Siyavula Project

Siyavula is an exciting project funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, that aims to bring free, high-quality training resources, to schools in South Africa. Upfront Systems was engaged to add functionality to the Rhaptos platform, which is used by the Connexions repository at Rice University.

Siyavula will make a core set of materials available under an open licence, allowing communities to adapt and collaboratively develop educational resources, that suit the needs of our schools and teachers. Open licences enhance innovation and lighten the load on individual teachers. It also result in localised, content-specific materials that are immediately useful to teachers.

Connexions and Siyavula will work together to create the repository, and Siyavula will create an online community of educators in South Africa that will expand, update and use the lessons. The newly created content will reside in the Connexions repository, one of the largest open-education resources (OER) repositories in the world.

Development was done in Plone and in conjunction with the Connexions team at Rice University, Houston, Texas.