Invite: Open Access Week Talk
Open Access Week talk by Prof Alex van der Merwe
Title: Developing DUT’s Economics modules as Open Educational Resources
This year’s open access theme is ‘Open in Action’. To celebrate this theme, the library together with the E-Learning Project are hosting an exciting talk by Professor Alex Van der Merwe on “developing DUT’s economics modules as Open Educational Resources”. Prof van der Merwe is a senior lecturer from the Department of Public Management, Law and Economics at the Riverside Campus. Join us at the BM Patel Library on the 26 October 2016 at 13h00. Prof van Der Merwe will share some insights on open educational resources and its impact on teaching and learning, and the development of this textbook for the curriculum. DUT’s Prof Alex van der Merwe, Senior Lecturer in the department of Public Management, Law & Economics, has led on the project to create two open introductory economics texts. These texts, Principles of Microeconomics and Principles of Macroeconomics, will be used as the University’s primary prescribed textbooks. Prof van der Merwe has taken two open introductory economics texts which have been published and licensed by Openstax College and Rice University in the USA under a Creative Commons License 4 International and is editing and adapting these texts to suit the desired learning outcomes for DUT’s introductory economics modules. The texts will be finally published on OPenstax CNX’s online publishing platform. Apart from the pedagogic benefits of a locally designed textbook, this initiative to bring open educational resources into the “mainstream” of the teaching materials traditionally employed by the university’s instructors coincides with the current burning issue of the cost and the affordability for the average student of higher education in South Africa. Open education is founded on free and open educational resources such as open course materials, interactive content, videos, assessments, other open content and open textbooks.