Digital Open Textbooks for Development
Programs and partnerships
Lead institution(s)
Summary
The University of Cape Town (UCT), like many other African universities, is grappling with how to respond to the need for more locally relevant curricula. Some of the curriculum is dated and lacking in modern pedagogical practices.Read more
The University of Cape Town (UCT), like many other African universities, is grappling with how to respond to the need for more locally relevant curricula. Some of the curriculum is dated and lacking in modern pedagogical practices. Added to the imperative of curriculum transformation, the cost of textbooks is increasingly prohibitive. The average cost of a textbook in South Africa is 12% of the average annual salary. The #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall political movements encapsulate this complex set of interrelated challenges, calling for both cultural recognition and socio-economic redistribution.
Open textbook production is a crucial area of investigation in terms of pursuing a better approach to the provision of teaching and learning materials and the high cost of education that limits access in developing country contexts. The Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) project investigates the current ecosystem of open textbook publishing at the University of Cape Town, as a case study, and provides implementation support in open textbook publishing. It also aims to support policy-makers and other stakeholders in the development of institutional and national policy frameworks that govern open textbook publishing and address long-term sustainability. Located in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at UCT, the project aims to contribute a developing-country perspective on the global debate around open textbook publishing.
Research outputs
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Tim Low’s Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) grant enabled him to start translating the first-year IntroStat textbook from English into isiXhosa. As a senior lecturer at University of Cape Town, Tim advocates for greater inclusivity, localisation and multilingualism in the teaching of statistics at UCT. Enthusiasm for the project was sustained during 2019. However, activity during the normal academic term was not sustainable in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic adding to unpredictability. Two chapters were translated into isiXhosa and licensed in line with the ShareAlike principle. As the original English resource carries an open licence, no copyright issues were encountered.
Research by the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) project at UCT indicates that in many instances students are choosing to forego purchasing of textbooks, thereby jeopardising learning outcomes – not only because they are unaffordable, but also because they are deemed unfit for context, or because courses make use of only a fraction of the overall content. The two-page paper is a call for national support and coordination in order to grow and develop an open textbook community of practice, in addition to current institutional efforts.
This landscape survey utilised a desktop review approach combined with selective consultation with key partners, colleagues who were open education advocates, and practitioners, in order to produce a comprehensive list of open textbooks published at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The study reveals a minimum of 39 open textbooks were published by UCT authors in the period 2010–2021, and that there was uneven distribution of open textbook output across different faculties. As well, numerous (21 of 39) of UCT open textbooks were hosted on more than one platform, with OpenUCT and the UCT Libraries Continental Platform being the primary host environments.
Through the work of Learning Innovation through Orthopaedic Networks (LION), Dr. Held aims to provide an interactive educational platform for medical students and primary care providers in Southern Africa. His grant from the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) supports development of the Orthopaedics for Primary Health Care open textbook. There is a severe lack of African learning materials which are tailored to local pathology and circumstances, and written by local experts. All content in the Orthopaedics for Primary Health Care collection is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
This case study draws from the experience of Associate Professor Maria Keet (Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town/UCT, 2018) who wrote the first textbook in the new subfield of ontological engineering, “An Introduction to Ontology Engineering.” The Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) project is a research, advocacy and implementation initiative based in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at UCT. Aimed at Honours and early postgraduate students, the work identifies and demarcates ontology engineering; introduces its essential components; provides explainers, summaries of scientific papers, as well as interactive exercises.