Shuttleworth develops open education

Houston-based Rice University and the Cape Town-based Shuttleworth Foundation today announced plans to jointly develop one of the world’s largest, most comprehensive sets of free online teaching materials for primary and secondary school children. 

The organisations will work to transform South African primary and secondary education with a bold initiative based on open-source software, online educator communities and open copyright licenses. 

Ultimately, the group hopes to offer a complete suite of the highest caliber K12 materials online for free. This comprehensive repository of educational resources includes everything from online textbooks to classroom activities, experiments and training materials. 

Using Rice’s “Connexions” project and Shuttleworth’s “Siyavula”, the organisations will work together to create an open source resource repository. Siyavula will create an online community of educators in South Africa that will expand, update and use the lessons. The newly created content will reside in the Connexions repository, one of the largest open-education resources (OER) repositories.

Because it is licensed under the Creative Commons attribution license, all material in Connexions is available to the world to use and reuse for free. The Connexions platform will be used to distribute the project’s content.

Connexions Executive Director Joel Thierstein stated “The Connexions platform allows materials to be translated and remixed to make them culturally relevant and thus usable throughout the world," Thierstein added. "Connexions allows instructors to rearrange lessons, reorder chapters and add their own materials, in effect giving each teacher the ability to create his or her own customised textbook. Finally, the Connexions platform makes it easy to print materials, as well."

Siyavula Project Manager Mark Horner said the Rice-Shuttleworth team will create the software that South African educators need to develop and maintain a comprehensive set of educational resources that cover the entire South African school curriculum.