Browsing by Subject "global south"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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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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    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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    Diversity, inclusion, and social justice in the information context: global south perspectives
    (2020) Raju, Jaya
    This is an editorial of the special issue of the International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion 4(3/4), 2020 authored by the guest editor (Jaya Raju).
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    Investigating the potential for utilising a water equity metric to benchmark differential access in Global South cities: a case study of Cape Town
    (2024) Hoosen, Naadiya; Taylor, Anna; Atkins, Ffion
    In the wake of the day-zero drought the City of Cape Town (CCT or the City) has made the commitment to become water sensitive in its Water Strategy (CCT, 2019). According to the United Nations SDG 6.1, universal access to water has to take priority in any form of water policy. This is reflected in the principles of water sensitive design where equitable and universal access to water is a core tenet. This study assessed the state of equity in the domestic water sector of the City of Cape Town using the Gini Coefficient and the Palma ratio. Both these metrics were selected to determine how access to water and water consumption were distributed averagely throughout the population with the Gini coefficient, as well as between the most resource rich and resource poor with the Palma Index. This was done to complement the Urban Water Metabolism- a water mass balance analysis done for the City by Atkins et al., (2021). By providing a complimentary metric, much like performance indicators used by Paul et al., (2018), Renouf et al., (2017) and Kenway et al., (2011) to analyse the underlying state of equity within the context of the whole-system. The Urban Water Metabolism provides an overview of the City's water budget and the flows of water throughout the city before it finally exits the system. The addition of these equity metrices to benchmark and compare the state of equity can provide valuable information for decision makers to determine if the implementation of water policy, such as those aimed at making Cape Town more water sensitive, have a positive or adverse effect on equity- a point that becomes especially salient during times of low water availability. 141 suburbs in the metropolitan were assessed using the population and total water consumption for a period between April 2017 to April 2018 to determine a figure for the Gini coefficient and Palma ratio which were found to be 0.30 and 4.18 respectively. The Gini coefficient for levels of access to a flush toilet, as well as access to piped water in a dwelling for the suburb households, was also determined and found to be 0.07 and 0.15 respectively. The results of this study revealed that the Gini coefficient and Palma ratio for the City are substantially higher than the Gini Coefficient of the Western Cape (0.06) and the Gini Coefficient and Palma ratio of South Africa nationally (0.27, 0.95) determined in a study by Cole et al., (2018). This difference in the level of inequity represented by the Gini Coefficient at the national and provincial level may highlight the value of working with data at smaller scales and disaggregating data to provide a more nuanced picture of inequity.
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    OER use in the Global South: A baseline survey of higher education instructors
    (African Minds, International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources for Development, 2017-10-11) de Oliviera Neto, Jose Dutra; Pete, Judith; Daryono, Daryono; Cartmill, Tess; Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams; Patricia Arinto
    The research presented here provides baseline data regarding the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) by higher education instructors in the Global South (South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia). It does so while attending to how such activity (or inactivity) is differentiated across continental regions and associated countries. The chapter addresses two questions: what proportion of instructors in the Global South have used OER, and which variables may account for different OER usage rates between respondents? This is done by examining which variables – such as gender, age, technological access and digital proficiency – seem to influence OER use rates, thereby allowing the authors to gauge which are the most important for instructors in their respective contexts. This study is based on a quantitative research survey taken by 295 randomly selected instructors at 28 higher education institutions in nine countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia; Ghana, Kenya, South Africa; India, Indonesia, Malaysia). The 30-question survey addressed the following themes: personal demographics, infrastructure access, institutional environment, instructor attitudes and open licensing. Survey responses were correlated for analysis with respondents’ answers to the key question of the survey: whether they had ever used OER or not. Findings indicate that 51% of respondents have used OER, a rate slightly differentiated by region: 49% in South America, 46% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 56% in South and Southeast Asia. A number of variables were associated with varying levels of OER use rates – such as instructors’ country of habitation (and its gross domestic product per capita), level of digital proficiency, educational qualification, institutional position and attitude to education – while many others were not, such as instructors’ gender, age or perception of their institutions’ OER-related policies.
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    Open Education and the Open Scholarship Agenda, a University of Cape Town Perspective
    (University of Cape Town, 2014-09) Czerniewicz, Laura; Cox, Glenda; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Willmers, Michelle
    At the University of Cape Town open education and open scholarship activities and projects have taken place in several guises over the past seven years. They have been loosely connected, driven by champions and enabled by external grant funding. Open education practices and advocacy work has been firmly grounded in a collegial institutional culture, with the concomitant implications. The year 2014 saw the organic growth come together in an institutional commitment expressed in a Council-approved holistic open access policy, in the Launch of a repository curating both open education resources and research, and through a decision by the Library to provide a home for much of the work, partnered by the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching. The work has been accompanied by a commitment to researching practice, and has seen a number of studies completed, with a large scale research project on OERs across the global south underway. The open education agenda has been driven by a commitment to high quality education, by a belief in access to knowledge, by the hope for economies in the system, and through the Internet enabling the collaboration already woven into the academy to take a new networked and transparent form. Given its location, there has also been an acknowledgement of the need to make openly available locally developed teaching resources and research scholarly content from the global south. This bookchapter is a post-print. It is made available according to the terms of agreement between the author and the journal, and in accordance with UCT’s open access policy available: http://www.openuct.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/UCTOpenAccessPolicy.pdf for the purposes of research, teaching and private study.
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    Research on Open Educational Resources for Development in Post-secondary Education in the Global South (ROER4D) - Proposal Document
    (2013-05) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    The first proposal to the International Development Research Committee outlining a global south research project, aimed at building an evidence base of successful OER initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and South America.
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    Research on Open Educational Resources for Development in Post-secondary Education in the Global South (ROER4D) - Scoping Document
    (2013-12-09) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl
    This document serves as the scoping document for the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project. It outlines the rationale, scope and intent of the project, including detailed project plans for the twelve sub-projects contained within ROER4D.
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    Research on Open Educational Resources for Development in the Global South: Project landscape
    (African Minds, International Development Research Centre & Research on Open Educational Resources for Development, 2017-12) Arinto, Patricia; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; King, Thomas; Cartmill, Tess; Willmers, Michelle
    The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project was proposed to investigate in what ways and under what circumstances the adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) could address the increasing demand for accessible, relevant, high-quality and affordable education in the Global South. The project was originally intended to focus on post-secondary education, but the scope was expanded to include basic education teachers and government funding when it launched in 2013. In 2014, the research agenda was further expanded to include the potential impact of OER adoption and associated Open Educational Practices (OEP). ROER4D was funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Open Society Foundations (OFS), and built upon prior research undertaken by a previous IDRC-funded initiative, the PAN Asia Networking Distance and Open Resources Access (PANdora) project. This chapter presents the overall context in which the ROER4D project was located and investigated, drawing attention to the key challenges confronting education in the Global South and citing related studies on how OER can help to address these issues. It provides an abbreviated history of the project and a snapshot of the geographic location of the studies it comprises, the constituent research agendas, the methodologies adopted and the research-participant profile. It also provides an overview of the other 15 chapters in this volume and explains the peer review process.