South Africa’s education system is in crisis. In spite of education enjoying the largest proportion of annual budgeted government funding, performance generally remains dismal. Among other factors, a lack of resources and poorly skilled teachers have been blamed for the widely acknowledged deterioration of the country’s educational quality at school level. It is improbable that education will attract significantly more funding to address alleged shortages of resources and/or skills. Rather, it is more likely that pressure will mount to achieve more with less in a milieu of governments intent on shrinking national budget deficits.
Open educational resources (OERs) offer not only the prospect of substantial cost savings but also a mechanism to assemble teacher communities of practice for the purposes of sourcing and developing these materials for wide distribution. Such communities can also serve as repositories of skills and experience which can be tapped by the wider teaching fraternity. This exploratory study, on the basis of survey data and largely descriptive analysis, offers at least modest empirical evidence in support of the proposition that teachers are likely to engage more seriously with OERs in policy environments that recognise and reward such initiatives.
