Open for education: The CET team, prepped and ready for Open Education Week, is made up of Michael Paskevicius, Seta Jackson and Veronica Mitchell; and (front, from left) Dr Sam Lee Pan, Assoc Prof Laura Czerniewicz and Glenda Cox.
This week UCT takes another step towards an open UCT. Or, more technically, towards OpenUCT, whose aim is to make freely available as many as possible of those UCT-generated scholarly resources that can be shared, including research, teaching and popular scholarly resources.
From 5 to 10 March, UCT will be one of about 130 organisations across the globe that will participate in the first annual Open Education Week. This international event is, as such, staged by the OpenCourseWare Consortium, an international collaboration of higher education institutions and organisations of which UCT is a member.
Open Education Week aims to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially open educational resources, or OER.
At UCT, the week’s line-up kicks off on 6 March with an afternoon event on what open education is, it’s role at UCT, what open education means for higher education and schooling, and much more.
“The main objective is to increase awareness across campus and the Western Cape of how open initiatives can broaden learning opportunities,” said Glenda Cox of UCT’s Centre for Educational Technology (CET).
This year may mark the first Open Education Week, but the CET has staged similar occasions of its own.
Over the past two years the centre has hosted its own open access events, in a bid to free access to research articles for all students and researchers. Last year, UCT furthered its pledge to ‘openness’ by signing the Berlin Declaration on open access, one of a number of global declarations in which institutions commit themselves to accelerating efforts to promote open resources, technology and practices in education.
“This is the ideal opportunity to find out more about OpenUCT initiatives that are in place,” Cox says of Open Education Week.
Visit the OpenUCT Initiative website for the full programme.
Read More on University of Cape Town / Daily News: Global open education week
