This week we profile Chapter 7 of the ROER4D edited volume by Sarah Goodier, which sought to develop an understanding of how funding is allocated for educational resources for basic education in South Africa.
Titled “Tracking the money for Open Educational Resources in South African basic education: What we don’t know”, this study intended to establish a baseline for educational spending on educational resources in South Africa in order to determine what cost savings could result from the adoption of OER into the basic education curriculum.
The findings of the study indicated that it was difficult to determine the spending on Learning and Teaching Support Materials (LTSM), as individual provinces rather than the central government determined the budget allocated for educational resources. These budgets contained aggregated line items for LTSM that did not make explicit how much was spent on specific categories, such as textbooks, which made it difficult to develop the baseline to argue for cost savings arising from OER. While the South African Siyavula open textbook initiative shows promise for OER-adoption-related cost savings, the current budgetary allocations would need to be disaggregated before an accurate cost savings evidence base could be built
Visit the sub-project web page to access more detail on the study, other outputs and a video interview with Lead Researcher Sarah Goodier.
