Welcome to the Masifunde Project Wiki

Developing an online study skills course as a free resource for southern African students

The Masifunde project takes its name from a Xhosa expression which means "let us learn!"

The project was carried out by TSiBA Education (Cape Town, South Africa) and Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, and was funded under the  English-African Partnerships programme managed by the  British Council on behalf of the UK  Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) now the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Project News

• 05/12/07: We have just run our first project workshop, at TSiBA Education, South Africa. At the one-day workshop we focussed on the needs of TSiBA students in the area of study skills and discussed the existing  Oxford University Continuing Education online study skills course, written by Brenda Thornton, which the Masifunde Project will adapt. Here is a brief report of the workshop.
• 14/02/08: Our end of project workshops occured: Monday 26 May 2008 for Internal TSiBA-Oxford workshop; THURSDAY 29 May 2008 for public launch and dissemination workshop at TSiBA, Cape Town
• 07/03/08: The first pilot run of the new course starts today at TSiBA with the first group of Foundation students.
• 14/07/08: We are presenting a paper on Masifunde at the Pan Commonwealth Forum PC5 in London. You can download the paper below.
• 26/10/10: Available as an OER for download and adaption.

Masifunde download

The Masifunde online study skills course is now an Open Educational Resource (OER) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial?-ShareAlike? 3.0 Unported License.  More information

The Project Team was

 TSiBA Education

•  Leigh Meinart: Project Sponsor, TSiBA
• Morea Josias: Project Manager, TSiBA
• Adri Marais: Director, Academic Programmes
• Amanda Paulsen: author/editor
• Julie Mc Farlane: author/editor
• Beverley Basson: editor
• Taurai Mhokore: IT
• Other TSiBA staff, volunteers, consultants and students

 Oxford University Department for Continuing Education

International & Public Programmes Divisions

• Angus Hawkins: Project Sponsor, Oxford
•  Tristram Wyatt: Project Manager, Oxford
• Christine Jackson: lecturer in history and academic support

 Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning Unit

• Marion Manton: TALL coordination for Masifunde
• David Balch: Web developer
• Other TALL colleagues  www.tall.ox.ac.uk

For a complete list of local wiki pages, see TitleIndex.