Building a global teaching profile: OER at UCT

Slideshow on open educational resources and how academics can build a global teaching profile online.

This presentation was delivered November 18, 2009 at the Teaching with Technology Miniconference hosted by the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT. Higher education institutions in the 21st century find themselves in a complex and often contradictory environment, as many of the world’s leading institutions are formulating policy to give their content away for free and are investing significant resources in establishing open content platforms; while other smaller institutions are holding onto content and proprietary systems in order to protect their identity and intellectual capital. The open educational resources (OER) movement follows in the wake of open source software and open access publishing initiatives and is fast transforming the way in which teaching and learning materials are created, shared and appropriated. Drawing on the concept of the ‘Knowledge Commons’ and the principle of sharing knowledge for greater good, the OER movement has the potential to play a substantial role in disrupting the traditional flow of information and transforming how institutions view their pedagogical practices. The OER UCT project, hosted by the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town and funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, aims to showcase the teaching efforts of UCT academics by encouraging the publication of resources as OER. The project is also in the process of building a directory listing the UCT Collection of OER, which will go live from early 2010, offering unprecedented potential for the sharing and visibility of teaching materials and global institutional and individual profiling on international OER sites. In this presentation, Michael Paskevicius and Michelle Willmers, will introduce the new terrain of OER and showcase the teaching and learning materials created by UCT academics that are already available worldwide and how UCT is gearing up to help you do the same.