Pilot Development of Open Textbook
January 21, 2010One of five pilot projects implemented at the University of Malawi and University of Botswana last year was designed to create a textbook from freely available open educational resources (OER) that would cover at most of a 1st semester Communication Skills course. Evaluation of findings and lessons learned from the pilot are available at OER Africa.
The effort resulted in a 102 page Communication Skills open textbook printed at Bunda and used with the first year students. The chapters are:
1. Orientation to the Text
2. Study Skills
3. How to use the Library
4. Listening Skills
5. Reading Skills
6. Writing Skills
7. Examination Skills
The textbook is openly licensed as CC: BY-NC-SA and is available from both the Bunda College website and the OER Africa repository.
Perhaps the open courseware will be redeveloped to be accessible with iPad. This would not only make the material more widely available but very fashionable as well.