SAIDE, one of South Africa’s most progressive educational bodies, is our featured author this week.
Founded in 1992, the South African Institute of Distance Education has been tirelessly promoting and catalysing the development of open education and technology in education in Southern Africa for the past two decades. More so than in any other place in the world, education in Southern Africa has peculiar challenges. The double burden of old colonial educational systems haphazardly reformed and (in some cases) incompetently run has resulted in the unhappy truth that Southern Africa is home to some of the worst-performing schooling systems in the world.
A non-governmental organisation, SAIDE aims to address the difficulties of educating in Southern Africa by implementing new models of open learning and distance education, promoting easy and free access to quality educational materials for educators and administrators through the use of information and communications technology.
Technology isn’t just window-dressing: technologies like the internet and e-books give their users access to free information that helps to redress past inequalities and facilitate the professional development of educators, regardless of budget or location. Because of its NGO status, SAIDE is also in a position to work collaboratively with other education providers “to facilitate networks and provide advice on the planning and implementation of distance education and the evaluation, development and sharing of courses and materials.”
At the moment, SAIDE has written a number of e-books, including valuable resources like:
- Being a Teacher: a systematic overview of teaching as a profession and the role of teachers in our society.
- Using Media: a guide to help teachers integrate popular media, textbooks and computer technologies into their teaching.
- Creating a Caring School: a guide for school management teams and administrators to help them create schools that facilitate learning through positive, caring environments.
Good administration and teaching in Southern Africa is of the utmost importance, so we are very happy to say that these three books, along with a number of other SAIDE titles, are available right now on Paperight.