Siyavula

Siyavula is a project to support teachers to work collaboratively to share and develop openly licensed resources under a Creative Commons copyright license, resources which can be printed, adapted to ensure cultural relevance and refreshed freely without the barriers associated with the vast majority of material which is under a traditional, restrictive copyright licence.

Siyavula will work with teachers and partners to support the online community in the sharing of knowledge and resources to save teachers time and allow them to focus on delivering quality education. To achieve this, Siyavula has partnered with open education resources pioneer, Connexions, to extend their education portal to serve as the foundation for Siyavula’s community of educators.

To ensure that educators can fully harness the power of the knowledge portal, Siyavula has also partnered with Edunova and a team of expert community facilitators, so that teachers gain maximum benefit from the support team and portal.

Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) has also embraced the Siyavula project and is the driving force behind understanding the participatory model so that Siyavula can adapt to match teachers needs most effectively. ISKME builds capacity for data gathering and critical inquiry at the programme level to share information and resulting findings across the board to advance local knowledge, opportunities and the field of open education resources at large.

Making sense of Open Content and Community

Open content is all about sharing.

In a brave new world of collaborative learning, open content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know.

Additionally, teachers can comment and suggest remediation to other educator's works to ensure that key messages are conveyed in the most sensible way possible. This not only stimulates participation, but catapults the quality of education materials into a whole new dimension.

For more information about the principles of open education visit the Cape Town Open Education Declaration website where you can read the declaration and many common questions are answered.

What is the Connexions approach?

Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web.

Its Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone - from children to college students to professionals - organised in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license.

Creative Commons By-attribution (CC-BY) licence allows:

• use,
• adaptation,
• printing, and
• distribution
• All you have to do is give credit (attribution) to the original author. All CC-BY material is identified by this symbol:

Connexions is based on the fact that when people share their knowledge, they can select from the best ideas to create the most effective learning materials. The knowledge in Connexions can be shared and built upon by all because it is legally reusable and customisable.

Connexions also promotes communication between content creators and provides various means of collaboration. Collaboration helps knowledge grow more quickly, advancing the possibilities for new ideas from which we all benefit.

How do I get involved with Siyavula?

To join Siyavula, simply go to the Siyavula website, create an account and sign up to receive the monthly newsletter, which will ensure that you stay informed on the latest news as well as upcoming events.

The site also features a blog detailing the latest news and developments at Siyavula, as well as case studies and reports on how to get more involved in open education.

By building communities, Siyavula will help teachers like you find support and consolidate your learnings whilst sharing valuable resources that are immediately available to you as an educator.

Working together we can achieve much more than working in isolation.