The Educator Track

Develop and use Open Educational Resources


About Educator

This track aims to connect those wanting to develop educational materials related to Digital Humanities or Computational Social Sciences in the South African context to open education communities and existing resources.

The ESCALATOR DH OER Champions Initiative

Our first iteration of DH OER Champions Initiative ran from March 2022 - November 2023.The Digital Humanities Open Educational Resources Champions initiative was initially led by Prof Jako Olivier, previously NWU UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources (OER). In 2023, Derek Moore took over leadership of the programme and helped us to complete the first round. Read more…

Other Global Initiatives

Since the DH OER Champions programme will have a specific intake date and duration, we would like to highlight the existance of other opportunities to get involved in the development and use of OERs for those who are unable to participate in the DH OER Champions programme.

For a range of global initiatives, please see the list below.

If you are interested to learn more about initiatives listed here, please let us know!

Digital Humanities Open Educational Resources Champions

A collaboration with the NWU UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources

In 2022 the DH OER Champions initiative was led by Prof Jako Olivier, previously NWU UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources (OER). The purpose of the initiative is to stimulate activism and research around the use and/or creation of OER for the digital humanities (DH) at universities in South Africa.

Scholars from South African universities were invited to apply to participate in the initiative which launched in March 2022 and concluded in November 2023. The opportunity was available to researchers, lecturers, and postgraduate students interested to include new online resources to their teaching or adapt their resources to their students' specific contexts. The programme provided support and funding for creating or adapting open learning content as well as researching the process.

A grant of R20 000 was made available to each successful application.

Read more about the initiative and application process…

** Applications are now closed. The programme commenced in March 2022.

** The programme team is currently reviewing the outcome of the initiative to identify ways to improve subsequent rounds.

DH OER Projects 2022-2023

Below is a list of projects that are currently under way as part of the DH OER Champions Initiative that commenced in March 2022. Click on the project title for author information and keywords. More information will be shared as projects progress.

*
Academic literacy development in public relations through gamification

Academic literacy development in public relations through gamification

View OER product Project description The project involves developing a self-paced, online course for first-year students to learn academic literacy in the context of public relations. This is to help students who are at risk of dropping out being unprepared for university demands, struggling with English as a second language and being first-generation university students (Motsabi, Diale and van Zyl, 2020; Van Zyl et al.

Digital Humanities & Image Scholarship

Digital Humanities & Image Scholarship

DH skills; digital, media, image and visual culture scholarship; critical digital humanities; writing for Substack; visual/video essays; digital image archives.

Digitisation of the Early Black South African Press

Digitisation of the Early Black South African Press

Newspapers, journalism, multilingualism

Information literacy skills programme

SMART Identification, Evaluation, Use, and communication of information.

IsiXhosa.click

IsiXhosa.click

IsiXhosa, Dictionary, Language learning.

Modern Architectures in the Global South (MA.gS+)

Modern Architectures in the Global South (MA.gS+)

Inventory of modern architectures, global South, histories and theories.

Umhuqa Phansi: IsiZulu Corpus Generator

Umhuqa Phansi: IsiZulu Corpus Generator

isiZulu, spoken corpus, vowels, sound spectrogram.

UWC/Oppelt Photographic Digital Collections

UWC/Oppelt Photographic Digital Collections

View OER product Project description Our team will create an online platform to host digital derivatives of physical artefacts found in UWC Library’s Special Collections. Special Collections houses rare and unique books, but also various other artefacts.

Alternative resources for Educators

Open Education for a Better World offers a tuition-free online mentorship programme supporting people wanting to develop open educational materials including open online courses and textbooks. Applications open towards the end of the year. The program is open to all candidates with a concrete idea, clear motivation and strong commitment to develop and deliver an open online course or other large-scale open resource (e.g., an open textbook) aligned with the SDGs. There are no limitations regarding the education or professional background of candidates.
The Carpentries teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. A community of volunteers contribute to collaboratively developed lessons that are published under open licenses. Their Curriculum Development Handbook contains valuable insights for lesson developers. The Carpentries also have a Lesson Incubator where community members can share their Carpentry-style teaching materials at all stages of development, to collaborate on lesson development, and receive feedback from other community members. New-comers can also learn about the infrastructure and process by contributing to lessons that are currently under development. A number of lessons currently under development relates to humanities and social sciences. All lessons are published under open licences. Lesson infrastructure is published under open-source licenses and can be used for free for lesson development.
The Programming Historian is a peer-reviewed, novice-friendly publication that focuses on tutorials relevant to the humanities. Tutorials cover a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. All tutorials are published under open licenses. There are no costs involved to work with the Programming Historian or publish tutorials. Clear guidelines are provided to help tutorial editors develop tutorials that can be sustained in the long term and that contains accessible content for a broad audience. Published lessons can be found on their website. Lessons under development is available from their Github repository.
This book by Greg Wilson offers practical and very useful tips for developing better ways of teaching tech skills. The content is based on research evidence (with great links to references from education science) and years of experience in the classroom. The book is freely available online.