 Great, so my name's Glenda Cox and this is my colleague Bianca and the two of us are going to be presenting today our third wheel so to speak Michelle Wilmas was not able to come and We are from the University of Cape Town We are from the Center for Innovation in Learning and Teaching And our project is called the digital open textbooks for development project. I Would like to take a few moments to dedicate this presentation to a very dear friend and colleague who we lost earlier this year and Olga's and Was a member of the global OER graduate network and I met her in 2013 for the first time the very first Goji N meeting And we met in Washington again, and then we collaborated and this our digital open textbook team with Anne and with her colleagues in Sweden And this lovely pictures us in Galway at the top, and then they all came to Cape Town as well and we just had this lovely collaboration and Anne was one of the most thoughtful kind Gracious people that I know and we want to dedicate this to her We were inspired by her and we are continuing our work in social justice and open education Because of her inspiration So this digital open textbooks for development project was funded by the Canadian IDRC So we're very grateful for that It was a project until 2021 but has now become an initiative at UCT So we're very pleased that it this work is being sustained The work included research Advocacy and also an implementation aspect where academics could apply for grants to create open textbooks and this work followed in the wake of a lot of Research on open education resources for development at the University of Cape Town And we're very proud that we won a goji and award last year for best open research It's nice when the chair is cheering for you So this was our lofty objective to contribute to improving inclusion in South African higher education By addressing equitable access to relevant learning resources and this project Came through this kind of this period it emerged in the period when there was a lot of student protests especially in South African universities but across the globe around fighting against imperialist symbols of Exclusion that was happening in higher education globally And that's how we kind of conceived this this project against this backdrop of of this crisis in access and representation And this is not only we're coming from the global south. This is a South African perspective. This is our case But this is not only the situation in South Africa It's across the globe, but this is a very interesting article Written recently in the US where similar things have been found around this sort of growing inequity And lack of access to materials and to higher education So when we started this off this kind of idea of an open textbook We were very excited about open textbooks because we thought that would grab people's imaginations Maybe a little bit more of an interest easier concept than open education resources, which is sometimes a little bit more tricky But yet we still find it quite difficult to define what an open textbook is So the key aspect for us was that it's scaffolded around specific teaching and learning content Okay, so it's not just any kind of open education resource. It's actually scaffolded Published under an open license with these amazing affordances of integrating multimedia and third-party content And of course published in a range of different places It can be online. It can be digital, but it could also be print so a lot of powerful affordances and As we continued our research and did the most the more recent research We saw this incredible power of the open textbook to be collaborative and inclusive In these three processes and pillars that we will talk about Bianca will talk about I'll talk about Where we see the textbook having an authorship phase a quality assurance phase and a publishing phase And we could see how people were collaborating across those different phases And how these models we've developing these models that are actually quite sustainable in future and can really Be grounded in social justice and transformation So to kind of just draw up this little picture. So we started off thinking. Okay, we've got these open textbooks Grounded in social justice principles. I'm going to talk about them in a minute So we wanted to make an argument for open textbooks having a role in social justice and When we started exploring issues of access to materials and access to higher education, we realized that there were so many Classroom injustices as well that could also be named that academics were looking at So it became quite a holistic process. It wasn't only about the content, but it was also about the practice and We saw how These authors were bringing in colleagues and students as collaborators and this became a key element for us to investigate and The views that we're going to be talking about now are open textbook views So they're the authors of those open textbooks. We focused on on the faculty. That's where we did our research Bianca's talk gonna talk about the method soon So that's the kind of relationship that we were talking about and The social justice drivers that came out of this were very interesting. So we asked the open textbook authors Why did you create this open textbook? And a lot of it was about affordable access and we know that's a big argument for open textbooks But it was much more than that for them. It was also about curriculum transformation Which includes the two aspects of multilingualism and localization And then for other authors, they had this vision of how this open textbook could completely change the way they were teaching A totally different pedagogical strategy So a little bit about Social justice So we follow the work of Nancy Fraser So we have a specific theory that underlines the work that we're doing and there are a number of other social justice theorists out there And it's based on the fact that it's a concept that requires the organization of Social arrangements that make it possible for everyone to participate equally in society and What Fraser talks about is participatory parity. Okay her pee pee to shorten it But that's it's everyone. I really like that definition. I think it's a very strong definition It's not always given people talk about social justice, but this is kind of the the nub of it And she talks about it in three different dimensions the economic the cultural and the political So briefly to unpack that The economic is about material resources being mold distributed and What we want to think about is redistributing economic resources And this is where open tech open textbooks have the act the aspect of free Right, so giving access to those who wouldn't be able to afford the textbook Then there's the cultural dimension where cultural attributes are Misrecognized and through the open textbook. We are able to recognize those cultural attributes and Then very importantly the political this idea of misrepresentation and misframing of voice And how the open textbook has potential to give a Representation and framing of political voice So this is the in a nutshell Quite quick and brief, but hopefully I explained that correctly importantly this last point is Nancy Fraser talks about remedies for social justice And she talks about them on this sort of continuum of the of this kind of range From affirmative to Transformative and so we were very interested in this work to explore exactly what that meant and Affirmative social justice remedy means you are making a change you are moving in the right direction You are addressing the social the injustice Whereas transformative is getting at the underlying power structures It's the disruption of those power structures. So a much deeper transformation So just keep that in mind because that's kind of the premise of some of our argument that we're going to make Right over to Bianca for a bit Thanks, Linda Sorry, I'm missing a slide here. Can you see that the one of the Which one Well, we seem to be missing a slide and that slide was kind of a screenshot of Decorative academics that I wanted to show to everyone that formed the sample of the dot-for-d study Who and who are also largely the grantees that participated in the dot-for-d grants program? Sorry, it's missing. It's really nice to usually show their faces. So you see the the people behind the work, but What the picture represented was not just their faces, but the different the different kinds of disciplines that they all emerged from and How they all represented these different contexts that they exist in and also the varied levels of experience Or expertise in their field. So some were associate professors Others are senior lecturers and we had one who one academic well one participant who was a head tutor who had also chosen to take part in this open textbook development endeavor and From this they were all able to produce these different kinds of outputs and different kinds of resources to varying levels of completion throughout the one-year Program that they participated in and through our different research activities that I will explain as I go on the project Engaged with the varying approaches that authors used in the production of their Open textbooks and the different degrees of success that they were able to achieve in their different contexts And so one of the key objectives of the dot-for-d project has been to articulate these models of open textbook production And as part of our work we worked with these 11 open textbook initiatives through the grants program as I've said to explore how these academics transform content creation or Co-creation and pursue social justice within their classroom contexts through the development of these open textbooks And so our process used a mixed method approach. So both qualitative and quantitative approaches and Within this we we assessed grant proposals that were given in at the beginning of the grants program We administered a survey. We did case study interviews. We assessed grant closure reports where Authors were able to reflect on their journeys at the end of the grant period And we also made use of very various kinds of field notes from our implementation work and so from this data we were able to then identify key production Production activities there in and these were namely authorship quality assurance and publishing and Within them we were able then to reveal or or Define different forms of collaborative practices and approaches That were taking place with colleagues and students in these different initiatives and so in authorship we were seeing instances of solo authorship where authors would work by themselves predominantly or Authors as editors in chief leading the process and working with Collaboratives in the background in quality assurance We had academics who were adopting these different kinds of review mechanisms with colleagues or students or eliciting some kind of professional editorial support from within the institution or outside of it and in publishing we had academics academics were establishing themselves as self-publishers or Establishing some kind of institutional co-publishing relationship and this was predominantly or in most in some cases with the library Within the institution and with all of these activities We focused on the collaborative approaches that were emerging with colleagues and students and were particularly examining Which open textbook production process production activities sorry were colleagues and students being involved in and How or to what degree were they being brought into these processes and so To do this work. We engaged a lot of literature around Student co-creation or students as partners or literature around collaboration in general and we discovered the work of Catherine bobble and her body of work that is That she has established around Collaboration particularly with students and we found that Catherine bobbles Work presented us with a framework a framework of inclusion Which was a very useful analytical tool that we used to understand these degrees of collaboration and student involvement in Open textbook production I'm gonna have to skip forward then Okay, so this is just a breakdown of how we had adapted Catherine bubbles work And we used her framework to define what we called inclusion strategies Here we have them listed as participatory design where authors work with participants and collaborators Who contribute to the design and the development of the textbook but in and not a very engaged way So students in these processes have very low levels of engagement or agency in the process We then have engagement strategies where authors make use of different Activities to motivate and interest students in most cases we have partnership where the process is a lot more collaborative and reciprocal and All participants kind of contribute equally to pedagogical Conceptualization to decision-making and to the implementation and analysis of the work and then lastly We have co-creation where authors allow collaborators and their participants to contribute new pedagogical ideas And there's a much there's a lot more empowerment in this process and more meaningful engagement That's taking place and within co-creation. We have these different roles That Where participants operate in these different roles where some are more Where we saw that some are more collaborative than others for the interest of time I'm going to have to skip forward here Okay, so what we did then with those Those different categories of inclusion is we position them on the social justice remedy continuum And you can see we spoke about affirmative remedy is where you are making definitely making a change in your practice to include Students to write the actual open textbook and then these more transformative remedies where we saw Co-creation and partnership where traditional hierarchies of power were actually disrupted I'm going to go as quickly through this So this so we had this idea of creating a kind of heat map So that we could we could code the different levels of inclusion and from that Decide on different models that that we saw in these open textbooks So here these first four were mostly participation and engagement and you can see we've got a colleague Section in a student section and so on I think it's quite quite clear. So this was white one particular model And then you can see lots of yellow here So yellow is the co-creation and this was what we were excited about to see Just how much co-creation actually happened. We didn't tell authors that they had to do this We suggest that it would be a good idea and actually look what happened with the students there It's kind of all yellow really and then also this incredible Partnerships that were developed amongst colleagues and so we created these different models With the principles of social justice underlying them and these ideas of just how much inclusion is involved Okay, and Bianca is gonna do the last bit Okay, so just to go back to this one quickly So yeah, so the aim of the work has really been to provide Open-text book creators with these sustainable models of production that manifests to this idea of parity of participation as the just end of social justice and so the models we have Defined here kind of reflect these varying levels of collaboration with both students and colleagues Have them listed here, and I'll just quickly go through them so the first model is that of Is what we've called the participator engagement model and here authors operate mostly as solo or lead authors with a very little collaboration with colleagues and a little bit of Participation coming in from students in these different production activities And this model is positioned as affirmative as Glenda explained earlier with less inclusion and collaborative collaboration with colleagues and students Then the other three models The next model is the participatory engagement and co-creation model and authors worked as editors in chief with colleagues and student authors and Here they collaborated with colleagues and students as co-authors of content which meant there was a greater participation in the textbook process the Aspects of co-creation move this model towards a rethinking and a restructuring of how textbooks can be created we then have The co-creation model and here authors worked mostly as content development Facilitators and worked with colleagues and students who also authored content and this model offered a more equitable process An outcome where colleagues and students engage in meaningful Collaboration where the voices of colleagues and students also then construct the knowledge that goes into the textbook and The last model is the co-creation Partnership model and here authors worked as editors in chief or content development facilitators with the colleagues and students as authors or core authors and the strategies used were those of partnership or co-creation in the in in the different production activities and authors were using very innovative and inclusive methods to include the different voices into the textbook development process and So because of this kind of collaboration this model really does promote cultural recognition through the inclusion of multiple voices and representation of local knowledge and it also addresses political Misframing by offering a balance of power in this authoring In the authoring of the textbooks and therefore can be classified as the most transformative of our models And so although all the models attempt to achieve or offer some kind of parity of participation through these different levels of collaboration The co-creation partnership model takes these efforts of collaboration inclusion a few steps further Offering this the most transformative potential for open textbook production. It's okay. Okay. I think that is a good place for us to end Are you having a question? Yeah, I'm sorry, I might have missed it. Are these textbooks already done and ready for publishing or? As we say they're at So some of them 100% complete have been published in our UCT open monographs price Some are chapters that are available to students and not complete It's a difficult process. It's not for the faint-hearted So we we were just incredibly pleased with what we got and and there were some there was some that did not complete their work But we learn valuable lessons from that So can you just give us some numbers? The wonder is published now. How many people were involved in that and how long did it took? So the grants the grant period was one year and I Don't think I can give you a number so I can I can give you an example of the marketing in South Africa textbook, which is beautiful And that was a really big team. I think I don't know any idea about 20 people involved and And that was one of the the real sort of collaborative models So we found there was strength in the collaboration and This is a very tentative Conclusion but the the examples that were not successful were the ones that were on the affirmative scale that were working alone and It seemed that that just wasn't enough support for them to actually complete the work because it is huge I might have missed it, but how did you identify those three core points publishing authorship and quality assurance? How did we identify the production activities? um We went through a very iterative process the three of us when we started the work during a lot from the proposals that were presented and Kind of documenting the work as it unfolded from each author's journey and what we came up with these handles ourselves to try and Classify the kinds of work that we were seeing so under authorship. There's obviously a lot of different aspects that fall under authorship It's not just the writing but it's also the the thinking behind the content that you want to include who are your who you want your partners to be In terms of quality assurance We were seeing the way the practice that practices that they were developing in terms of trying to assess the quality of their work and Establish these oh their own kind of review processes in their own work. So it was very different from for each Textbook initiative Same with publishing publishing was a very new thing that a lot of us as well were dealing with In terms of open textbooks And so a lot of it was coming from like a grand grand a very grounded approach You know coming from the ground up trying to see what is actually happening in these initiatives and what can we classify it as? So we didn't really draw them from anywhere But it was more of a trying to group the actions and the practices we were seeing under some kind of heading some kind of handle And these are the key ones that we were seeing Yeah, I think also we we wanted to have a quality assurance focus because that's definitely a Critique of OER and open textbooks historically and we wanted to show that the quality Processes were really rigorous whether it was peers or colleagues or students These authors took the quality very seriously. So that needs an emphasis. I think to have that separate Hi, thanks so much for your talk. I learned a lot from you My question is around I think that all of the textbooks that you are working on were geared towards higher education It's all right. And so I think I'm assuming that you have more flexibility in terms of like Standards and competencies that you have to cover within a course at higher education level but I wonder if you have any thoughts about Doing this kind of participatory textbook writing and for secondary school and how you might Work within the established kind of standards and competencies that are usually rather dictated by governments So we are in higher education that that is our focus. There are units within our university that are school-facing In South Africa, there's an incredible organization called see a ruler and they've sort of done leaps and strides in terms of Getting Basic education textbooks Approved by government Free open textbooks. I don't know how much student inclusion though at that level So I can't really answer that question entirely, but it is an interesting question Excuse me, I would just like to ask whether What is the revenue model behind this? So there is no revenue model at all or The the the educators they are motivated to do this leave it open rather than developing another textbook that could be published elsewhere This is one the second thing Publishing them over your portals is only by the CC license and that's it or they are objects have that do have do is Digital object identifiers or eventually ISBNs or stuff, which is not very common for electronic, but thank you Um, it's a lot to that question So these authors received small grants, so really not a lot of money $5,000 roughly arranged We found that many of the authors were inspired to be open educators before the grant They're already were thinking about open they were already sharing not all of them But for some of them. This was the tipping point to actually start something In terms of sustainability This is I think this is something that we're gonna go forward now and research in the future It's just interesting that there several of those authors are continuing the work now With maybe a little bit of money from their departments or outside We're extremely impressed by four or five of the initiatives actually carrying on So they definitely is that agency and that drive and that real belief In in the kind of social justice principles and that this is something that they should be doing But difficult to sustain we'd love to have some more money for some more grants Thank you You