University of Cape Town Case Study

The University of Cape Town (UCT) is South Africa’s oldest university and one of Africa’s leading teaching and research institutions. The university has a long history of involvement in open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEPs).  This officially began when UCT’s Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) initiated an Opening Scholarship project in 2007, which was funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation. The research focused on 12 case studies profiling open initiatives at UCT. As a result of this work, CILT received funding from the Mellon Foundation in 2008 to create a portal for sharing OER. With this funding, UCT developed its first open content directory called OpenContent, which provided a space for UCT academics to share OER.

UCT expressed its commitment to openness in April 2008 when it signed the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education. Then in November 2011, the University signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. In fulfilling the philosophy of openness, it became possible to openly share knowledge at the institution when the university council adopted an Open Access Policy in March 2014.

Since then, through CILT, UCT has spearheaded several open education projects, including OER UCT and the Health OER Project. The University is a member of the Open Education Consortium, an international consortium with approximately 300 universities that make their teaching materials openly available for sharing.  This case study examines four of the institution’s key OER initiatives: the OpenUCT Initiative (2011–2014); Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) (2021–2017); the UCT Vice Chancellor’s OER Adaptation Project (2013–2016); and Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) (2018–2021). Each has been selected because of its focus and influence on OER advocacy, practice, and policy for Africa academics.