The road to Free and Open Educational Resources at the University of the Western Cape: a personal and institutional journey

Abstract

Free and Open Educational Resources at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) are deeply rooted in our institutional culture, stemming from the role we played in the struggle for political freedom in South Africa. The successful development of a strategy has been influenced by this history, as well as the role of a champion in the main decision‐making structures. There is little doubt that the brand recognition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the originator of the ‘MIT Open Courseware’ initiative played a role in the acceptance of the strategy within the UWC. The focus at the UWC is on the benefits of freedom that include social justice, rather than solely on the utility benefits, hence the continued use of the term Freedom within the conceptualisation and the choice of licences consistent with that concept. Implementation of the strategy has to be sustainable within the institutional context, so the implementation of it is linked to the e‐learning tools that are in use at the UWC, which from 2009 will automate the sharing of courseware via a standards‐based repository. It is also linked to building sustainable institutional support through the activities of the eLearning Development and Support Unit of the university.

Keywords:

• open courseware
• South Africa
• digital freedom
• e‐learning
• free content

Introduction

The tapestry into which the Free and Open Educational Resources (F/OER) story is being woven is rich and varied, as the contributions in this issue will attest. Even definitions and conceptualisations of what we mean by the key concepts are not universally agreed (Downes, 2007; Geser, 2007), with concepts of ‘open’ being in more common use than concepts of ‘free’.

Declaration on Libre Knowledge

The Declaration on Libre Knowledge (http://www.wikieducator.org/Declaration_on_libre_knowledge) emphasises the notion of ‘libre’ (free) over open – and although the University of the Western Cape (UWC) strategy predates this initiative, it is more aligned to ‘libre’ than to the notion of ‘open’.

Perhaps the story of the UWC initiative offers a perspective that has common elements with others, but that is also sufficiently different to offer some insights into the benefits of retaining the notion of Freedom in the concept. There is also a personal journey contained in this story at the UWC, for it is often the personal journeys that drive the institutional ones, much as we often imagine otherwise. This story is a snapshot at one point in time in a journey that is still very much underway, and one which aims at building institutional sustainability.

UWC and the notion of freedom

The UWC was established in 1960 as an ethnic college for ‘coloured’ students, and became a full university in 1973. In 1978 its council rejected the ideological basis on which it had been founded, and in 1983 the institution gained independence from direct political control. The UWC has played a pivotal role in South Africa’s liberation struggle against oppression and discrimination, and under the leadership of Rector Prof Jakes Gerwel declared itself ‘an intellectual home for the left’ during the 1980s–1990s. This mantra implied a deep intellectual engagement with the issues of freedom and democracy in order to prepare for the post‐liberation democratic political dispensation that was coming. The ‘left’ in this case meant the liberation movement, not merely a political left as it is commonly applied elsewhere. The focus was on teaching the next generation of leaders, while providing opportunities for academic engagement by some of those who would be the first generation to lead after the establishment of democracy.

Under the leadership of the current Rector, Prof Brian O’Connell, the UWC emerged from a difficult time both financially and otherwise, and established the notion of an ‘engaged university’, within which the concept of engaged implies a deep intellectual engagement with the challenges of our times. One of those challenges is, of course, continuing to understand, protect and improve the democratic principles of freedom and social justice. This means both that F/OER is important as a means to enable us to achieve our broader goals, and that the concept of ‘digital freedom’ within which F/OER is embedded must also be a strong component of our engagement. As the Chancellor, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, mentioned in opening the Digital Freedom Exposition at the UWC in 2007, ‘In a digital world, there are many threats to our hard‐won liberty’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdydCoiru4o).

Within the UWC, we are able to speak of concepts such as liberty and freedom because the concepts are so deeply rooted in our institutional culture, and we continue to engage with the issue of what it means to be free in a democratic state. The notion of freedom embodied in concepts such as free software, free culture, free content, and digital freedom resonate well with our history and our institutional culture.

Champion on the inside: a personal journey

When I began to see the potential benefit of the World Wide Web to education in 1994, after watching technologies come and go for many years, I started experimenting with the technology. By 1995 I had established a web server in my academic department (Botany) and had begun to create and mirror content for use in my courses. This was at a time when the Information Technology Department saw its role as supporting the administration, and it had to be coerced into supporting even email for academics by some activist academics in the Physics and Botany Departments who set up their own email servers.

By 1996 I had realised that others in different parts of the world were doing the same thing that I was doing, creating specialised content for their courses, but that so much more could be achieved if we could share the load instead of recreating course content. I knew nothing of free or open source software, but continued to create content for my own classes, as well as the rudiments of some scripts that eventually became a learning management system of sorts.

In 1997 I stumbled upon the GNU/General Public licence created for software by Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, and I longed for something similar for content, with processes similar to software collaboration for educational content creators. I released a programme that I had written, called Knowledge Environment for Web Learning (KEWL), under this licence and started attaching the GNU/General Public licence to my educational content, but it was not satisfactory. Then David Wiley came to the rescue with his Open Content licensing scheme in 1998/1999.

The late 1990s were a tough time for the UWC. In the wake of democratic elections, budgets were decreased, and a sequence of events led to severe financial difficulty. Against this backdrop, a number of academics lobbied ‘the administration’ to take academic computing seriously. However, in 1998 we had a major blow in that a significant percentage of the academic staff were retrenched or given voluntary severance. Voluntary severance also had a severe effect on the Information Technology Department, and resources were stretched to the limit. The university only barely survived. However, amidst the turmoil there was hope, and a number of us established a Teaching and Learning Technology Round Table. Instrumental in this were Karolina O’Donoghue, Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) Faculty, and later Director of the Teaching and Learning Technologies Unit) and Prof Peter Vale (Academic Vice Rector). This put academic computing, the Internet and the World Wide Web firmly on the institutional agenda, and ultimately led to the establishment of an executive management portfolio, the Information and Communication Services (ICS), to create and drive a new vision of how information and communications technology could help the UWC advance its academic mission.

The position of Executive Director (equivalent in many ways to Chief Information Officer or vice president for information technology in some institutions) was created to lead the new unit. The Executive Director is a full member of the seven‐person executive management team, and reports to the Rector as do the other five members. What was important was that the Council asked for ‘an accomplished academic’ to lead the ICS, not necessarily a technology specialist. It was thus that I was able to apply and was successful in securing the position. I became a champion on the inside, participating in the key institutional conversations (see Keats & Darries, 2003).

Events and strategies set the scene

Keats and Shuttleworth (2003) – in an article completed in 2002 – discussed the state of ‘open content’ and talked about a strategy for how institutions might create a global knowledge commons. This was written before Wikipedia was launched, and well before the formal F/OER movement was born. The ideas contained in this article were expressed in several strategies developed by the ICS, including the Integrated Information Strategy (Keats, 2002) and the e‐Learning Strategy (Keats et al., 2004). The UWC’s work in Free and Open Source Software was also known inside the university, thus there was already a discourse about which the ideas could be expressed, and this discourse set the stage for the development of the Free Content and Free and Open Courseware Implementation Strategy (Keats & Ridge, 2005), which was approved by the Senate and Council of the University in late 2005. Keats and Darries (2003) alluded to this in discussing the importance of organisational conversations that help to create possibilities and drive them to become realities.

In addition, in 2004 we held the Idlelo: The First African Conference on the Digital Commons at the UWC, and among the speakers was Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement. It was perhaps Stallman who helped us understand more deeply the link between the politics of Free Software and the politics of our democratic struggle. This ultimately lead to the Digital Freedom Exposition in April 2007, which saw several leaders in the area of digital freedom speak to an audience that included many of the senior management of the university, including deans and heads of departments. Speakers included Lawrence Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Brian Behlendorf and others, with video contributions from Mark Shuttleworth, Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall, Vint Cerf, Richard Branson, Peter Gabriel and a marvellous contribution on digital freedom by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Exposition received considerable media attention and raised the profile of the notion of digital freedom within the university and its community. Thus, the conversation within the UWC has been supplemented by ongoing conversations that keep the discourse alive.

The vision that the document expresses is of an institution that understands the principles underpinning the concept of digital freedom, and both contributes to and draws from the global commons of free learning resources without losing sight of that knowledge. Thus, the strategy offers definitions that serve to reinforce these principles (Table 1) that have been derived from published literature and web sites (for example, Lessig, 2001; MIT OpenCourseWare), as well as from personal involvement in producing and researching free and open content over several years (for example, Keats, 2003; Keats & Shuttleworth, 2003; Keats et al., 2003).

Table 1. Definitions contained in the UWC strategy.

Concept	Definition
Free content	Content that contributes to social good by recognising four freedoms and one restriction that safeguards and promotes those freedoms. With free content, anyone has the following rights: • to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work without requiring any further permission than that granted by this freedom (Freedom 1); • to exercise this freedom for any purpose under any circumstances, including commercial use (Freedom 2); • to make derivative works (Freedom 3); • to copy, distribute, display, and perform the derivative work (Freedom 4). The restriction below ensures that the first four freedoms are passed on in derived content: • if the work is altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, resulting work may only be distributed under an identical licence that includes this restriction (copyleft restriction). An optional further restriction is permissible with free content in that it may require the original author to be given credit. This restriction stipulates: • the original author(s) or producers(s) of the content as well as the author(s) or producer(s) of derived works must be acknowledged and given credit for their contribution.
Free courseware	Free content that is arranged in courses and made available in a structured manner via the Internet.
Open content	Content that includes some, but not necessarily all, of the freedoms of free content. For example, open content may restrict the conditions under which the content can be used (e.g. content may carry a non‐commercial restriction, or not allow the production of derivative works).
	The emphasis in the philosophy of open content is access while protecting the author’s wishes to restrict access or usage to certain conditions. All free content is open content, but not all open content is free content.
Open courseware	Open content that is arranged in courses and made available in a structured manner via the Internet. All free courseware is open courseware, but not all open courseware is free courseware.

In retrospect, both restrictions in the free content definition should have been considered options. These principles have since been encompassed in the Declaration on Free Knowledge (http://www.wikieducator.org/Declaration_on_libre_knowledge), and the UWC strategy may need some revisions in the light of this declaration.

The approval process

Three governance groups were involved in the approval process: the Executive Management Committee, Senate, and Council. The first step was to create the draft document and discuss it with knowledgeable and interested colleagues. This helped refine the thinking and create a language that was aligned to the UWC’s institutional culture, as noted earlier. The draft document was then taken to the executive management committee, which consists of the Rector, two vice rectors, executive directors of finance, human resources and the ICS, as well as the registrar and institutional planner. The document was discussed there, and some minor changes were made, chiefly to do with the financial aspects of the strategy.

The document was then placed on a website, a discussion forum was established and the campus community was notified of it. Following this, minor corrections were made and the strategy was submitted to the Executive Committee of Senate (academic governance) and the Executive Committee of Council (corporate governance), of which the Executive Director of the ICS is a member. It was approved there with very little discussion, other than some questions about practical aspects of implementation. It was thus served at the full Senate and Council thereafter, and passed with almost no discussion. The support of the Rector and the Academic Vice Rector in both the Senate and Council were also important for establishing trust, and this facilitated the smooth passage to approval.

The vision

The vision of the UWC strategy is one in which the UWC is engaged in both the creation and use of F/OER during the course of its normal operations. For this reason, the university agreed to set up a server to host F/OER, and we decided to build the functionality into our free software learning management system (KEWL3) to both receive and export packages according to IMS (The IMS Global Learning Consortium creates specifications and standards for e‐learning – http://www.imsglobal.org/specifications.html). The vision was that we would be consumers, producers and modifiers of existing F/OER materials, and would have both the technology and the institutional process in place to support this vision. It was also envisaged that the institution would not be passive, but rather an active participant in the global F/OER network, and we were able to leverage an external opportunity to appoint someone to lead the project‐based initiatives under the ambit of the Free Courseware project.

Choice of licences

The UWC chose the Creative Commons licences that are most compatible with the notion of freedom. In particular, it chose to avoid the NonCommercial restriction on freedom of use and reuse that characterises Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare. The conditions under which licence choice is recommended in the strategy are indicated in Table 2.

Table 2. Recommendations for choosing licences at the UWC.

Condition	Recommended licence	Notes
Where no immediate commercial revenue is expected	Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike (BY‐SA) licence	The ShareAlike restriction that ensures any derivative works, even if done for commercial purposes, can benefit the author and the community
Where content is expected to be published commercially	Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial ShareAlike (BY‐NC‐SA)	It is recommended that, following the lapse of a period of time (e.g. five years) after which commercial revenue is unlikely, the licence should revert to BY‐SA even for work in this category
Where derivative works are not appropriate, such as when the item is an opinion piece	Creative Commons Attribution–No Derivatives (BY‐ND)	For an opinion piece, you may not wish your expression to be modified, and then attributed in whole or in part
Where these licences are not possible; for example, when publishing in a collection where the publisher does not allow these licences	Academic staff members are therefore encouraged to request that their article to be granted a BY‐SA licence whenever possible	Even diehard publishers will sometimes allow individual articles or chapters to publish under such licences when asked to do so

Project‐based implementation

In the absence of donor funding on the scale that got the F/OER initiatives started at MIT and other institutions with external support, we decided that we would need to set more modest goals. The Free Courseware project was established to begin the process of:

•	setting up a Free Courseware server and identifying some existing courses within the UWC that could be converted to F/OER and made available on it;
•	setting up a mirror of the MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative content, later made unnecessary by the hosting an OpenCourseWare server on the South African higher education network backbone; and
•	establishing some projects to work with both lecturers and students to use and produce reusable resources (Rip‐Mix‐Learn with lecturers, Rip‐Mix‐Learners with students).

Due to the time constraints related to going live with an enterprise‐ready system, KEWL3 with support for F/OER would not be available until the second semester of 2008 (July–November). However, at the time of writing, this has now been completed and courses are being put into the system for use in 2009. In addition, an EduCommons site has been set up to which the courses will automatically be published from the start of the 2009 academic year (beginning of February). Since the software and the institutional processes for doing this are still untested in production, there will undoubtedly be some refinement to both process and technology before we are confident that we are able to automate the process fully. In 2009 the UWC courses that have an online component will then be available in a form that others can use.

In spite of the limitations inherent in the need to build sustainable processes, in 2008 the UWC was elected onto the Board of the OpenCourseware Consortium, which could be seen as testimony for our work as an important voice representing the perspective of developing country institutions.

Discussion

Smooth passage of strategy

The reasons for the smooth passage of this strategy through the university structures are many, but I believe that paramount among them were:

•	a pre‐existing discourse about liberty into which the strategy fits;
•	elements of the strategy were already part of existing strategies; and
•	the alignment to the notion of ‘freedom’ and our institutional history and culture.

A secondary factor in facilitating the approval process was the opportunity for the UWC to join the OpenCourseware Consortium, something that was generally appealing, given the value the UWC constituency places on international networking and collaboration. That this was led by an institution that has global recognition in academia also undoubtedly played a role in the acceptance of the strategy.

Choice of licences

Some of the reasons for avoiding the NonCommercial restriction are provided by Keats (2006). We were able to choose the licences that were selected in part because of the discourse on freedom within the university, and the industrial information economy mindset of content as property was not firmly established. The licences are aligned to the concepts of freedom as envisioned in the strategy.

In particular, we avoid the NonCommercial restriction wherever possible because this places a restriction on the users that prevents them from mixing content with different licences in derivative works based on multiple sources (licence incompatibility). More importantly, it largely excludes the private sector from contributing to educational resources. In the case of software, there are no licences in any successful application that exclude private‐sector contributions. Indeed, given the significant contribution made by commercial interests, it is doubtful whether free and open source software would exist were commercial interests precluded from participating in and contributing to the ecosystem.

Why freedom is important

It is interesting that in much of the discourse on F/OER, particularly the OER part, the notion of freedom is often avoided. In the recent publication Open Educational Practices Resources that resulted from a study carried out by Salzburg Research with financial support from the European Commission (Geser, 2007), the notion of freedom was not mentioned, although some of its key short‐term practical benefits were pointed out. Including freedom in the discourse might lead to a deeper understanding of the key benefits of what Benkler (2006) refers to as non‐market production. Benkler (2006) believes that, and provides supporting evidence and arguments for, non‐market production of F/OER and other free cultural resources improve freedom and social justice in liberal, democratic societies. It would be a great shame to lose this from the F/OER discourse, where education is a prime contributor to equality, democracy and social justice.

Keats and Schmidt (2007) outlined changes that are incipient in higher education that they referred to as Education 3.0, in which the role of the person learning (student in today’s terminology) is heightened and institutional boundaries are much more porous than they are in most current higher education systems. The freedom of learners to reuse educational materials freely, under only the requirements of academic goals in a particular context, is vital to our understanding of Education 3.0.

Slow path to sustainability

Given that the UWC has only published a small number of courses that are outside the institutional processes and technologies up until now, it would be easy to think that F/OER has no traction within the university. While there is still a lot of internal communication and promotion to be done in 2009 through the activities of the eLearning Development and Support Unit of the university, there is general widespread acceptance of the principles. Building institutionally sustainable processes, putting in place technologies to implement them, and getting actual buy‐in from participants is a slow process. But it is on this foundation that the future must rest if our involvement in F/OER is to be sustainable.

Conclusion

There is little doubt that F/OER is changing the landscape of education, consistent with the tendency of the early twenty‐first century to evolve towards the non‐market production of information as discussed by Benkler (2006). This is making new approaches to education possible. For example, institutions may wish to accredit learning achieved (Keats & Schmidt, 2007) rather than only that which is acquired through formal courses. Institutions may align themselves with a framework of freedom and openness in order to maintain quality while moving into this space. In Africa, where the scale of available academic specialisations in any single institution is limited, this kind of explicit and implicit collaboration will prove vital if we are to achieve the potential of higher education on the continent. At the UWC, we are an early‐adopter at the strategic level, and we hope that through our collaborative activities we will inspire other African institutions, and indeed other institutions in other countries, to take similar steps and establish strategies to implement and promote F/OER in a way that is sustainable within their means.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks numerous people for their contribution to the creation and implementation of the strategies referred to here, as well as for valuable discussion: Brian O’Connell, Stanley Ridge, Karolina O’Donoghue, Peter Vale, Shirley Walters, Dirk Meerkotter, Christopher Tapscott, Ellen Tise, Jan van Bever Donker, Isabel Venter, Shirley Walters, Tahir Wood, Madiny Darries, Juliet Stoltenkamp and Philipp Schmidt. The author also thanks the International Development Research Centre (Canada), the United States Agency for International Development (USA), the Department of Science and Technology (South Africa) and The Shuttleworth Foundation (South Africa) for supporting the work that is reported here in a variety of ways. The author thanks Stanley Ridge for his valuable feedback on a previous draft.