The role of postgraduate students in co-authoring open educational resources to promote social inclusion: a case study at the University of Cape Town

Abstract

Like many universities worldwide, the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa has joined the open educational resources (OER) movement, making a selection of teaching and learning materials available through its OER directory, UCT OpenContent. However, persuading and then supporting busy academics to share their teaching materials as OER still remains a challenge. In this article, we report on an empirical study of how UCT postgraduate students have assisted in the process of reworking the academics’ teaching materials as OER. Using the concept of contradictions (Engeström, 2001), we endeavor to surface the various disturbances or conflicts with which the postgraduate students had to engage to make OER socially inclusive, as well as Engeström’s “layers of causality” (2011, p. 609) to explain postgraduate students’ growing sense of agency as they experienced the OER development process as being socially inclusive.

Keywords:

• open educational resources
• social inclusion
• activity theory
• contradictions
• agency

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town for a grant to undertake this research and to the senior students supported by the UCT OER Project and the African Health OER Project for their participation in this study.