Given my non-traditional academic role, my work and that of the EdTech team in relation to community engagement is quite unique. As part of our work in the EdTech team we support and advise lecturers, add guest users on short courses and support them with accessing and resolving issues in relation to RUconnected. In essence, we provide the infrastructure to enable community engagement activities that depend on an online digital environment.
During the pandemic many community engagement initiatives went online, either because these lecturers already had plans to integrate blended learning or the pandemic situation precipitated them to engage with community members in a different mode. As RUconnected has a mobile app that can be used offline and because it is zero-rated (i.e. data free) across a number of networks, this helps to make digital materials and learning opportunities more accessible to community members (also part of goal 1 of the IDP). We share advice with colleagues doing community engagement around how to maximise the accessibility of their materials on a regular basis as well as related design matters.
RUCE lecturer, researcher and convenor of the service-learning Joana Bezerra shared a summary of how the EdTech team have supported her:
βπ½ Course support: Community Engagement has a number of courses on RUconnected that go beyond the simple use of the platform for content. Edtech supports RUCE in exploring RUconnected functions to maximise engagement.
βπ½ Supporting partners: Community Engagement works with external partners that are involved in some of the courses. Edtech supports partners and RUCE staff in developing the partners' contributions to the courses, always thinking about access and content in online teaching.
βπ½ Responsiveness and adaptability: the support resources and workshops, being fast to respond in creating courses and adding students (especially external course participants).
βπ½ Individual attention: setting up individual sessions for people when needed.
βπ½ Sharing: Edtech was readily sourcing and sharing software when asked by the RUCE team.
βπ½ Critical thinking: interactions with Edtech also pushed the RUCE team to think more critically about how to teach online, thinking about how to best deliver the content.
βπ½ All of this made the switch to fully online MUCH easier.
Community engagement is intertwined with my teaching and leadership, management and administrative work. Unlike other research intensive universities where the interest in designing online short courses is motivated by generating third stream income, it is my observation that more than half of the participants who engaged in the Online Course Design (OCD) course were lecturers designing online courses and offerings aimed at community engagement. Senior Researcher based at the Institute for Water Research (IWR), Sukh Mantel, shared that the structured materials provided by the EdTech OCD were extremely useful for the IWR to engage with the Early Career Researchers (ECRs) as a capacity building and community engagement exercise. In her letter of recommendation, Sukh explains how she worked with an ECR colleague in the IWR, Mr David Gwapedza, to modify the materials from the EdTech OCD course to develop a program that included online course approaches, tools and course development principles that were delivered during weekly zoom interaction meetings with the ECRs over two months in 2020.
While we would like to do more in relation to community engagement, we are cognisant of the fact that we are a small team (two educational technology specialists and two half-time assistants). The main communities we support are Rhodes lecturers and other less well-resourced universities with whom we share materials and advice on a regular basis.
One example is the University of Jos in Nigeria who also makes use of Moodle and wanted to adapt our introductory resources for lecturers on using RUconnected. I tried to import our course site into their Moodle platform but we were constrained by the restrictions on the size of uploads so we shared individual how-to documents and screenshots of how the site was organised. Similarly, this course site was shared with colleagues from the University of Venda who are part of the teaching team on the Social Justice and Quality in Higher Education doctoral programme. We have also shared many of our resources as Open Educational Resources (OERs) via our webpage on the CHERTL website. In turn, this link was shared in e/merge Africa newsletters as part of a list of resources to support educational technology professionals and other lecturers in African higher education settings with emergency remote teaching and learning. The aim is that such resources can be adapted to other settings by people doing similar work as the EdTech team.
We have particular constraints when it comes to supporting certain stakeholders. For example, we had requests to assist schools with creating a space on RUconnected for teachers and students during the pandemic. Unfortunately, we were unable to assist them given that it is illegal for us to host minors on our system. We advised them to consider using free platforms such as Google Classrooms. However, the main attraction to RUconnected was that it is zero-rated and therefore would not incur data costs if teachers and learners were using networks offering this.
In March 2021, Neil Kramm and I met with Di Hornby and discussed how we could encourage lecturers to share their materials as Open Educational Resources (OERs) as part of their community engagement initiatives. This was supported and presented as part of a presentation that I co-presented with Debbie Martindale, responsible for advancing digital scholarship at the university. I explained open licensing and did some advocacy work around OERs to help lecturers see how it may fit into their teaching and community engagement initiatives, while Debbie introduced colleagues to Rhodesβ open repository, Figshare, and how to use it. My library colleagues have shared that lecturers share more teaching resources openly than they do open access research publications and data.
This also intertwines with the leadership section of my portfolio. I see myself as an OER and open access advocate who leads through incorporating this into my own scholarship, practice and work. I believe that there is an important connection to be made between making university resources accessible to broader communities, OERs and community engagement. One of the areas in need of development in the future will be evaluating the impact of OERs that form part of community engagement initiatives.