Funding Open Educational Resources in Higher Education: A South African Public Policy Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Check line 5 - OER referred to as Online Education Resource?

Author Response

Check line 5 - OER referred to as Online Education Resource?

This has been changed to " Open educational resources." 

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors present OER funding status in South Africa. The strategy applied is a critical theory paradigm and documentary research. The study finds that the OER funding regulation is so far from the National Policy framework developed in 2020.  The work seems relevant to the the field.

References are to be more recent

Author Response

The authors have made use of recent references. However, it is important to note that OER in South Africa has begun to recently gain traction, hence academically, it has begun to attract the interest of researchers, hence recent sources from a South African perspective are still limited. However, the authors tried to incorporate recent sources where available. 

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper shows the state of art of OERs from a public policy perspective in South Africa. What emerges from analysing government documents from 1996 to 2022, through semantic coding, is that the OER funding policy exposes higher education to a poorly funded OER environment.

I consider this research quite useful to fuel the debate among scientific community on OER all over the world going beyond a “Eurocentric” view.

However, I would like to suggest to the authors

-       Better describe the authors' reasons for adopting the critical theory paradigm;

-       Summarise at the end of the results a diagram or, for example, a matrix in which the authors combine public policy documents on the financing of OERs in South African higher education sectors with the overall production and distribution costs of OERs (Table 1) to see at a glance what is missing;

-       discuss the authors' findings with public policies in other countries to give a more general scope to the study.

The article is well written and a clear research process is outlined.

Author Response

Better describe the authors' reasons for adopting the critical theory paradigm;

This has been done

Summarise at the end of the results a diagram or, for example, a matrix in which the authors combine public policy documents on the financing of OERs in South African higher education sectors with the overall production and distribution costs of OERs (Table 1) to see at a glance what is missing;

While the authors appreciate the comment, as argued earlier, OER in South Africa is still in its infancy stage. Hence a matrix or diagram illustrating the overall production and distribution costs of OERs will be impossible as the data relating to such is minimal and rarely available in the public domain. At best, OER implementation and policies around such are still observed from government policy documents, thus figures relating to its production are scarce if not available at all. Notneltess the authors made effective use of available data to ensure one understands the current state of OER in South Africa. 

Discuss the authors' findings with public policies in other countries to give a more general scope to the study.

This has been done under "Possible OER Funding sources"