Featured Report: Open Educational Resources

Building Open Educational Resources from the Ground Up: South Africa's Free High School Science Texts

This month's featured report from the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education offers a truly useful case study in how open education projects can not only survive but also thrive. The report follows the development and unexpected growth of a project whose goal was to create a free high school science text for all teachers and learners in South Africa.

The study provides other organizations working in the field of open education not only with a set of best practices unique to our field but also with on-the-ground ideas about how to assess, track, and share our learnings in ways that are in keeping with the spirit and goals of the relatively new field of open educational resources.

Some of the key points in the case study included:

• The important role that face-to-face collaboration played in sustaining momentum during the development of this online project.
  
  
• The necessity of having content facilitated and vetted both from the top-down and bottom-up, ensuring its relevance at the same time as ensuring that it would meet broader standards.
  
  
• An organizational culture and work process that valued experimentation and adaptation.

There are many more interesting lessons and insights to gain from this short report. If your work even touches on educational content, open access, online archiving, knowledge sharing, nonprofit evaluation, or nonprofit management, give this one a read.

And for more research on the subject of open education resources, check out IssueLab's OER research repository.