The University of Cape Town's OpenContent initiative - Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams

Institutional Strategies for Open Education Resources at the

University of Cape TownPresentation to the SCORE event: Institutional

Strategies for OER11 March 2011

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams(Former OER UCT Project Director)

Welcome from the University of Cape Town

http://www.flickr.com/photos/51607907@N03/4793218574/sizes/z/in/photostream/

On 12 Feb 2010 UCT launched …

http://opencontent.uct.ac.za/

Inspired by …

http://ocw.mit.edu/

MIThttp://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

Open University

https://open.umich.edu/

University of Michigan

History of UCT OpenContent

Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation

http://www.cet.uct.ac.za/OpeningScholarship

UCT signs Cape Town Open Education Declaration April 2008

History of UCT OpenContent

Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation

Funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation

Funded by the Hewlett Foundation

UCT Context• Government-funded, campus-

based university• 24 661 students and 3144 staff

of whom 1515 are professional staff and 1629 are non-professional professional or administrative staff

• No direct funding for teaching materials – only for throughput

• Limited funding is available for developing teaching and learning materials

OER UCT Project

• Funded by Shuttleworth Foundation from March 2009 – February 2010, total value R800,000 (= £73 000)

• Activities:– Survey existing T&L resources with potential to be OERs– Provide support to OER creators– Facilitate the publication of 5 exemplar OERs– Create an OER Directory for UCT– Document the OER UCT process as a case study– Promote longer-term sustainability of the initiative

• Strategies and tactics

Strategy 1: Small part-time team

• Employ a part-time project manager & 2 graduate assistants

• Use existing staff members of CET– Academic in CET – Project Director– Co-ordinator of the CET Learning Technologies -

technical manager

• Invite OER Project Manager from Health OER

Strategy 2: Resource- based approach

Includes:• entire courses• individual

resources– e-books– Manuals– Presentations– Podcasts– Lecture notes– Animations

Strategy 3: Directory of resources

• Decided not to host resources on a separate repository, but rather to create a ‘portal’ to act as a directory

• Reduce duplication and maximise the use of existing infrastructure

• Directory allows– Lecturers to upload or remove resources– Lecturers to capture metadata– Selection of resources by category or keywords

Strategy 4: OSS - Drupal

• Use Open Source Software - Drupal modules

• Customised by CET team• Specialist programming

done by consulting company

• Uses same authentication as other UCT sites

http://drupal.org/

Strategy 5: Lecturers upload

• Allow individual academics to upload and maintain their resources directly

• Reduce intermediary technical personnel thereby reducing staffing costs

• Quality assurance therefore rests with the lecturer – following the “pride-of-authorship” model adopted by MIT, but unlike the quality assurance model adopted by the OU

Strategy 6: Minimal moderation

• Employ a minimal moderation process was adopted where the OER team would check for copyright compliance– Creative commons– No 3rd party copyright– Format of resource

Strategy 7: Metadata standard • To increase visibility and

discoverability, used the Dublin Core metadata standard to ensure that the resources in UCT Open Content could be automatically harvested by international aggregating services– OER Commons– Open CourseWare Consortium– Google

Strategy 8: Project incorporated into existing portfolio

• To ensure the sustainability of the UCT OpenContent directory, the management of the OER initiative would become part of the portfolio of the Curriculum Development Officer in the Centre for Educational Technology (CET)

Strategy 9: Marketing

• Seminars & workshops• Blog – OER@UCT• Facebook• Twitter• Social events• Button on UCT homepage

Strategy 10: Open.UCT

• OpeningScholarship project recommended that the OER initiative should not be seen in isolation

• To be part of a more ambitious Open.UCT project that included making research and community engagement resources available to the general public

• Initial plans for Open.UCT are in place and initial funding has been granted.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/za/ or send a

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Prepared by Cheryl [email protected]

OpenContent Directory: http://opencontent.uct.ac.zaCompanion site on Vula: https://vula.uct.ac.za/portal/site/openuct

OER UCT project blog: http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct

Follow us: http://twitter.com/openuct

Presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/mpaskevi