Webinar: Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D)

For the next webinar, we are delighted to host GO-GN alumnus, and award winner Dr Glenda Cox as the next speaker. Glenda  is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town, and completed her PhD on the relations between culture, structure and agency in lecturers, focusing on how and why they choose to use OER. This talk is on her work post PhD on the Digital Open Textbooks for Development project. Join us on Wednesday 5th December, 4pm GMT, if you can.

Glenda has written a brief background to her talk, as follows:

This presentation will provide an overview of the IDRC funded Digital Open Textbooks for Development project, which is aimed at conducting research on open textbook publishing at the University of Cape Town (UCT), providing support to academics at UCT in the form of small grants, and undertaking advocacy activity, nationally, to promote policy development that supports more open, inclusive textbook publishing models. The project runs until December 2020.

UCT, like many other South African universities, is grappling with how to respond meaningfully and creatively to the call for more relevant curricula and pedagogies (Luckett & Shay, 2017). Added to the imperative of curriculum transformation, the cost of textbooks is increasingly prohibitive, resulting in an access crisis where students are forced into either simply not having the resource (thereby compromising the learning process) or participating in various kinds of “shadow library” activities and informal sharing of key resources (Gray & Czerniewicz, 2018). The #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements encapsulate this complex set of interrelated challenges, calling for both socio-economic redistribution and cultural recognition. Open Textbooks have the potential to address these highlighted economic, cultural and political injustices (Fraser, 2005).

The presentation will include a description of the conceptual approach that we will use in the DOT4D project, a proposed social justice intersectional model.

The webinar took place on Wednesday 5th December 2018, 4pm GMT. A recording is below: