Abstract
The Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project is based at the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Glenda Cox and Henry Trotter of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town undertook Sub-project 4 of ROER4D. The project, Research into the Social and Cultural Acceptability of Open Educational Resources in South Africa, aims to describe and explain the barriers to and enablers of Open Educational Resources (OER) contribution at institutions in South Africa. The key objective of the research was to understand why scholars contribute or refuse to contribute their teaching materials as OER. The project utilised a mixed methods approach. Surveys of and interviews with academics at three South African institutions were conducted in March 2015 to understand the conditions under which the contribution and/or use of OER would be considered socially and culturally acceptable. Focusing on academics’ teaching practices at the University of Cape Town (UCT) (urban, contact), the University of South Africa (UNISA) (distance, online/ correspondence), and University of Fort Hare University (rural, contact). The resultant dataset includes the survey (quantitative) and interview (qualitative) data.
