Kundayi Masanzu’s Mail and Guardian opinion piece “Academics lose out to online study” raises a crucial question as lecturers prepare to move their modules online: “Moocs have opened up the floodgates of knowledge dissemination and, at the same time, exposed the importance of clarifying knowledge ownership within tertiary institutions.” What is the fairest balance between the sharing of learning content, and commercial publication? Prof Caroline Ncube of UCT provides a helpful response to the question.
OERs – how to make them
Thinking about putting your teaching materials online? Want to go the OER route? This short video gives excellent how-to advice in animated form. Turning a Resource into an Open Educational Resource (OER).
OERs are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work” (2012 Paris OER Declaration).
The Future is Digital
I was delighted to find this banner in a Pretoria street “The Future is Digital”. The slogan from the South African Department of Communications chimes with the 2014 Educause major IT issues for HE and the strategic direction for e-learning at DUT. Four of the Educause “Top 10” are specially important right now at DUT:
- Improving student outcomes through an institutional approach that strategically leverages technology
- Assisting faculty with the instructional integration of information technology
- Using analytics to help drive critical institutional outcomes
- Addressing access demand and the wireless and device explosion
- Developing an enterprise IT architecture that can respond to changing conditions and new opportunities
Take a look at the full Educause article (thanks to Nicky Muller for sending it):
https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1421.pdf
