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.
On the 24th of March we held the first FullMarks event at the University of Cape Town. You can read more about our first uploading sprint in this post.
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.
I was invited to participate on a panel at the AMESA Congress this year on a panel on professional development. Given the Siyavula roll-out plan, my time with the community facilitators, the research the Foundation did into teaching teachers and my time working on a big physics experiment I thought I could find something to contribute.
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.
I have a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation to work in the area of Open and Collaborative Resources. My Fellowship enables me to work on a number of projects in this area. I believe in the liberation of information and supporting education in South Africa.
I manage the Siyavula project, where I co-ordinate the development of a comprehensive set of Open Educational Resources (OER) supporting the South African National Curriculum.
Along with Sam Halliday, I co-founded the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) project which launched in 2002 and has collaboratively produced a set of openly licenced science and mathematics textbooks
In collaboration with Steve Song, Interconnectedness Fellow, I founded OpenPress, a project to deploy a print aggregation service to support teachers.
I also run FullMarks, an open assessment bank, to help teachers rapidly generate tests, capture results and access reports based on those results.
I have a PhD in physics from the University of Cape Town and conducted my research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California on the results from the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
My blog highlights the progress on my various projects and contains thoughts on the OER space as well as life in general.
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