After our previous visit to Johannesburg in May, St John’s College expressed interest in joining the open education movement, and making their science content available online under an open licence. Following this, the Siyavula technical team arrived at St John’s on Monday morning 18 July, ready to help the science department upload their content to Connexions. On our arrival, the IT team at the school was just finishing off installing all the software that we recommend using, such as Google Chrome and LibreOffice.

 

Mark started off with a short presentation on the process they will follow in order to upload their content to Connexions. We then showed them a sample of what their content could look like once it was uploaded. With much laughter and high spirits, the teachers began preparing their documents for uploading to Connexions, which involves styling their documents with headings, and typesetting their equations. They quickly picked this up and learned a great deal about this process. After a short lunch break work resumed, breaking only for coffee mid afternoon.

The next morning we returned to St John’s bright and early, ready to start them on the next step to getting their content onto Connexions. Pretty soon we had one module up and published, and a few more close to completion. However, technical difficulties intervened and soon the team was working to resolve the issues. The teachers remained upbeat and positive despite these difficulties and carried on with the preparation steps of their documents. After a short lunch break, Mark showed the teachers some of the other features of Connexions, such as the collection editor and how to reuse other work that is already on the website.

Despite the technical difficulties experienced on Tuesday, the teachers felt that they had gained some useful knowledge about using word processors and the methods needed to style their documents. One teacher commented that she was planning to teach her students how to use document styling in word processors, as many people don’t know how to use them properly!

At the end of all the hard work over the course of the 2 days, the Siyavula team and St John’s teachers enjoyed a well deserved dinner at La Rustica, where they were able to relax together and chat in an informal environment.

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