Who is Siyavula?
Siyavula, a Shuttleworth Foundation seeded project, believes in sharing, community, collaboration and openness, and through the use of technology we strive to produce the best quality free educational resources out there. Our openly licensed Grade 10 – 12 Maths and Physical Science textbooks are currently being printed by the Department of Basic Education, for free distribution across South Africa! This means that every single learner in a government school that is taking Maths and / or Physical Science in Grades 10 – 12 will receive a copy of our textbooks, paid for by the Department of Basic Education. This is hugely exciting for us as an organisation, but also for the world of open educational resources – as far as we know, this is a world first. The books have their own website and can be viewed at Everything Maths and Everything Science.
The Grade 10 Life Sciences textbook
Over the course of a weekend, and following the great feedback and success of our Maths and Physical Science textbooks, a group of volunteer educators and post-grad students in the Life Sciences came together to create the first draft of a CAPS aligned Grade 10 Life Sciences textbook. As with our Maths and Physical Science textbooks, this textbook will also be free and open for everyone to use and share, will be media-rich and accessible online, via mobile, and downloadable.
Through planning, collaboration and sharing it is possible to write a textbook in a weekend. Using educator’s existing material, pulling content from the internet under the same open copyright licence as ours, and working in teams, we were able to produce the first draft. The process doesn’t end here however, as we encourage educators to constantly contribute to and provide feedback on the book via our online annotator tool.
If you would like to be involved in the Life Sciences textbook, please click here.