Browsing by Author "Butcher, Neil"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    A Contribution Towards Innovating Continuing Professional Development in African Higher Education Institutions
    (2022-09) Lelliott, Tony; Butcher, Neil; Glennie, Jenny
    PCF10 Sub-theme: Fostering Lifelong Learning // Traditional approaches to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) prevalent at many African universities are dominated by face-to-face workshops that take academic staff away from their normal duties. Staff often find it difficult to implement what they learn in such events once they are back in their normal teaching environment. This is exacerbated by several obstacles to staff participation identified in literature on CPD. These include lack of time, resistance to moving away from traditional teaching practices, and that innovative teaching practices are often not a requirement for appointment or for career progression in Higher Education Institutions (Inamorato dos Santos et al. 2019). One possible strategy to alleviate some of these challenges is to provide short, online tutorials that engage participants in authentic learning tasks that can be done individually or collaboratively in their own time, while they are in the workplace. // From 2019 to 2021, OER Africa delivered a series of CPD pilot activities at African universities to introduce more innovative approaches to, through the design and delivery of modular and flexible ‘learning pathways’ (LPs) available at https://bit.ly/2NVj3P5. The LPs discussed in the paper focus on finding and adapting Open Educational Resources, and Open Access Publishing; each consists of several learning activities designed to be accessible on a variety of digital devices. Pilots were implemented via introductory video conferencing, and participants then worked through an online learning pathway over two weeks. Thereafter, an online feedback session was held and data was collected via pre- and post-activity surveys. Findings indicate that the LPs were well-received, showing statistically significant change between baseline and endline tests, suggesting that learning did indeed occur. There was also self-reported evidence for participants using the content of the LPs with their own colleagues and designing better courses for their students. This paper summarizes the development of the LPs and the findings from the pilot evaluation, and discusses implications for CPD policies and processes at HEIs in Africa. // Paper ID 2999
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    A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)
    (2015) Butcher, Neil; Kanwar, Asha; Uvalić-Trumbić, Stamenka
    Its purpose is to provide readers with a quick and user-friendly introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) and some of the key issues to think about when exploring how to use OER most effectively. The second section is a more comprehensive analysis of these issues, presented in the form of a traditional research paper. For those who have a deeper interest in OER, this section will assist with making the case for OER more substantively. The third section is a set of appendices, containing more detailed information about specific areas of relevance to OER. These are aimed at people who are looking for substantive information regarding a specific area of interest. Originally published 2011; Revised 2015.
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    Best Practice in Education Portals: Research Document Prepared for The Commonwealth of Learning and SchoolNet Africa
    (2002) Butcher, Neil
    A key feature of the ongoing growth of the Worldwide Web over the past five years has been a proliferation of web portals that focus on supporting school education. While many such sites require subscription and registration, there are large numbers that deliver services free of charge to anyone with Internet access. This research project has focused on identifying a representative sample of these sites, describing the services that they offer, and distilling an understanding of emerging best practice. In completing the latter task, we have not constrained ourselves to data gathered during this research project, although all of that data is attached as an annexure to this report. Thus, summary of the best ideas we have found - which is also informed by several prior years of research and experimentation by the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) - is presented in this report
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    Exploring the Business Case for Open Educational Resources
    (2012) Butcher, Neil; Hoosen, Sarah
    The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement, which began at the turn of the millennium, was motivated by the ideal that knowledge is the common wealth of humankind and should be freely shared. Most institutions that decided to implement the ideal by creating OER relied on donor funding, notably from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has demonstrated an admirable combination of consistency and flexibility in funding the OER movement around the world. As the OER movement took off, however, questions about its sustainability became increasingly pressing because it could not continue to rely indefinitely on donor funding. Institutions and governments began to review the economics of OER in order to determine whether there was a business case for investing in their production and use. It is against this background that I am delighted to welcome this preliminary version of an essay by Neil Butcher and Sarah Hoosen on The Business Case for Open Educational Resources. It was commissioned by the Commonwealth of Learning as an input to the World OER Congress organized by UNESCO in June 2012. This first version is a work in progress that will be refined and finalised in the light of experiences and results presented at the Congress. The authors do an excellent job of situating the contribution of OER in the wider context of the challenges facing education at all levels in an era of economic stringency. They relate OER to the realities of the teaching-learning process, arguing that greater reliance on resource-based learning, rather than large-group teaching, will be essential if wider access to education of quality is to be achieved. Creating high-quality learning resources ab initio is expensive, but Neil Butcher and Sarah Hoosen present compelling evidence that using OER can reduce this cost substantially. They also present some startling analyses of the economics of textbook production, which again show that systematic processes of investing in OER can create huge savings for governments and students. The commercial publishing industry can play a part in this process. The 2012 World OER Congress will greatly increase awareness of the potential of OER amongst governments and institutions. If this awareness is to lead to greater reliance on OER, then those who develop and use OER will need to be confident of the economic and business case for so doing. The authors have provided a solid basis for debating the business case in a variety of settings. I invite readers to take the debate forward and point the authors to any additional sources of data that might enrich the paper so that the post-Congress version of this report can reflect an even wider understanding of how to use OER to expand and improve education while cutting its cost. Sir John Daniel, Project Director, Fostering Governmental Support for OER Internationally
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    A Government Policy Development Template to Progress Effective Implementation of Open Educational Resources (OER)
    (2012) Butcher, Neil
    This template is designed to help governments to review and develop key policy issues for implementing effective OER policy at national level.
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    Guide to Developing Open Textbooks
    (2016-09) Moore, Andrew; Butcher, Neil; Mishra, Sanjaya
    This how to guide has been developed to assist teachers, teaching support personnel and educational technology administrators to: understand the value of open education, OER and open textbooks for teaching and learning; appreciate the potential value of developing an open textbook platform; select appropriate technology to build an open textbook platform, using either existing services offered free on the Internet or open-source tools, based on local needs and resources; and build, manage and maintain an open textbook platforms.
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    Harnessing OER to Develop Teachers: The Guyana Experience
    (2014) Butcher, Neil; Moore, Andrew; Hoosen, Sarah
    The Ministry of Education in Guyana has prioritised increasing the number of qualified teachers by providing opportunities to both pre- and in-service teachers to gain relevant qualifications. This paper describes the process used to redesign the teacher training curriculum in Guyana to achieve the goals of a newly-developed ICT Professional Development Strategy. The UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (CFT) was central to the redesign process, and was used to review and reorganize the national teacher education curriculum aimed at pre-service teachers. The framework also influenced plans to provide professional development for in-service teachers, and influenced the selection of Open Education Resources (OER) used to develop a new learning environment and the accompanying learning materials for the teaching of ICT in Education. One of the significant lessons learned during this process is that people rather than technology are crucial to transformation. It is essential to have leadership support at the highest levels but also committed champions at all other levels. The process called for the inclusion of local stakeholders who understood and knew how to respond to contextual constraints. Moreover, the process benefited from the use of existing frameworks and the use of cost effective OER to develop the course materials.
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    Harnessing OER to Drive Systemic Educational Change in Secondary Schooling
    (2014) Butcher, Neil; Moore, Andrew; Hoosen, Sarah
    This paper reports on two action research projects which explored the challenge of determining the conditions under which use of OER can drive a transformative educational agenda in schooling systems. At St Peter’s College in Johannesburg, South Africa, a small pilot study was conducted to explore how to best to adopt new teaching and learning methodologies to encourage greater student engagement and responsibility, and to gauge student and staff reactions to a change in teaching and learning methodologies. It placed heavy emphasis on harnessing OER to enable student-led content creation, with a long-term view of demonstrating that students can use OER to create self-paced learning environments that significantly accelerate their journey through the formal curriculum. In Antigua and Barbuda, the research project considered how to facilitate an entire system to change. It recognised that for change to be effective, it needs to be driven at the systemic level, as these ultimately direct the operations of most public schooling systems. The paper explores the different steps taken, starting from the government’s commitment to ICT infrastructure, fostering a policy environment through an ICT in Education policy and an ICT Master Plan to guide procurement and deployment of ICT in schools, and the development of a School ICT integration plan to ensure school’s ICT needs and requirements. The research explored the deployment of an OER Virtual learning Environment (VLE) Prototype, and the compilation of an online mathematics ‘textbook’ from available quality free OER. The paper concludes by highlighting the kinds of systemic actions required for the proponents of OER to build sustained pressure for long-term, educationally effective systemic change.
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    Knowledge Management Strategies for Distance Education
    (2006-10) Butcher, Neil
    PCF4 // This paper will review the importance of effective Knowledge Management in education, with a specific focus on its role in supporting distance education. // THe paper will provide an introduction to the concept of Knowledge Management, and then focus attention to why Knowledge Management has become so important in distance learning. The paper will take readers through a non-technical overview of key design principles that will need to govern any successful knowledge management system for distance learning. In doing this, the paper will draw particularly on best emerging from a collaboration that is focusing on the development on learning object repositories for the African Virtual University and COL’s Virtual University for Small States. // Paper ID 73
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    Knowledge Management Strategies for Distance Education
    (2007) Butcher, Neil
    During the past century, rapid development of an information society and growth in the quantity of accessible information was given considerable momentum with the development of information and communication technologies (ICT), which allow people to interact with each other and to share digital information relatively easily. An example of this is the Internet. For many people the information explosion has led to an overwhelming feeling of information overload. Internet searches for relevant information yield a growing number of results that are unrelated to the searched topic or are only marginally useful, while growing amounts of the information available are of poor quality. If information and knowledge are to be of practical value they must be effectively managed. This is particularly important in education and distance education (DE) where information plays such an important role in teaching and learning. Knowledge Management (KM) is a response to these challenges, mostly seen in the business world and to some extent, in education.
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    Open Educational Resources (OER) Guide for Students in Post-Secondary and Higher Education
    (2016-03) Hoosen, Sarah; Moore, Derek; Butcher, Neil
    This guide provides an introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) for students in post-secondary and higher education. It is aimed at helping you, as students, to explore the value of good quality OER, and provides an introduction on how to find and use OER. It intends to serve primarily as a source of reference for students in the Small States of the Commonwealth, but we hope it will be useful to students from any country.
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    PREST in Open and Distance Learning: Using Programme Monitoring in Research and Evaluation (B1 Handbook)
    (2004) Butcher, Neil
    When you have worked through this handbook, you should be able to: 1 Differentiate between monitoring and evaluation. 2 Define what kinds of monitoring information need to be gathered to inform research and evaluation of a distance education programme and for what purposes. 3 Identify and analyse appropriate methods to gather that information. 4 Map the systems required to manage that information efficiently, and define the reporting requirements of programme monitoring systems. 5 Apply the outputs of programme monitoring systems in support of research and evaluation processes. 6 Describe how research and evaluation can improve educational delivery, drawing on programme monitoring data.
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    Understanding Open Educational Resources
    (2015-08) Butcher, Neil; Moore, Andrew; Mishra, Sanjaya
    The fact that you are reading this lesson suggests that you have heard of open educational resources (OER). Currently, there is a lot of buzz about OER. Some see them as totally revolutionising how we bring learning materials into our education system and use them, while others see OER from a more pragmatic perspective. Before we start looking at OER, including their origin, benefits and challenges, it is important to consider the problems that we are facing today in education. While these problems range, in different countries, from lack of access to poor quality, there is a common thread in most: low availability of good-quality educational materials. Although learning materials are available, the cost of access in many locations is very high and increases each year. For example, the cost of college textbooks in the United States increased 82 per cent between 2002 and 2013— three times the rate of inflation.1 According to the College Board, in the 2014–15 academic year, students in the USA spent about USD 1200 each on textbooks.2 Another study indicated that 65 per cent of U.S. students do not buy textbooks due to prohibitive costs, despite being concerned about grades.3 Is this not alarming? While there are many other reasons to support OER, the cost issue is a primary factor in their growing popularity amongst students and teachers.
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    Using ICT to Support Professional Development on Open and Distance Learning in Southern Africa
    (2002-07) Naidoo, Vis; Butcher, Neil; Magagula, Cisco
    PCF2 // The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) has been providing training support to distance education practitioners for several years. A key focus of its work has been to support policy makers who are required to consider effective policy environments for distance education. While facilitating face-to-face workshops has immense value, there is a growing view that using technology can offer a range of added value to professional development activities. It is with this in mind that COL established a project that developed such a course using the Internet (or CD-ROM where connectivity was a problem). A further consideration is to test the use of such technology within the Southern African region, noting its developing world status and the immense need for professional development amongst its people. // Working with members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Technical Committee for Distance Education, COL focused on providing an online educational experience for policy makers in Southern Africa. This was to be complemented by a five-day face-to-face training session, which aimed to ensure that the best of educational strategies was combined in creating a training course for distance education policy makers. // COL commissioned the South African Institute for Distance Education (SAIDE) to develop and implement the online course that lasted four months. During this period, COL commissioned an evaluation to be conducted during and after the course. This paper outlines the experience of implementing this course, and lessons learned from it. //