Globally, OER has become critical to the mission of making education sustainable. Here, in South Africa, much like the rest of the continent. Our OE practices vary, as the landscape is uneven. OER integration into the curriculum is largely dependent on individuals. Unlike the global north, where OERs are seen primarily as a means to address the costs of resources. The brief for OER adoption is wider and magnified by systemic injustice and multiple inequalities.
This Digital Humanities project sees OER as a means to stimulate activism, address inequality between the country’s eleven official languages and build multi lingualism resources, foundational literacies and increase academic’s capacity to use digital media. If you are interested in finding out how students, researchers, lecturers and teacher educators, from rural and urban universities in South Africa. Have gone about developing their OERs over the past two years. Then sign up for the DH-OER Champions Showcase and celebration.
Date: 16 November. Time 9:00-15:00 SAST
We look forward to offering our guests a close up perspective on open in South African Higher Education.
Thanks for sharing - Will you be recording the session? I’m keen to learn more about OER activities in South Africa, but the session is not amenable to my time zone.
Hello Wayne. The sessions will be recorded. But I also have been trying to encourage the developers to use a repository to store their OER’s. I will share the programme (with the links) afterwards.
For reference, see also the ESCALTOR project site “Towards an inclusive & active
South African community of practice in Digital Humanities & Computational Social Science”
Multilingual Projects
First up is isiHoxsa.click a language resource site (a student team project)-- Try it https://isixhosa.click/
IsiXhosa.click is an online dictionary for Xhosa and English. The project aims to create a free, open-source, and easily usable dictionary for learners of isiXhosa.
There was mention of connecting the web site’s database to a Flashcard app Anki (another new one for me!)
Second project is Umhuqa Phansi: IsiZulu Web crawler - appears to be a python based web scraper using Beautiful Soup parser (video is in isiZulu but has English explanation overlays)
Third project is “Multilingual Social Work Dictionary for South Africa” (video not yet on YouTube)
Latest social work dictionary available was published in 1995 and only in English and Afrikaans, but many new words in practice not in dictionary plus need to include indigenous languages.
Plans to offer as a downloadable OER and also a mobile app
