click here to see them.

Guests

• Patrick and Jo Dixon, Patrick is the founder of LearnAid Publishing in the United Kingdom.
• Elizabeth Meyer from the Centre for Education Development at the University of the Free State.
• Marlin van Heerden

The particularly exciting thing about having representatives of LearnAid at the event was the opportunity to allow the advisors to meet someone who really has leveraged the benefits of OERs that we preach to them. We were able to show professionally laid out derivatives works of the content we’ve made available. LearnAid publishing has used both Siyavula and FHSST content in their handbooks. This really drives home the power of open licensing.

Changes

For the third workshop we restructured the flow of sessions to better leverage the momentum from the community sessions, before we had inserted some technical training to ensure that people didn’t get too tired of working in one area, but the groups generated so much momentum and energy that we withheld the technical training till later in the day which worked really well. It is hard to know up front how engaged and focused a group will be after 2 hours focused on one topic and we try to go where the energy is in our workshops as much as possible because it is an indicator of the passion and needs of the participants.

We also modified the introductory process and swapped the speed dating for a individual introductions in the plenary session. We asked participants to tell us not only who they were and which district they were from but also what their expectation, if any, of the workshop was. This worked really well as everyone’s voice was heard and a wide range of issues were raised.

Workshop 4 – 25 & 26^th March 2010

Advisors for Natural Sciences and Economics and Management Studies were the participants at the final workshop as well as some Physical Science advisors wanting to learn more about the FHSST content.

All the photos from the workshop, taken by Quinton Davis, are online – click here to see them.

This workshop was the most intense group of participants and we spent a lot of time discussing very technical issues of both the site and group dynamics. Again participants requested more time for all aspects of the program.

I’ve included a complete list of the responses we received during the introductory exercise when we ask everyone to introduce themselves and tell us why they are here and what they expect to get out of the workshop. This exercise gives people a voluntary opportunity to put their cards on the table and we get some really honest responses. This is great because it means that our team really knows their expectations – you’ll see that there is a lot of honesty included in the responses and it is not just a case of everyone towing some party line. We get a chance to put some processes in place to address them where there are, for example, logistical concerns. This sets the tone for the workshop and gets us off to a great start.

“Sharpen my skills and bring better skills to other people.”
“Get some material to support our schools.”
“Be developed technologically.”
“Catch a mouse.”
“Learn a lot.”
“Access information easily from computer.”
“I’ve researched portfolio assessments, found a lot on the web and thought this was a good opportunity to go into “internet conferencing.”"
“What is the workshop all about?”
“99% don’t have internet. How to access those portal with a lot of information on science. Hope program can be extended into most syllabus areas.”
“Something’s going to be opened up – Siyavula.”
“I just wanted to get out of the office.”
“I’ve developed grade 4 material. I’m not going to type and distribute yet because I’ve heard of Siyavula and going to the workshop first.”
“Jors said I would meet Mark Shuttleworth. [Once this was found out not to be the case...] Perhaps Siyavula will open the door to Mark Shuttleworth.”
“Normally we have to work for a workshop. This time I want to take something away.”
“I never wanted to be a teacher, but my classmates told me to be a teacher. I didn’t want to come to this workshop, but my colleagues told me to be here. [When asked if the was a good teacher she said that she's been told that she is]”
“I’m here to visit the area. Be able to use information from the internet.”
“There are no physical science educators at some schools.”
“I heard about the workshop from someone else who attended the workshop – they said it was good”
“Given lack of support from the department, and lack of resources, I hope this can inspire educators to be creative.
“I’ve heard a lot of things about it [Siyavula] and am very interested.”
“A lot of good things were said about this workshop and I did some marketing for the workshop.”
“I’ve never heard of Siyavula in my life. [When all participants were asked this by Helene, a few others put up their hands to indicate that this was the case for them too].”
“I’m interested to see about the grass roots vs top down approach, and how Siyavula tackles this.”
“Reputation of Siyavula from colleagues.”
“Far, far behind technologically – I hope this is a catch up program, and hope to come out a better person.”
“Colleagues were here and I was told “This is one of the workshops you can’t miss!”"
“Here to meet Shuttleworth as well. Don’t know what the workshop is about. Hopefully sharpen skills, gain more.”
“Efficiently help the education system to be more.”
“Not very sure why I’m here. Was told they teach you how to open a document. I want to learn something that I don’t know – or something I know – waiting for that wow moment!”
“Some material seen from Jors – inspired.”
“Heard that facilitators are good. Like hardworking people – don’t like lazy people.”
“Explore new things I don’t know. Viva Siyavula!”
“Jors said if I don’t do it now, he will kill me.”
“Jors. Subject advisors must know more than teachers. Improve in a technological way.”
“Want to be more technologically advanced.”
“Inspired by Jors.”
“I was lost – that’s why I’m late. I hope the workshop can benefit me. Share info with educators”
“Here out of curiosity – develop.”
“Heard about Siyavula a lot – curious.

The final session is a discussion of how to take things forward, what people can commit to and what challenges there are. Some of the comments made were documented and here is a list:

Select educators that are computer literate and introduce Siyavula to them. Introduce a buddy system i.e. each of them will introduce one other person.

Cellphone, simulation. A lot of people are new to all this. Need to spend time playing with the website i.e. getting comfortable with the website ourselves [as curriculum advisors].

We need to set up meetings.

We feel empowered, excited and tired.

We need to get more comfortable with Siyavula.

Most educators are not computer literate.

Although one person may have access to a laptop, they don’t necessarily have exclusive use of it.

I see the potential, but there are big constraints.

We need to kept being reminded about Siyavula – we need to be prodded
[response: it is important to remember that this is a voluntary thing]

Most of felt we could use it ourselves.

We would show it to our children.
[A lot of people in the audience agreed]

Some websites are blocked [because of firewalls / proxy servers]. Can you please make sure that this is rectified for the Siyavula website?
[response: we'll sort that out]

We would feel more comfortable if the DoE gave us a mandate to be able to use Siyavula – and put time into it instead of other things.

Thanks to Mark, the Shuttleworth Foundation and Jors

Much has been spent on the psychological part – more time should be spent on the technical part.

I didn’t like the time spent on the technical part.

I really enjoyed the psychology part.

Different strokes for different folks – maybe you guys can find out the level of technical competence beforehand.
[response: it varies and we need to choose how to spread the time of the workshop]

Ultimately the participants always hung around until the end, were lively right up until the closing session and were all enthusiastic about the project and engaged in the process. I thought I’d close this post with a photo of, arguably, our most enthusiastic participant:

Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute introduced me to some representatives from UNESCO who wanted to discuss Open Educational Resources and specifically some the issues relating to the choice of platform. Previously I had met a number of UNESCO people working in the OER space – advocating OERs in teaching etc. at the e-Learning Africa conference in Accra, Ghana in 2008, but this was more to do with an internal UNESCO strategy.

Neels van der Westhuizen and I met with Abel Caine, Igor Nuk and Jaco du Toit on the 3^rd of March. The UNESCO initiative they described is different from Siyavula and school OER projects yet highlights some of the benefits of OERs so I thought I jot down some notes about it.

UNESCO often convenes panels of experts to write framework documents, documents intended to support member states in wide variety of activities. These documents are not prescriptions and are written with a large amount of flexibility embedded in them. One particular example that we were shown was a framework document for a university level journalism degree. The document included the possibility of running the course over 3 or 4 years, as well as being easy to restructure etc. The course could easily be implemented but also adapted to meet more specific needs.

What is important here is that member states have the freedom to use and adapt these courses without penalty (I actually don’t know what licence they are released under but it is the freedom to make adaptations that is important). These courses are essentially open with derivative works being allowed. In this sense they have the same freedoms as OERs, they be copied, adapted, enhanced and distributed.

It turns out that member states do take advantage of these freedoms because, as in education, one size doesn’t fit all. Many of the member states that have used framework documents have adapted them to meet their needs. These adaptations often relate to context but also to other unforeseen needs and challenges. This is similar to the issue in education where there is no way any single educational resource can be applicable or appropriate in every context.

UNESCO are seeing the real world application of one of the freedoms of open licensing. The freedom to adapt, enhance and contextualise is one of the primary benefits that we allude to when advocating the adoption of OERs. There is little question that the customisation of resources is essential in education.

The problem for UNESCO is that many of these adaptations are being lost to the broader member state community because they are not being fed back to UNESCO. So other member states aren’t able to feed off each others time and innovation. I would argue that if all of the work and innovation were showcased in one place it would lead to further improvements.

We have exactly this problem with the FHSST project, people are using, adapting and enhancing the resources but we’re not tracking it in any way and the enhancements aren’t being fed back to the core resources (we are in the process of trying to address this).

UNESCO are looking to roll-out an internal platform that allows member states to see the innovations of other states so that they will more freedom and diversity for their own implementations. It will also provide a place to showcase the uptake, diversity and innovation of framework documents and build a much stronger community around UNESCO’s work in this area.

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

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.

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.

To help teachers get the most out of the the full library of Siyavula, Connexions, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) and many other open textbooks, we want to see these resources printed as cost effectively as possible while still ensuring high print quality. We believe that by aggregating print orders we can do just that. We will facilitate this through an online print aggregation service that we are calling OpenPress.

Our vision for OpenPress is to provide a web-service for the aggregation of print orders, offering users the benefit of economies of scale achieved through collaborative purchasing. Our primary aim will be the dissemination of open educational resources (OERs). A cost-effective printing solution will add significant momentum to the adoption of OERs as well as incentivise the creation or release of further OERs and allow real classroom use which is a necessity for the iterative, collaborative development cycle of quality OERs.

OpenPress is beginning to take some real shape and we’ll start spreading the word about our first phase in the next 48 hours. Before we roll out the online service we will do a pilot run. This will be a full manual implementation of the process as a proof-of-concept. The second phase will be the development of the web-service that implements the process, informed by our learning from the manual process.

For the manual process we have selected the FHSST Grade 10 Mathematics book. The FHSST books and other open education resources have no authors’, editors’ or publishers’ royalties so we only need to worry about the cost of printing. Everybody knows the more of something you produce the cheaper it gets per unit and the same holds for printing. If we all put our individual orders together, everybody benefits from a better price. Our goal is to help everybody get the cheapest possible price by finding as many orders as possible and aggregating them together. To make it even more attractive we’ll place an order for the first 1000 books (R50,000) which we’ll donate to severely disadvantaged schools. This will guarantee a maximum price of R50 per book and every additional order will makes the price cheaper for everyone.

Details for the first pilot print run:

The process:

• We place the first order for 1000 Grade 10 FHSST Mathematics books with OpenPress
• All interested schools, organisations and individuals submit the number of books they are interested in to OpenPress at openpress@siyavula.org.za
• Submissions must reach us before the 15^th of November 2009 (Please note that this is merely an expression of interest and not binding. We will not hold you to it in any way)
• OpenPress finds the best possible price for the total order
• OpenPress contacts everyone who expressed an interest with an offer at their best price
• Parties wanting to commit to this print run completes a contract for the number of books they require
• OpenPress prints the books, followed by payment and collection.

Other titles:

We are accepting expressions of interest for any of the 6 FHSST Books, Mathematics Grade 10,11 and 12 as well as Physical Science Grade 10,11 and 12 as part of the manual process. However, we can only guarantee a maximum price of R50 on the Mathematics Grade 10 book to start.

As soon as the OpenPress site goes live we will make available the full list of open titles available for order. To date we have located literally 100s of titles that have been released under an OpenPress-friendly copyright license.

I think that it is fitting that I start my new site off with an update on the project responsible for the fork in my life-trajectory which leads me to be writing this blog. Since the release of version 0 nothing visible has happened on the FHSST website. It sounds like I might be leading up to an announcement of great behind-the-scenes work but I’m not (but one day I will!), at least not on the FHSST front. There has been much activity on the broader open-educational-material front and I’ll blog about that shortly.

There has been some FHSST activity behind the scenes though, we’ve received emails with a number of errata for which we are really grateful. One of the primary benefits of Open Educational Resources (OERs) is that they can be updated rapidly. The errata will be corrected in the next version of the books.

At Science Festival Africa 2009 we also learned of a number of people who had been using the books for tutoring and self-learning. It was always the intention of the project that a resource that could support other initiatives be created. We have always felt that if the redundancy of producing material could be overcome many outreach organisations could be more effective. One notable inclusion on this list are the education outreach activities of the Students’ Health and Welfare Centres Organisation (SHAWCO) at the University of Cape Town who have been using FHSST content.

This afternoon I had a very interesting conversation with Jacky Hood and Kathi Fletcher about the state of the FHSST books. Jacky, and the Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP), have been re-purposing FHSST content to support their work to provide openly licenced textbooks for community colleges. As part of the process they’ve reviewed the FHSST content and then, as a first step, reworked one of the Mathematics books to suit their needs. They are looking for funding to continue this work, covering the full set of FHSST books.

Jacky also told me about a Community College lecturer (I don’t have a name) in New York who has been using the Statistics chapters of the FHSST Mathematics books to support her lectures.

Again, we have provided a resource that the CCOTP can use and the best part, in my opinion, is that the work that they put in, over and above what FHSST did, will be released on the Connexions site so that we can build further on that for use in South African Further Education and Training (FET) Colleges (our equivalent of the community colleges). Derivative works are being fed back into the community, instead of being lost, which will really help accelerate OER development. It often (always) becomes a debate heated enough to rival your pick of the religious wars but I think that derivative works which are voluntarily made openly available make our sharing community (commons if you must) stronger than derivative works which are mandated to be shared by certain copyright licences.

We are also in the process of uploading all the FHSST books onto the Connexions site so that it will be much easier for other organisations to adapt them to their specific needs as well as manage derivative works. Rory Adams has uploaded all of the books but a second pass is still required to ensure that our environments have been converted properly. Getting this done is high on my priority list, unfortunately so are many other things right now, and I hope to get it done in a week or two.

So what’s next? We need to:

• be more efficient at getting feedback from users so we can improve the books,
• advertise and link organisations using the books so that learnings/ideas/strategies can be exchanged,
• improve general awareness of the books existence,
• correct the errata,
• update the FHSST website, when that big FHSST announcement arrives it will includes a system for submitting, tracking, managing and publishing errata so that the status of the individual books is clear and readily available,
• finish uploading the FHSST books to Connexions (they’ve got a better authoring platform than we do and they maintain it), and
• organise that printing happens (expect MANY more blog posts on this topic soon!).

The good news is that it turns out that the FHSST content has already proven quite useful to a number of people, now we just need to harness that to add even more momentum to the OER-movement. It is easier to find the time to work on the project knowing that we’ve already been successful in helping other organisations, projects and people.