Browsing by Author "Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl"

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    Open Access
    365 days of openness: The emergence of OER at the University of Cape Town
    (Athabasca University Press, 2013) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Paskevicius, Michael; Cox, Glenda; Shaikh, Shihaam; Czerniewicz, Laura; Lee-Pan, Samantha; McGreal, R; Kinuthia, W; Marshall, S; McNamara, T
    Historically, resources such as books, journals, newspapers, audio and video recordings have been fairly well curated in university libraries. However, the same cannot be said for teaching and learning materials, unless they have been included in a textbook or study guide. With the growth in digital media, libraries have been extending their curation of scholarly resources to include electronic journals, digital books and reference guides, broadening access to these beyond the physical walls of the library. While the growth in digital technology has prompted academics to create their own customised and contextually specific digital media for use in their teaching in the form of PowerPoint presentations, manuals, handbooks, guides, media resources and websites, these resources are most often stored on personal hard drives, on departmental servers or within password-protected institutional learning management systems. Access to these digital materials is usually limited to registered students undertaking specific courses within specific institutions and usually only disseminated by individual academics or departments.
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    Open Access
    Adjusting pedagogy to optimise negotiability and interactivity in lessons using the interactive whiteboard an action research study in a primary school
    (2012) Jaftha, Cheryl; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    One of the recent technological devices that have been introduced in the educational domain is the interactive whiteboard (IWB). IWBs have become established teaching and learning tools, particularly in primary school classrooms in developed English speaking countries and have more recently been deployed in developing countries such as South Africa. The Western Cape Province in South Africa has rolled out a province-wide IWB programme over the last decade, despite limited local research on the pedagogical value of IWBs in South African schools. This research study aims to investigate how the IWB can be used to encourage collaboration amongst the learners in a Grade 6 Technology Education class at a primary school in the Western Cape and specifically to assist the teacher in understanding how her pedagogy needs to change to optimise learner collaboration in association with an IWB. To understand the ways in which the IWB influences the activities in the classroom, Activity Theory is used as a framework to understand the tensions that arise and how the teacher needs to change her pedagogical strategies to successfully resolve these tensions.
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    Open Access
    Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South
    (African Minds, International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources for Development, 2017-12-22) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Arinto, Patricia
    Education in the Global South faces several key interrelated challenges, for which Open Educational Resources (OER) are seen to be part of the solution. These challenges include: unequal access to education; variable quality of educational resources, teaching, and student performance; and increasing cost and concern about the sustainability of education. The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project seeks to build on and contribute to the body of research on how OER can help to improve access, enhance quality and reduce the cost of education in the Global South. This volume examines aspects of educator and student adoption of OER and engagement in Open Educational Practices (OEP) in secondary and tertiary education as well as teacher professional development in 21 countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. The ROER4D studies and syntheses presented here aim to help inform Open Education advocacy, policy, practice and research in developing countries.
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    Open Access
    Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South: Chapter summaries
    (African Minds, International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources for Development, 2018-02-28) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    Education in the Global South faces several key interrelated challenges for which Open Educational Resources (OER) are seen to be part of the solution and against which use of OER might be evaluated. These challenges include: unequal access to education; variable quality of educational resources, teaching and student performance; and increasing cost and concern about the sustainability of education. The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project was a four-year research initiative to investigate in what ways and under what circumstances the adoption of OER could address the increasing demand for accessible, relevant, high quality and affordable education in the Global South. The project was comprised of 18 sub-projects, the findings from which are captured as chapters in the edited volume, Adoption and Impact of OER in the Global South. The summaries presented here provide an overview of chapters’ study contexts, methodological approaches, key findings and recommendations, as well as links to accompanying open datasets. Of the total 16 chapters, 12 are based on sub-project findings and four are synthesis and overview chapters. The chapters are organised into five main sections: Overview, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Conclusion. Within these broader sections, chapters are presented in sequence according to whether the research addresses basic or higher education.
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    Open Access
    Building a global teaching profile: OER at UCT
    (2010) Paskevicius, Michael; Willmers, Michelle; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    This resource is a slideshow on open educational resources and how academics can build a global teaching profile online. This slideshare slidecast includes slides and audio syncronized which can be used in part or fully to help academics understand the terrain of OER.
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    Open Access
    Case study: Cell-Life
    (2009-02-28) Willmers, Michelle; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    This case study analyses the ways in which the Cell-Life initiative, a collaboration between the University of Cape Town's departments of Civil and Electrical Engineering and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, utilised technology-based solutions (in particular, cellphone technology) for the life management of patients living with HIV/AIDS.
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    Open Access
    Case study: Custom-designed virtual experiment in fracture mechanics in Mechanical Engineering
    (2008-11-30) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    This case study describes the development and use of a custom-designed virtual experiment in Mechanical Engineering which partially simulates the concept of metal fatigue to help student engage with a complex practical application. It then explores some of the enabling or constraining structures, policies and practices at a national, institutional and personal level that appear to have an impact on making such a simulation available as an open educational resource.
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    Open Access
    Case study: Interactive spreadsheets
    (2008-11-30) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    This paper describes how the Department of Statistics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) currently uses interactive spreadsheets to assist students in analysing and preparing summaries of data. It explores some of the potential benefits of making such resources more freely available to others as Open Educational Resources (OER), and outlines the key issues which would need to be resolved in order to do so. To this end, this paper discusses the pedagogical needs that led to the lecturers using the spreadsheet program MSExcel to encourage students to engage actively with statistical processes. It describes how the lecturers and students use these interactive spreadsheets and examines how well these interactive spreadsheets seemed to have worked, so that others who may have similar pedagogical needs can be alerted to the advantages and disadvantages of using this type of technology. In addition, this paper explores the possibility of these interactive spreadsheets being offered as OER first to other departments at UCT and then to a broader community.
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    Open Access
    Case study: Mobile learning
    (2009-02-28) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Ng'ambi, Dick
    At the University of Cape Town (UCT) mobile learning is being adopted for teaching and learning purposes. This paper describes the use of the Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions (DFAQ) tool, designed and developed at UCT by Dick Ng‟ambi, as a special-purpose question and consultation environment for students with a Short Message Service (SMS) interface which allows students and lecturers to pose and respond to questions using their mobile phones. This case study uses a range of methods to investigate the use of DFAQ by Organisational Psychology lecturers, including presentation and document analysis and follow-up interviews.
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    Open Access
    Case study: Simulations for visualisation of complex processes and principles in chemical engineering and in physics
    (2009-02-28) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    This paper describes two case studies where open source software (OSS) has been used to create simulations to assist students in visualising complex processes in university courses. The first case reviews the use of Python to help students visualise the motion of particles or molecules in physical processes used in chemical engineering. The second case reviews the use of VPython to allow students to create their own simulations of abstract concepts in physics.
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    Open Access
    Case study: The Health and Human Rights Programme
    (2009-02-28) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    This case study provides an overview of the Health and Human Rights Project (HHRP), which was established and run collaboratively by the University of Cape Town’s School of Public Health and Family Medicine and a human rights NGO, the Trauma Centre for Survivors of Violence and Torture from 1997 to 1999, to devise a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on health-related issues. The HHRP subsequently assisted the organisation of the commission’s health-sector hearings. This collaboration resulted in the publication of a book based on the submissions and stimulated the inclusion of human rights in undergraduate teaching. After the project closed in 1999, the focus of the department shifted to research on human rights issues and the training of university educators of health professionals. The HHRP provided the basis for the development of the Health and Human Rights Division within the School of Public Health and Family Medicine.
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    Open Access
    Chapter 04. Framework to understand postgraduate students' adaption of academics' teaching materials as OER
    (2011) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Paskevicius, Michael
    This chapter addresses a way of responding to one of the key challenges of OER contribution, namely academics' lack of time to re-purpose teaching materials originally intended for campus-based face-to-face lectures as stand-alone Open Educational Resources (OER). It describes how masters' students, tutors and interns at the University of Cape Town have been engaged to support the innovative practice of adapting academics' existing teaching materials into OER.
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    Open Access
    Cognitive apprenticeship in architecture education: using a scaffolding tool to support conceptual design
    (2016) Hitge, Lize-Mari; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    Modeled on the master-apprenticeship relationship, student designers gain access to implicit design knowledge mainly through the conversations with their tutors during studio projects. However, intimate design studio tutelage is being challenged by increasing student to staff ratios. If leveraged effectively, technology offers the potential to maximize tutors' time investment in order to allow them to tend to more students. Scaffolding tools (Reiser, 2004) as supplement to teacher support, can assist learners with complex tasks previously out of their reach. This case study is a critical realist inquiry into the use of a scaffolding tool, Cognician Cogs. It seeks to reveal the ways in which and circumstances under which these Cogs scaffold conceptual design in a second year architecture studio project. The study draws upon Cognitive Apprenticeship as a conceptual framework to shed light on design studio practices involving specially developed Cogs. The mixed methodology approach adopted consisting mainly of qualitative data in the form of the project brief, scaffolding tool content, sample design critique conversations and interviews with three tutors and nine students. Supplementary quantitative data included closed survey question responses and Studio work marks collected from the entire class (39). Thematic analysis of the qualitative data was framed by the Vitruvian guiding principles of architecture: 'Firmness', 'Commodity' and 'Delight'. The study revealed that the intended use of the Cogs to cover aspects of Firmness and Commodity only resulted in the over-scaffolding of Firmness and the under-scaffolding of Delight. The students' resulting designs were practically acceptable, but lacked novelty.
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    Degrees of ease: adoption of OER, open textbooks and MOOCs in the Global South
    (University of Cape Town, 2014-06-25) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    Internationally, education institutions are under a great deal of pressure to provide rising numbers of students with access to quality education in increasingly economically constrained environments. For some time now, the affordances provided by the internet have enabled a range of educational activities to be supported digitally or conducted online. Three fairly new forms of web-enabled activities that are receiving attention are Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Textbooks, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). OERs and Open Textbooks have been hailed as a response to the demand for provision of flexible and cost-effective learning materials, while MOOCs have been touted as an answer to the provision of up-to-date and cost-effective tuition for growing numbers of students in so-called ‘developing countries’, or what I shall refer to as the Global South. This paper will offer a definition of these forms of teaching provision and learning support within the context of “Open Education” and identify the key activities underlying OER, Open Textbooks and MOOCs. It will interrogate the factors that seem to influence the ease with which educators and students in the Global South can contribute to or adapt existing materials and/or tuition to suit their contexts as a way to avoid any possible “neo-colonization and one-way flow of content based on the massive amount of content published by those in richer nations” (Amiel 2013: 127).
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    Open Access
    Degrees of openness: the emergence of open educational resources at the University of Cape Town
    (University of the West Indies, 2009) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Gray, Eve
    Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a range of opportunities to share educational materials and processes in ways that are not yet fully understood. In an extraordinary development, increasing numbers of traditional and distance universities are using ICTs to make a selection of their teaching resources freely available as 'open education resources' (OER). The University of Cape Town recently signed the Cape Town Open Education Declaration signalling some senior level support for the notion of OER. In anticipation of an institution-wide roll-out, lecturers and educational technologists at UCT are grappling with the issues that need to be addressed to meet this intent. This paper suggests that careful analysis of existing educational materials and processes is necessary to provide an indication of what can be done to make them more openly available beyond the confines of an individual teaching and learning space. However, the deceptively simple term “open” hides a reef of complexity. This paper endeavours to unravel the degrees of openness with respect to key attributes of OER, namely social, technical, legal and financial openness in an attempt to make the task of identifying where changes could be made to existing teaching materials or processes a little easier for the lecturer and the educational technologist alike. While acknowledging the potential value of content, we contend, however, that it is the opening up of educational processes, which we are calling Open Pedagogy (OP) enabled by the Web 2.0 technologies that are set to play the more transformational role in the collaboration between students and lecturers.
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    Developing communities of practice within and outside higher education institutions
    (Wiley, 2007) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Slay, Hannah; Siebörger, Ingrid
    Higher education institutions (HEIs) are largely built on the assumption that learning is an individual process best encouraged by explicit teaching that is, on the whole, separated from social engagement with those outside the university community. This perspective has been theoretically challenged by those who argue for a social constructivist learning theory and a more collaborative approach to learning. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) afford lecturers and students an opportunity for extending the boundaries of a learning experience, not merely beyond the lone individual, but beyond the limits of discipline boundaries within a specific university community and beyond the institution into the local community. This paper illustrates how a collaborative effort between lecturers and students from the Computer Science and Education Departments at Rhodes University, teachers from the local community, the provincial Department of Education and a non-governmental organisation developed into an unfolding virtual and physical community of practice which enabled ICT take-up in a number of schools in the Grahamstown District, South Africa. This discussion of what has become known as the e-Yethu project provides an example of how ICTs, underpinned by the insights of social constructivism, the notion of 'community of practice' and in particular Hoadley and Kilner's C4P Framework for Communities of Practice, can serve to help HEIs understand ways in which ICTs can provide opportunities for developing collaborative learning within HEIs, and between the HEI and the local community.
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    Open Access
    EDN 5510 - Advanced Research Design
    (2016-07-01) Brown, Cheryl; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Ng'ambi, Dick; Cox, Glenda
    Advanced research design is a compulsory module offered to Masters in Education (MEd) in Information Communication Technology (ICT) students embarking on a minor dissertation. The Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) at the University of Cape Town offers the course in blended (hybrid) mode for students in their ICTs in Education stream. The hybrid module involves pre-course work, a 6 day face-to-face block component where students develop and get feedback on an initial research design, followed by post-course proposal development with lecturers and peer feedback. This record contains a selection of materials from the course, named according to the dominant theme explored in each resource, namely: 1 - Research Topic and Problem; 2 - Context and rationale; 3 - Concepts, empirical research and literature review; 4 - Conceptual frameworks and theories; 5 - Research questions; 6 - Data collection and data analysis; 7 - Ethics; and 9 - Validity. These materials were last updated July 2017.
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    Educators' challenges and behavioural intention to adopt open educational resources : the case of Africa University, Zimbabwe
    (2015) Kandiero, Agripah; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Cox, Glenda
    A review of the literature confirms that Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives have created free, openly licenced and high quality educational resources for anyone to use. However, these free, openly licensed and high quality educational resources appear to remain largely unused by Africa University academics in the educationally resource-impoverished Zimbabwe. The objectives of this research study are to explore the challenges and enablers experienced by Africa University educators who may potentially adopt OER, and ascertain barriers preventing them from adopting OER in mainstream teaching. The sample consists of 45 full time educators from Africa University. Data was gathered by means of a survey questionnaire administered by the researcher. A modified version of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model developed by Venkatesh et al. (2003) was used. The UTAUT model was created from a fusion of eight diffusion of innovation models, and this gave it conceptual superiority over other candidate models. Key findings indicate that the extent to which educators believe that using OER will help them to enhance their teaching performance (Performance Expectancy),the extent of perceived easiness associated with finding, customising, and using OER (Effort Expectancy) and the extent to which educators perceive how important the opinion of their peer educators if they adopt OER or not (Social Influence)have a statistically significant positive influence on the educators' Behavioural Intention to adopt and use OER. The extent to which an individual is satisfied with the institutional framework, policies and technical infrastructure to support the use of the innovation (Facilitating Conditions) did not yield a statistically significant influence on the Behavioural Intention and this was interpreted to mean Africa University educators are satisfied with the current resources and infrastructure in place. However educators felt Institutional Support in the form of institutional OER supportive policies, official OER project enactment, and OER related incentives needed attention. Also, significant differences were found in the barriers which potential users of OER identified as either limiting to potential use of OER, or negatively affecting their intention to use OER. These barriers include open licensing knowledge; institutional support; follow up training sessions; relevance, reliability and adaptability of OER. Addressing these factors could lead to a more widespread adoption of OER, at Africa University and help address the prevalent educational resource challenge.
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    Explaining the relations between culture, structure and agency in lecturers' contribution and non-contribution to Open Educational Resources in a higher education institution
    (2016) Cox, Glenda; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Luckett, Kathy
    Despite the existence of many successful initiatives to promote the sharing and use of Open Educational Resources (OER), sharing and use of OER is not a widely accepted practice in higher education. The reasons for lecturers' choices on whether or not to contribute OER are poorly understood. This thesis develops a theoretically-based explanation of both why lecturers contribute and why they do not. The thesis addresses the question: How do the relations between culture, structure and agency influence lecturers' contribution and non-contribution of OER in a higher education institution? A mixed methods approach was used to gather quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (interviews) data. Fourteen lecturers from the University of Cape Town (UCT) were interviewed (two from each of its seven faculties), seven who had contributed OER and seven who had not. The analysis adopted an Activity Theory framework to highlight the enablers and barriers to contribution present in the institutional system. The Social Realism of Margaret Archer (1995, 2003, 2007a, 2012) was used to explore the power of academics' agency and their internal conversations arising from their personal concerns in deciding on their courses of action. This study illustrates how capturing lecturers' internal conversations and analysing how they think about their social contexts is valuable not only in the context of OER but also as a way of understanding their role as social actors more generally. Analysing the relations between culture, structure and agency in institutions explains why some institutions are slow to change and/or prefer to maintain current practices. At UCT, where institutional culture allows academic freedom of choice and structure supports that choice, it is the academic agents themselves who hold the power of action to contribute or not to contribute OER. Academics have the power to change their practice if it makes sense in terms of their projects, the activities that they are involved in and their concerns. Thus in this context, the long term sustainability of the OER movement rests firmly on the willingness of individual lecturers to share and use OER. By understanding the institutional context in which the individual is placed, OER can be encouraged appropriately
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    Factors influencing Open Educational Practices and OER in the Global South: Meta-synthesis of the ROER4D project
    (African Minds, International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources for Development, 2017-12) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Arinto, Patricia; Cartmill, Tess; King, Thomas
    This chapter provides a meta-synthesis of the findings from the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) empirical studies based on the 13 sub-project chapters in this volume as well as other sub-project research reports. It does so by analysing how three phases of Open Educational Resources (OER) adoption – OER creation, use and adaptation – are observed in the studies as forms of Open Educational Practices (OEP), identifying where there are most likely to be disjunctures that inhibit optimal OER adoption processes and their longer-term sustainability. It compares the open practices reported in the ROER4D sub-project studies to an idealised or maximal set of open processes, modelled as the Open Education cycle framework. It draws upon social realist theory to uncover agential decision-making about OER creation, use and adaptation in relation to structural and cultural environments, and seeks to answer the ROER4D project’s overarching research question: Whether, how, for whom and under what circumstances can engagement with OEP and OER provide equitable access to relevant, high-quality, affordable and sustainable education in the Global South? This chapter interrogates findings from the ROER4D empirical studies using a metasynthesis approach. Following a review of sub-project research reports (including, in some cases, primary micro data), the authors used a literature-informed set of themes to create the meta-level conceptual framework for claims about OER and OEP in relation to access, quality and affordability; the Open Education cycle; and structural, cultural and agential influences on the potential impact on access, quality and affordability. Nvivo software was used to help reveal literature-informed and emergent themes in the studies, identifying the most frequently occurring themes to provide a more comprehensive and classified interpretation of the findings across the empirical studies. Insights and recommendations were then distilled according to Archer’s (2003; 2014) social realist theoretical framework which assesses social change – and its counterpart, stasis – according to dynamically interactive and structural, cultural and agential factors. The authors used these three factors to guide their analysis of the ROER4D findings, as understood in relation to the three broad phases of OER adoption (creation, use and adaptation) proposed in the Open Education cycle. Findings show that in the Global South contexts studied, the ideal or maximal Open Education cycle is incomplete in terms of optimising the benefits of OER adoption. There are five key points of disjuncture: (1) the dependence on copying of existing OER and the corollary failure to localise; (2) the adaptation of OER, but with inconsistent curation and rehosting of derivative works on publicly available platforms or in repositories, limiting access to the derivative OER; (3) limited circulation of derivative OER due, in part, to the absence of a communication strategy; (4) inconsistent quality assurance processes; and (5) a weak feedback loop for continuous improvement of the original or derivative work. The chapter concludes with a critical exploration of the range of influences of OER and associated practices on access to educational materials, the quality of educational resources, educators’ pedagogical perspectives and practices, and student performance as well as the overall affordability and sustainability of education in the Global South. It argues that full participation in the OER movement in the Global South requires that certain structural factors be put in place – including a minimum level of infrastructural support, legal permission to share materials and OER curation platforms – to curate curriculum-aligned OER in local languages. However, these structural adjustments alone are insufficient for the full value proposition of OER to be realised. While individual educators and some institutions are sharing OER, this willingness needs to be bolstered by a much stronger cultural change where communities of educators and students are given technical and pedagogical support to enable OER uptake – especially the creation and adaptation of OER produced in the Global South.