26.11.2025, 10:00–10:45 o'clock (Europe/Berlin), Yellow Room
In Marketing, the term "friction" is used as a mechanism for understanding how easy or complex it is for a customer to undertake a desired behaviour; minimising friction is important to facilitate desired outcomes. This presentation and Q&A will reflect upon the amount and type of friction there is in three different educational contexts within Southern Africa: Institutes of Higher Education; Secondary Schooling; Early Childhood Development, drawing from practical experiences in implementing OER within the different contexts, and associated research undertaken in relation to monitoring, evaluation, adaptations and learnings. A primary objective would be to enable a deeper understanding of the southern African context, and what can be done to minimise "friction" so as to facilitation more adoption of OER within the various educational contexts.
Beginners, Advanced, Professionals
Additional information –Siemens Stiftung https://www.siemens-stiftung.org/en/; Kathryn Kure of Data Myna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathrynkure/
Language of the session –English
Kathryn has demonstrated her mastery of open licensing by successfully completing the Creative Commons (CC) Certificate Course. As Chapter Lead of the South African Chapter of Creative Commons, she has been deeply engaged in supporting recommendations to Parliament to the relevant committee regarding sorely-needed Copyright reform in terms of the Copyright Amendment Bill, and she actively advocates for tax policy changes in terms of 18A to enable more Learning and Teaching Support Materials resources to become available at no additional cost to the fiscus while enabling South Africa’s commitment to UNESCO in line with the Recommendation on OER.
Globally, she has worked on policy recommendations relating to the Ethics of Open Sharing, and together with the Wikimedia Foundation, initiated discussions, and edit-a-thons to improve the quality and quantity of information on Wikipedia relating to OER and the CC License Suite and Public Domain Tools. The Commonwealth of Learning have engaged her to facilitate the creation of policies on Open Education, Employability. and Hybrid Flexible Learning at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, and she continues consultancy there with regard to the design and development of Open Education Resources on an Open Source Learning Management System, looking to incorporate Gamification, Micro-Learning, Co-operative Learning practices into the design in relation to educational affordances, with a strong focus on an adapted 6 C’s premised on the importance of Psychological Safety. She has presented a wide range of papers at peer-reviewed international conferences in Open Education, from the Creative Commons, OpenEd and OE Global – the problems of the Global South’s indigenous languages having on a small corpora of texts and this impact in terms of Generative AI to the piloting of the MoodleBox in under-resourced areas.