We are opening: free textbooks for South Africa

Mark Horner launched his Siyavula blog this week! Yay! It’ll be a great way for people to track this ambitious and important open education project. For those of you who don’t know:

The objective is to make Open and Collaborative Resources (OCRs) a firm
and sustainable reality in the South African education system and, in
the process, make a massive contribution to improving the current crisis (just one short article but many exist).
We will make contributions which cover the entire curriculum, from
grades 1 through 12, for all learning areas in grades 1 through 9 and
the majority of subjects in grades 10 through 12.

What Mark fails to mention in his first post is his own experience running the Free High School Science Texts project. FHSST has successfully produced open, royalty free math and science texts for grade 10 – 12 using a collaborative, volunteer-driven approach. Given Mark’s chops, I’m convinced Siyavula will succeed.

Side note: in the Shuttleworth tradition of embedding vision and values in project names (Ubuntu), Siyavula is anĀ  Nguni word meaning we are opening.

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