Background
Siyavula is a non-profit education initiative which originated within the Shuttleworth Foundation. It grew out of an earlier project by Mark Horner, the Shuttleworth Foundation fellow for Open and Collaborative Resources, which used a group of volunteers to write a set of FET mathematics and physical sciences textbooks and released it under a free and open copyright license. The open copyright license under which the Free High School Science Texts (www.fhsst.org) were released allows anybody the freely and legally copy, change, reproduce and distribute it as opposed to most publishers’ material which cannot be legally copied, distributed or changed.
This is part of a greater vision of a comprehensive set of free and open SA curriculum aligned resources for all subjects and grades, in a similar manner way that FHSST did for FET Mathematics and Physical Sciences. In pursuit of this, the Shuttleworth Foundation acquired the rights to a set of workbooks for Grade R-9, Afrikaans and English, for all learning areas and also released it under an open license.
Siyavula searched for a digital platform to make these two sets of resources, the FHSST books and Siyavula workbooks, as well as other open content contributions available on-line. Connexions out of Rice University in the United States developed an excellent platform that not only allows educators to download the material, but also edit, mix and share it as well. Subsequently Siyavula partnered with Connexions and made all these resources available on-line at http://siyavula.cnx.org/lenses/siyavula for educators and learners.
In South Africa most of the educational material still gets consumed in printed format, which remains expensive, even though the content is free and open. Siyavula is hoping to address this through OpenPress (http://qa.openpress.co.za), another initiative which allows interested educators to aggregate their printing orders and drive printing costs down significantly. By way of example, when OpenPress prints more than a few thousand copies of the 280 page firm, colour cover FHHST book, the price drops to below R35 per textbook.
Through the on-going work with educators and encouraging the sharing of teaching resources, Siyavula received enquiries about the sharing of assessment items. In response this need Siyavula developed an open and free assessment bank called FullMarks (www.fullmarks.org.za which will be officially launched on the 27th of August), which gives educators access to a database of open questions and answers that can quickly and easily be compiled into a test or exam paper and memo.
Assistance required to source and uploading more open resources
At the moment Siyavula is working at spreading the message among educators to share their materials and helping them to upload it to the Connexions and FullMarks repositories. In order to speed up the sourcing and uploading of open content we are looking at hiring two more people for the rest of 2010.
As OER content facilitators they will:
- source and upload educational resources to FullMarks (www.fullmarks.org.za), Connexions(siyavula.cnx.org) and other tools like Slideshare.net;
- manage additional uploaders;
- facilitate school-based afternoon workshops to ensure educators are able to maintain their resources on the various websites;
- help organise a series of evening community building events (2 per month) for educators in which we showcase open resources and seed local communities;
- help to re-establish the FHSST (www.fhsst.org) hackathons * (4 per month) to incorporate feedback and ensure comprehensive model solutions;
- follow-up with all feedback contributors for FHSST /Siyavula /FullMarks to connect educators and ensure that they are aware they can make derivative works; and – give presentations about content, sharing tools and online
communities at meetings at schools.
These activities will ensure that:
- a wide variety of resource types are shared and available for all educators;
- high profile educators are sharing content, that they are able to maintain;
- and that the community of educators is being exposed to the shared resources.
The candidates will need to be:
- computer literate,
- enthusiastic about education and effecting change in the world,
- comfortable running small workshops on their own,
- good at explaining technology
- open to learning about:
– new technology,
– community development,
– software,
– open educational resources and figuring out how to fix
– keen to help education in a sustainable way.
Individuals interested in finding out more about the Siyavula project and exploring the opportunity of joining the team can contact us on 082 3343 259 or e-mail neels AT siyavula DOT org DOT za