Pivoting to open education resources

In the wake of the national shutdown of all schools and higher education institutions as part of the efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa, colleges and universities are shifting to remote teaching and learning.

The primary concerns expressed around this move, which affects nearly 2.5 million South African tertiary educators and students, pertain to access and connectivity, particularly as relates to socio-economic disparity and inequality amongst students.

Universities are taking steps to zero-rate instructional websites and provide relief data bundles to students, but there is an additional problem of the availability of suitable instructional content that is legally shareable on the internet.

South African educators typically use copyrighted materials in their lectures, which, within a certain page limit, is legal in the traditional classroom context. They do, however, often find themselves in the dark when navigating the intricacies around the extent or different formats of third-party content which they are legally allowed to reuse in their own teaching resources.

The rapid shift to online teaching further confronts teachers and academics with a minefield of copyright and licensing hurdles which need to be navigated in sharing their resources online.

Private education companies around the world have responded by making online resources available through various content delivery models. While this seems like an immediate solution, access is often given for restricted periods of time and those resources may not be modified or translated by lecturers for their own teaching context. There is also the issue of being ‘locked in’ to ongoing investment with a single content provider.

OER – A sustainable and contextually based solution

Open education resources, or OER, are part of a raft of solutions and practices encompassed within the concept of open education. These teaching and learning materials, which are openly shared on websites and repositories under Creative Commons licences, enable educators and students around the world (as well as anyone else who is interested) to legally reuse or adapt that content, provided that licensing conditions are adhered to.

The benefits of OER in terms of addressing issues related to cost and accessibility have been well documented globally, even before the pandemic crisis. Now, educators, institutions and civil society organisations are exploring OER as a critical component of the global education recovery strategy required for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The value proposition of OER is particularly acute in South Africa and other countries in the Global South. In addition to providing a means through which to address issues related to cost and the lack of access to materials, the democratised authorship approach entailed in many forms of OER production is conducive to collaboration and peer-to-peer knowledge production.

In this sense, OER can provide a mechanism through which to challenge the Western-oriented worldviews enshrined in traditional textbooks and other teaching materials, and can be used as a tool for addressing transformation in the classroom.

The current COVID-19 crisis makes it impossible to ignore the benefits OER could provide to an education system operating under unprecedented strain, as well as the economic relief it could provide to students.

OER in South Africa

Globally, there is a wealth of useful OER available to educators for immediate reuse and adaptation through such sites as OER Commons, Merlot and Open Textbook Library. In Africa, the visibility of locally produced resources is boosted by aggregating sites such as OER Africa, as well as by tools such as CC Search, which is designed to surface openly licensed content.

In South Africa, awareness and uptake of locally produced OER appears to be on the rise. The Open Access Atlas of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Operative Surgery, an OER self-published by University of Cape Town Professor Johan Fagan, has had more than two million downloads internationally.

The OpenUCT repository currently hosts more than 500 resources in its Open Education Resources collection, while the University of Pretoria African Veterinary Information Portal boasts a specialist archive of locally produced OER for veterinary science.

As a means to boost multilingualism, there is also the Open Educational Resource Term Bank, a free and reusable resource to allow university students and lecturers to check meanings and definitions of key concepts in various disciplines in all 11 South African languages.

In order to share disciplinary knowledge, academics at institutions around the country are creating and sharing OER independently through personal websites and social media platforms, such as YouTube and Instagram.

As a way to grow OER and stimulate uptake, academics and open education advocates at South African universities are driving initiatives in many fields and disciplines. Examples of these include the #OpenEdInfluencers initiative at Nelson Mandela University and the Digital Open Textbooks for Development project at the University of Cape Town.

In the current climate, the ability to adapt existing materials is a boon for frantic educators. There is evidence of academics adapting and reusing OER published by colleagues at other South African institutions – a particularly useful strategy for small teams of lecturers at institutions operating under emergency conditions or severe resource constraints.

The need for a national, coordinated approach

The South African government has already taken some key strides in supporting international OER recommendations and declarations. In 2017, the national Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) issued a call for comments on the Open Learning Policy Framework for Post-School Education and Training, in which OER is strongly recommended as a mechanism to support the sustainable development and sharing of quality learning materials.

South Africa was also one of the member states that supported the adoption of the UNESCO Recommendation on OER in 2019.

The DHET is also currently supporting the Cases on Open Learning project to investigate ways in which open learning is being adopted in universities and colleges. This project forms part of the Open Learning Framework, and is aimed at exploring ways in which open learning can respond to the social, economic and transformation needs of the country.

A number of South African universities have articulated OER frameworks, policies and strategies. Some have also become signatories to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, a statement of intent and commitment to pursuing open education approaches signed by hundreds of learners, educators, publishers and foundations around the world.

While these are encouraging steps, there is much more to be done. As the financial pressures in South African higher education intensify and students rightly demand locally relevant materials, the number of locally produced online teaching materials must continue to grow. This points to an urgent need for a coordinated national approach to support the production and profiling of OER that can be of use to the country in sustainable ways.

OERs offer a viable and sensible alternative to resource creation and sharing which keeps control over reuse firmly in the hands of the creators, and enables students to have free, legal, long-term access to meaningful educational resources.

Laura Czerniewicz is director of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), South Africa; Michelle Willmers is publishing and implementation manager of the Digital Open Textbooks for Development project and is based in CILT; and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams is an emeritus associate professor in CILT and former UNESCO chair in open education and social justice at the University of Cape Town.