#364 Panel (90 minutes)

Wednesday 18 April 11:00 - 12:30 Fitzpatrick Theatre

From Project to Mainstream in a constrained environment: towards openness at the University of Cape Town

Laura Czerniewicz, Glenda Cox, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams & Gregory Doyle, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Moderator: Glenda Cox

Panelists:

• Laura Czerniewicz is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Development. She is currently the Director of the OpenUct Initiative, a Mellon Foundation funded project that launched in July 2011.
• Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT where she teaches on a Masters in Information Communication Technology in Education programme and supervises PhD students. She is a former director of the UCT OER project and former project manager of the OpeningScholarship project at UCT.
• Glenda Cox is a Lecturer in the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT. Glenda is the Project manager for OpenContent UCT, UCT's open educational resource directory.
• Greg Doyle is the Education IT Manager in the Faculty of Health Sciences at UCT. He has been the Primary Investigator for the Health OER Project led by the University of Michigan since 2009.

Conference Theme: Impact

Summary: Panel discussion highlighting some of the key lessons learned by members of the UCT OER project.

Abstract: Initially completely reliant on funding from the Shuttleworth Foundation, a small team at the University of Cape Town launched an open initiative in 2007. This growing venture was supplemented by funding from an international inter-institutional project, OER Health, funded by the Hewlett Foundation. In 2011 the Mellon Foundation granted funds to support a more integrated open initiative that includes both open educational resources (OER) and open access (OA) scholarly publications. This panel discussion highlights some of the key lessons learned by members of the UCT OER project and the newer and more encompassing Open UCT project.
The four member panel will recount the growth of OER at UCT and how the signing of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration and the development of the UCT OpenContent directory spurred the expansion of the project-based OER initiative to a more institutionally integrated ‘open initiative’ across the institution. Specific attention will be paid to four key issues: the challenges of institutional change; the growing understanding of what encourages UCT academics to contribute (or not) to the UCT OpenContent directory; the usefulness of using postgraduate students to assist busy academics to adapt current teaching materials into OER; and the organisational, legal, technical and financial management required to foster this fledgling open initiative with a relatively small number of people, mostly on a part-time basis.