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.

EVEN THE NUMBER 1 science school in South Africa will benefit from having access to FHSST, Siyavula and OpenPress.

We are going to run a full manual aggregation process to test and demonstrate the process we envisage for the OpenPress web-service.

I was quite excited to see a press release from the Office of the Governor for the state of California: Governor Schwarzenegger Signs Legislation Furthering Digital Textbook Initiative. But then I noticed one of the components signed off: SB 48 by Senator Elaine Alquist (D-San Jose) requires that any individual, firm, partnership or corporation that [...]

I will get the chance to build an open assessment bank. The community of teachers in SA is chomping at the bit for such a tool and I have had multiple requests for bank software that communities are already prepared to populate themselves. Providing the different groups with a single tool will allow them to feed off each others energy and allow us to begin with a bang. Working with existing communities also makes the tool much more sustainable.

As part of my Fellowship at the Shuttleworth Foundation I have the opportunity to try things. I’ve got Siyavula, OpenPress and now I’m toying with adding an open assessment bank to the mix.

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.