To help you plan your participation the conference program schedule can be filtered by date, venue, session type, and session format using the Filter functions.
Filter by Date lets you look at a specific day of the program. Filter by Venue lets you look at the program by venue rooms where sessions are taking place. Filter by Type lets you look at the program by track. In addition to keynotes and breaks the program is made up of three main tracks or types of sessions Pedagogy, Roles, and Strategies. Clicking on a type in Filter by Type lets you see only sessions of that type in the program schedule. In addition, Pedagogy, Roles, and Strategies each have a set of associated topics. Topics appear when you hover over a type name in the Filter by Type area of Sched. Topics are clickable allowing you to further filter the program by topic. Session Format lets you view the program by types of sessions - Action Labs, Lightning Talks, Posters, Presentations, and World Cafes.
The conference program is rich and diverse representing the current state of open education around the world.
Open textbook initiatives are demonstrating cost-savings in the United States and Canada. The case is therefore increasingly being made for the production and use open textbooks from an economic perspective. At the University of Cape Town (UCT), the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) project, which began in July 2018, is also investigating cost savings. However, the impetus for this project is premised on the potential for open textbooks to play a key role in transforming the curriculum. This is particularly relevant in the South African higher education context, where student protests from 2014-2107 called for decolonisation of the curriculum and free university education.
The DOT4D project has three components. The research process includes a landscape survey of open textbook publishing at UCT, case studies on UCT open textbook development initiatives, and an intellectual property policy landscape survey. The implementation component provides small grants to enable academics to create and adapt open textbooks. And lastly, advocacy activity engages stakeholders in the South African higher education system in a conversation around what is required to promote and sustain a scaleable, institutionally driven approach to open textbook production.
This presentation will include examples of the application of the DOT4D, social justice, agency and intersectional approach. It will highlight the role of open textbook creators as agents who have embraced an intersectional and transformative approach to collaborative authoring of teaching materials. The purpose of using this social justice approach is to identify the injustices that are present in current student access to textbooks. This research will also consider how open textbook creators are moving towards a transformed and just approach to textbook creation and use.
