Okay.
So I think my my presentation is going to be a little bit different.
I'm not really going to talk about kind of list of things that I've done
in terms of reaching out to communities and such.
I have a message that I want to get over,
and so I'm taking a slightly different slant
and talking about the research that we're doing at Somerset Clinic.
Can you hear me?
Okay. Excellent.
Okay.
So I'm going to talk about
my university a little bit
about my country and my position ality.
I want to talk about social justice
and a framework that
the chair and my team
we've been using to understand open education.
I want to integrate and kind of problematize
the global dynamics of North-South inequality and higher education
and talk about what can be done
and perhaps suggest
a couple of of avenues to move forward.
And just always keeping in mind
this very, very lofty goal that we're aiming towards
to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education
and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Okay.
So a little bit about me.
So, yes, I am South African.
I'm third generation South African, but I'm white.
So sometimes that is a little
surprising for people when they invite me
as a global South representative and I have a white skin.
And that does make me feel
uncomfortable in a way.
But I am very passionate about what I believe in
and the chair encompasses
my objectives.
As my colleague Professor
Lachica said earlier,
South Africa itself is a country of high income inequality
and I am one of the privileged people.
I'm middle class person and I have had this incredible
career since 2010, an open education where I've been part
of these amazing international networks
through hard work, but also being given the opportunities
because of my position and where I am.
And some of you might recognize colleagues in these
in these photos of of big initiatives that I've been part of
and that I'm very proud of being part of.
So here is
a picture of the University of Cape Town,
the upper campus.
We have a number of different campuses
and we have around about 30,000
students.
We are the high strength
university in South Africa and in Africa.
And traditionally we are kind of seen as being
an elite university and well-resourced.
But I must add that currently we are facing the huge estates
that we've been under in the history of the university.
So things aren't quite as rosy as they might seem up on the Hill,
as people say, as we're on the side of doublespeak.
So that's our situation.
But at the University of Cape Town,
we have had open education initiatives
since 2007, so we've been working very hard at open education.
I hope I'm still clear.
I can hear a echo which is annoying.
On your phone. Perfect. Okay, great.
So here is the backdrop.
So in South Africa,
we have a very strong student voice, which is
very powerful and changing and has been very powerful
in changing the pathways of higher education.
And these so called or termed
false movements began around 2014,
where students initially
had what they called the feesmustfall
to try and ensure that the government would give them more support
for fees as the fees were very expensive.
And they also had something called Rhodesmustfall, which was a protest
against traditional colonial statues and colonial curriculum
that was still being taught at institutions around South Africa.
So this was kind of all back around
to thinking
about open education and and what we could do
at the university to try and address
these injustices.
And the project that I launched at the time through the chair
and even before the chair was around open textbooks
and in South Africa, open textbooks
have so full a very specific need around
both access and representation
and I'm going to talk about social justice and explain
some of these terms and and what we're hoping to achieve.
This project was initially funded by the ICRC,
but fortunately is now part of university work.
And we have this kind of, you know, lofty
objective of improving inclusion in South African
higher education by addressing equitable access
to appropriate and level relevant learning resources.
So we feel very strongly
about the transformation of education of the continent
and of about decolonizing education,
which requires all of us.
And I'm saying that not just me sitting here talking to you
or people in South Africa, but everyone in this audience
to think and interrogate historical legacies and dominant
forms of knowledge and to think about who they contribute, they
contribute to favoring
which groups are favored over others.
And think about decolonization.
When you're living forward in creating takes
and in your teaching.
So what is social justice?
I'm not going to talk about this
in too much detail, so no time for time.
But social justice is a very strong theme in open
education and in UNESCO's and the terminology of UNESCO,
where, you know, in the conference last year
it was all about social justice and just higher education.
And I like this definition by Nancy Fraser
that talks about social arrangements
where everyone can participate equally in society.
So participatory parity.
And she talks about different dimensions
economically, culturally and politically.
And we can infer this on these social arrangements.
On our education goal, we want everyone to be participating in education
and be part of education.
And how can we achieve this?
And yes, Nancy Fraser is is why to why to North
American feminist political social theorist.
But this particular definition has been very useful for us.
So when she talks about social justice, it's
not just about economics, it's not just about money.
Material resources.
It's also about where people
have not been recognized in society
and in our example in education.
And then there's also political
where people have been silenced and haven't been able
to be represented in society
or in our case, education.
So she looks at this kind of three dimensions.
She says, You can analyze these components separately,
but all three are necessary to address
injustice.
And then this is important.
And I think I'm not sure who used the word transformative earlier,
but she talks about remedies on two levels.
So some of the injustices
I will talk about are the way we've used up in textbooks.
Affirmative strategies.
But when she says affirmative, affirmative, it
kind of means, well, it's it's helped the situation.
It's a remedy that's corrected inequality,
but it hasn't stopped the underlying
framework where it's transformative, which is what
we're really aiming for, for true social justice
disturbs the underlying causes.
So we did quite a bit of research at the University of Cape
Town, interviewing academics who produced open textbooks,
and we wanted to understand why they were doing this
and what they were hoping to achieve through the open textbooks.
And we analyzed this through the social justice framework.
So open textbooks
most certainly are affordable and can be contextually relevant.
And this is something that we need
we needed at our institution
and across South Africa.
Cultural
recognition was addressed because open textbooks can be relevant.
They can be in the language that is necessary for students
to understand as well as formats and genres
that promotes inclusivity.
And we also saw very innovative
pedagogical approaches around creating open textbooks
where students were brought in to create the textbooks.
In terms of the political misrepresentation.
We saw that academics
were aware that they were actually perpetuating
political mis framing and exclusion by continuously prescribing
those same old textbooks that had been around for 30 years.
We saw them using students, as I said already, and there was an attempt
to shift power dynamics between the lecturer and the student.
So the open textbook
and if we scale it up to open education, we can see how it has
so much potential to achieve social justice.
So does open education
address underlying structures of dominance and subordination?
No, not really, actually.
So what we did was wonderful, but it was it was, you know,
47 textbooks out of the whole institution.
So we need to be extending this across the country.
So as we've heard, UniSA using open materials,
we want all 26 institutions to be using open material.
And of course, globally, it's not that open
education is everywhere in the world.
And it's only then
that we can think about dismantling institutional obstacles
to really get to participatory parity
in higher education.
And so this is where we kind of
kind of want to question and leave you with questions
around is the system broken?
I mean, it is higher education
not able to change?
You know, we talk about the global South.
There's this othering, there's this us and them,
which as people from the global South
doesn't feel like it's respect.
And we want.
And this term global south, although it's geographical,
is kind of a subaltern it's like where the lower
and so the powerful research that Professor Lachica
and others in the Global
South are doing and my colleague Toll will be following and follows
he certainly would would also be in this kind of this grouping.
We have the potential to try and
balance relationships through open education
and through getting our knowledge out into the global system.
So I'm hopeful.
So this is a picture of university rankings around the world,
and this doesn't look very hopeful, but this is the reality.
And I could find ten different examples of different kind of,
you know, inequalities like this.
I mean, where the highest ranked institute wins, it's quite obvious
there are
few in the Global South, which is great, but it's it really is
a point that we have to think about how do we swing the pendulum
away from the global north or to a more central position?
Who is included and who is excluded in the geographies of knowledge?
And we need to think about these very deep power,
isometrics and how to decolonize.
We know the money is a in the north and the funding in
this is in the north.
My university doesn't fund me in any way.
Unfortunately,
I publishing is in the north.
Editors of journals are based in the north,
in South Africa.
We struggle to get visas to come to the north.
These are big problems that we need to be thinking about very deeply.
And it's hard work.
It's it's not an easy, easy problem.
And then
just to no idea whether I'm behind time,
just to think about just to draw a few really
interesting quotes from the futures of higher
education, a new social contract book by UniSA.
This new social contract
calls for openness, inclusive city and diversity.
It calls for higher education as a public and common good.
It calls for a rethinking of existing pedagogy,
and it calls for building,
for bringing students into pedagogy
and building a truly inclusive democratic education with students.
Feel a sense of belonging.
All principals that could not have saved myself.
And these are the principles that can guide us.
And so very briefly,
students, I feel all the way ahead.
And Jill has talked earlier about me
just by thinking about meeting students where they are.
And there's a kind of movement around students as partners,
and there's a journal around students
as partners and thinking about how to bring students
in to course design and facilitation
and research and building their agency and sense of belonging.
And that text in read the
process of a product is also about open education.
It's not only about the content that we creating.
In fact, it's more importantly around the process
of collaboration of bringing voices together.
That's what's powerful.
And then this concept that I heard from
this extremely interesting speaker about disrupting inequity in global
health is a call for allyship.
And it's just something to leave you with, something to think about.
But from the Global South perspective,
I would like to call for this allyship as
follows.
He spoke in some detail about this
very exciting unit to a network that we are part of
and very importantly, I want to be looking at
a national community and building a national community,
and my chair will be hosting an event next year.
We will be bringing together
chairs from South Africa and with a more broader
sort of hybrid format to bring in more voices.
So what can we do in the Global South?
We have to agitate If we don't and we sit back
and we take a more information from the global north,
we're just being re colonized.
We need to take on, as I said,
the hard work and question
and think about how we can work for equity and inclusion.
And this last quote from UNESCO's.
And just a comment about learning content that it should be finely
calibrated and are not, my words
finally calibrated to local cultures,
societies, languages,
histories, literatures and natural environments.
And this is by Cook, and it's a really interesting article
on the paradoxes of OCR, but that's what we need to be aiming
for wherever we are in the world, to put our students
at the front and foremost way of thinking
about how we can design on materials.
That's me.
Thank you.
Did you hear everything?
Absolutely perfectly. I just forgot to press the button.
Sorry, but that's okay.
So very nice, very thought provoking presentation.
And if you want to pick up
on one point you made, which was the same point
that John Traxler made this morning, talking points of decolonizing
content, I mean, okay, sounds nice, you know,
bottom up, community driven content, but it's actually difficult to do.
Resisting our influences is is an uphill struggle.
Do you think that I would have a role to play in that process
to actually help us debug our thinking processes and
and produce a more socially coherent materials?
So at the moment, no.
I think there's too many inherent biases
built into the content that's being created by A.I..
We know this.
We would have to work very,
very make a very concerted effort in the Global South
to make sure that our content is also included in those models.
Having said that,
there is a role for AI in producing an education materials for sure.
I've got a case study that we've just been looking at
where students created orthopedic surgery chapters
and really interesting learning process,
quick content, but they were critical of the content.
They had incredible
critical digital literacy
that we were not aware that students could have.
We were really impressed with them.
Plus, they had experts reviewing the material
so that they could check for accuracy.
And what was produced was really interesting material.
And it was quite an it's a
it certainly is an option for open education resources that we can
been thinking about AI to produce those kinds of local materials.
So these were local materials with local examples
and almost built into their text.
So there's a lot of this.
I'm quite pro, I accept it.
I'm very aware that they all biases and that scares me.