Session Title: Siyavula: Building Sustainable OERs Through Community Development
Presenter: Mark Horner, Project Manager, Shuttleworth Foundation
Time & Date: 11:15 A.M. - 12:00 P.M., Friday, August 14, 2009
Location: Rm. C180
Session Description: The objective of the Siyavula project is to ensure that educators have access to educational resources that comprehensively cover the South African curriculum which they can use, adapt, contextualise, print, and distribute as needed. Furthermore, the resources must form a sustainable, living body of material that continues to grow as technology, curriculum and contexts change. Communities of practice of teachers are the most effective means for achieving the long-term sustainability of the content as well as being an effective form of professional development.
Siyavula has partnered with the Connexions project to provide a web-platform that can be used for supporting communities of teachers. The platform supports content uploading, individual and collaborative editing and vetting and has been extended by Siyavula to support curriculum alignment, discussion forums, templates, and subjects.
A comprehensive set of workbooks and teacher’s guides covering grades R-9 for all learning areas in English and Afrikaans have been acquired as well as the material developed by the Free High School Science Texts project covering grades 10-12 Mathematics and Physical Science. This material has been uploaded to the Connexions platform where it will form the nucleus around which communities can form.
A community intervention is underway to support the formation of groups of educators that, over time, will evolve into fully-fledged communities of practice. The intervention supports the use of Connexions as a platform for the acquisition, enhancement and collaborative development of content as well as a platform for community discussion. These communities will enhance, extend and add to the existing material, ensuring that the body of material is sustainable.
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