NWU names OER fellows
The North-West University (NWU) last week announced the names of 22 academics from the university who have been selected to participate in a fellowship programme to learn about and develop Open Educational Resources.
These fellows are involved in 12 projects, and are from the faculties of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, Health Sciences, Humanities and Law.
The fellows will attend workshops by experts on Open Educational Resources (OER’s) and open methods of teaching. They’ll attend these conferences and presentations online; after which they will create educational resources that will be shared online through an open license, accessible for free by anyone.
The aim of the initiative is to promote the creation and use of original open resources. It is a unique programme in South Africa. The programme was initiated by Prof. Jako Olivier, the UNESCO chair on multimodal learning and OER’s at NWU. He said the programme aims to develop and support cost-effective and highly customisable options for teaching and learning in a technologically advanced environment.
Olivier said that the program is the ideal opportunity to provide academic staff with support and funding so they can include new online resources in their classes, or adapt their current resources to student needs. The programme includes a grant of R40 000 for the development of OER’s, and R7 000 for fellows to attend online conferences and presentations.
The focus of these workshops will be on open licensing, open pedagogy (teaching methods), and researching OER’s such as textbooks, tutorials, WikiBooks, videos, interactive activities and online games. At the end of the programme, fellows will publish a book on the process and the implementation of the programme.
“The motivation behind this programme is to address the need for cheaper and more relevant classroom resources, as well as to realise the goals the North-West University set itself with its Open Educational Resources Declaration, which was approved in 2018,” Olivier said. “We hope to continue with this fellowship in future, but the nature of the fellowship will depend on available funding and interest from different faculties. However, looking at trends internationally, open education is here to stay,” he said.