Invitation to the FullMarks upload sprint.

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.

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.

FullMarks is rapidly gaining momentum with two schools so far giving permission for their teachers to participate in an uploading sprint, one of them even told me that they have a list of teachers who are willing to participate.

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.

Turns out Mbilwi Secondary School has been doing a great job for many years.

I’m charging on ahead with development of the open assessment bank. We will be calling it FullMarks and the most important feature will be that teachers can actively participate.

Quite frankly, my sympathy goes to the learners who have to share one book between four and cannot do their homework properly, while publishing house executives sit in plush offices dreaming up misleading copyright messages to intimidate teachers and learners.