The North-West University (NWU) recently announced its Open Educational Resource (OER) fellows for 2021/2022.

These fellowships offer staff who are interested to include new online resources to their classes or adapt their resources to their students' specific contexts, support and funding for creating or adapting open learning content as well as doing research about the process.

Prof Linda du Plessis, the deputy vice-chancellor for planning and Vanderbijlpark Campus operations, and Prof Jako Olivier, holder of the UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources, made the online announcement.

“I want to offer my heartfelt congratulations to these colleagues on being awarded these fellowships, and wish them all of the best on their projects,” said Prof Du Plessis. 

The recipients of the fellowships are:

Faculty of Health sciences

Corneli Nienaber-Rousseau and the team consisting of Yolande Heymans, Christo Bisschoff, Baaqira Ebrahim and Christmal Christmals.

Faculty of Humanities

Andre Gouws, Carina Grobler, Juan Steyn, Godswill Nwabuisi Osuafor, Jess Auerbach, Mignon van Vreden and Sysman Motloung, as well as the team project involving Yolandi Coetser, Chantelle Gray van Heerden, Nolwandle Lembethe and Aida Terblanche-Greeff.

Faculty of Law

 Kabelo Mutubi.

Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences

Aurelia Williams and her team – Chandré Liebenberg and Mario Chauque, and Bukohwo Michael Esiefarienrhe.

Each 18 month-long fellowship involves a grant of R40 000 for OER development, R7 000 for online conference attendance and presentations, and writing a book chapter on the process or evaluation of the use of OER. Furthermore, the recipients of these fellowships will also have opportunities to attend workshops, and will receive the necessary support to create or adapt resources such as text books, as well as on how to research OERs.