Group Admins
Description
Pre-Recorded resources/notes
This video is slightly outdated as the University of Cape Town was shutdown due to the spread of Covid-19 in South Africa. The country had a lockdown on the 26 March but prior to that the university had moved to working from home. Therefore the infection rates and state of the world discussed in the video will reflect the past.
http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/onebuttonstudio
Session Description
“At the heart of the open educational resources (OER) movement is the intention to provide affordable access to culturally relevant education to all” (Hodgkinson-Williams and Trotter, 2018). This quote is at the heart of the alternative format session to showcase the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) One Button Studio (OBS), an automated video recording studio built at UCT. UCT educators are able to use the OBS system free of charge and it provides them with a full turnkey service from video recording, creating podcasts and screencasts and to video editing as well as the distribution or publishing OER on various platforms.
This proposal addresses the second theme of the conference to showcase practices that support sustainable open education communities. It responds to Hodgkinson-Williams and Trotter’s (2018) point that global south educators and students are excluded from fully participating in creating sustainable OER because of a lack of access to educational infrastructure, uninterrupted power supply, functional technological equipment, affordable and stable connectivity and access to requisite educational materials.
UCT’s OBS is based on the Penn State University’s concept (an open resource video recording solution), but it was extended and adapted to be integrated into the University’s learning management system, which is a Sakai instance, called “Vula” (“open” in IsiXhosa). This is a crucial adaptation from the original concept and provides the recorded video on a flash disk. The UCT system, on the other hand, is set up to so the video is processed and exported to the educators account where they can edit their video on OpenCast, an open source platform. This enables them to distribute the video to their various blended and online courses.
The OBS an innovative solution in the global south as it allows user-friendly production of OER by the educators themselves which can have a positive influence upon the attitudes of educators to OER. The system is easy-to-use and free for all UCT educators. It is operated entirely with a press of a button. It also cuts out production costs for UCT educators who do not have the skills or funding. The session will illustrate how an entire system can be built on the ethos of open resource with the back-end developed on open platforms and software. The session will also showcase examples of OER and social justice videos that were created in the OBS.
Not only does the OBS make accessible a professional studio recording service to educators, but it is also used to train and upskill educators to be reflexive about their role in the safety of the automated studio. To illustrate the practice of how global south academics are being supported to create OER at UCT using the OBS, the session will be a “flipped conference” presentation where the presenter will record a 5-7 minute made video in the OBS and be physically present to respond to questions.
References
Hodgkinson-Williams, C. A. and Trotter, H. (2018) ‘A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South.’, Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3), pp. 204–224.
