Introduction
Saide works across all educational sectors, including early childhood development, community education, schooling, further education and training, teacher education and higher education. Within these sectors, Saide has three strands of work:
- Supporting and developing open learning principles for quality education.
- Supporting education practitioners in the sound use of innovative course design, materials development, learner support, management and the use of technology for large scale provision.
- Building knowledge about sound and innovative methods of opening learning through research, the development of resources, and the dissemination of information.
Underpinning the creation of programmes, course and materials, Saide asks five key design questions:
- Where do we start?
- What do learners need to learn?
- How can we help learners learn?
- How will we know what learners have learned?
- How can we ensure good quality?
This approach is detailed in our Course Design and Materials Development Guide. Also, Saide's Learning Design with Technology framework, an important consideration for today's learners, is aligned to course design and materials development.
Open Saide includes open educational resources, open courses and open software that you can use, adapt or repurpose for your own situation. In addition, you can request Saide services, appropriate for each resource, to support your use, or futher development, of such resources.
Resources
Saide's Open Educational Resources can be arranged chronologically (Date) or alphabetically (Title). Identify resources associated with specific Services or Search Resources using keywords.
- Agshare Toolkit
- Curriculum and materials development workshop
- Designing and delivering distance education: Quality criteria and case studies from South Africa
- Distance higher education programmes in a digital era: Good practice guide
- External course evaluation instrument
- Learning about sustainable change in education in South Africa
- Open Educational Resources (OER) workshop
- Quality assurance toolkit for open schools
- Saide education studies: Being a teacher
- Saide education studies: Creating people-centred schools
- Saide education studies: Learners and learning guide
- Saide education studies: Using media in teaching
- Saide education studies: Working in classrooms
- Understanding OER
Open Courses
Online teaching and learning professional development courses developed by Saide are provided as a zip file that includes IMS Global Learning Consortium's Common Cartridge and Moodle's .mbz files. You can integrate these files into your LMS.
Software
Software developed and supported by Saide is available under an open GPL license. In addition, Saide provides hosted environments of such resources that individauls and organisation can use, free of charge, as a software service.