Open Educational Resources: legal aspects
Raquel Xalabarder, Department of Law and Political Science, UOC
In principle, intermediaries (i.e. OER repositories) are liable for infringement of intellectual property rights. Nevertheless, there are safe harbours (exceptions) where intermediaries are not liable, provided they pass the awareness of knowledge test. Mainly it deals with knowing you’re consciously infringing the law and your ability to quickly remove content when required to.
Big problem: there’s no consensus on which law should apply to what at the international level.
Three things that the law empowers the author (not the industry) to do: distribute, communicate to the public and transform. But there are exceptions to the author does not abuse his monopoly, and education is one of them. OER repositories, though intended to teaching — thus, fair use — do open those contents to anyone, be their purpose teaching or not, so we have a problem here of possible infringement.
Creative Commons is, in no way, a registry: you should (also) register your work in the Copyright registry to protect your rights, regardless of what you intend to do with them.
The advice for the OER community should not be just try and see how I apply the law but to lobby and see how this law can be changed, changed so educatinoal purposes are always an exception to copyright, to enhance consumer protection (vs. the industry’s). OER practitioners should aim to bring the debate to the international fora, not just to keep it in the scope of their own (immediate) needs. Rights should be about exploitation, not use.
Open Educational Resources and Virtual Universities
Susan D’Antoni, Head of UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning, IIEP Virtual Institute
Knowledge is not merchandise, knowledge divide is deeper than the digital divide [personal note: this is because we think of digital divide as ICT infrastructures divide, i.e. forgetting about informational literacy], OER has the potential to address national policy objectives on the Knowledge Society.
UNESCO (and, actually, the OER community taking part in the fora) should be in position to design a policy framework to enchance/foster/refer OER development and implantation.
Yochai Benkler, The wealth of networks: The importance of policy choices – and the social political choides behin them – in the move towards the information society.
Closing Session
Julià Minguillón, Vice-Director Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, UOC
The OLCOS project has drawn a roadmap and some tutorials on how to implant OER.
Recommendations
There’s a need for information, to spread the word of open access and OER
Top-down and bottom-up approaches
Remove producer-consumer barriers, in the sense that consumers can become producers, and producers become consumers
Stick to standards
Update 20061220: The presentations can now be downloaded here Update 20070517: The videos can now be downloaded here
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UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges (2006)
Case Study 2. Massachusetts Institute of Techonolgy. Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds
Shigeru Miyagawa, OpenCourseWare Advisory Committee, MIT
Move away from the MIT.com (dot.com) approach. MIT OCW is, no way, a means to get revenues: on the contrary, the participants are driven by the aim of sharing.
Open Educational Resources: technological aspects Miguel Ángel Sicilia, Information Engineering Research Unit, Alcalá University
Providing the sources is crucial so things are really “open”.
Reusability depends on the context: the more contextualized the learning object, the less reusable, but more usable. So, should we reward reusability, even if there is a trade-off with usability?
Opennes (in technology issues) should bring us from single opencourseware sites to federated ones and brokers… And standards are already ready.
Open Educational Resources: economic aspects Peter Baumgartner, Department for Interactive Media and Educational Resources, Donau-Universität Krems
From a strictly educational point of view, it’s crazy to think that we can create the tiniest learning objects, so we can build with them bigger educational resources, namely “courses”. Not even Lego — to follow the usual metaphor (118 Kb) — provides tiniest one size pieces: there are different sizes of pieces, and even different shapes. We should rethink the idea of granularity.
Assumptions:
The quality of educational settings is a mix of content and a learning environment
different types of educational resources support different kinds of learning environments, and vice versa
Three teaching modes:
Canned content is not (necessarily) open content. And content varies widely whether the institution promoting the open content is public or private, and whether it is about virtual learning (autonomous learner) or blended learning (educational support).
Why open content?
for “a better world”
for reputation
for content: so I can mix it with other open content
for other services: I give you content and you give me feedback on how it worked / you give me medatada / etc.
Barriers
copyright infringement
material has to be improved for general use: it was ok for my internal use at my lecture classes, but opening means public exposure, so it should be improved
print is better than web
lack of knowledge
giving away content can mean giving away business opportunities
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UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges (2006)
Open Educational Resources: institutional challenges
David Wiley, Instructional Technology Department, Utah State University
Shifts:
Analog -> Digital
Tethered -> Mobile
Isolated -> Connected
Generic -> Personal
Consuming -> Creating
Closed -> Open
How the educational model is being challenged?
Content is changing: the University no more the one and only content holder
Expertise is changing: more and more accessible (out of the University) experts
Credentialing is changing: certifications can be worth more than a university degree [personal note: this brings me/us directly back to (open) ePortfolios, personal digital repositories, personal research portals, etc.]
So, the monopoly is being broken apart
The problem is that institutions do not understand “online”, they’re digital immigrants, not natives.
And it’s also about respect: if you do customize your courses if you have to impart them in other cultures different than yours, why not doing the same when moving to “digital cultures”? This customizing requires “open”, to enable creation, connection, personalization… So, it’s not because it’s politically correct, but educationally/instructionally correct.
Open Educational Resources: educational aspects
C. Sidney Burrus, Senior Strategist at Connexions, Rice University
[Traditional] Publishing disconnects the author with his audience (mainly students and other teachers), and they become shutouts.
Two phases to major technological change:
Phase one: new technology does old job better
Phase two: new technology invents new application that could not have been predicted
All content is in XML, including “strange” content: Mahts, MathML; Chemistry, CML; Music, MusicXML; etc. This enhances editing, searching, aggregating, localizing…
New Intellectual Property issues:
Get it right from the start
Make content safe to share
Sustainability
Connexions online
Free
Forever
Generate mission support revenue
Revenue from low-cost textbook production
Community College Initiative
University Press Initiative
K-12 Textbook Initiative
Supporting developing world & financially disadvantaged
Information is free, books are not
All content, compulsory, is licensed under a Creative Commons “attribution” license. So, you can commercialize Connexions content and make money out of it. The reason? If the market does work, only people adding value to the content can actually charge money on it. Otherwise, people will just download the content and print it.
Case Study 1. Open University UK. Open Educational Resources and the Future of Open Universities
Niall Sclater, Director of Virtual Learning Environment Project, Open University UK
Open University model is not based or aimed to publishing, but to online displaying. Thus, web support is the focus, powered by a Moodle installation, with quizzes and activities, etc. Lots of other open source tools do complete Moodle features i.e. for instant messaging.
Sometimes (and growing) content becomes activity, and activity becomes content. Everything that happens in the virtual environment can be reused and converted into content. ePorfolios, thus, are somehow created on the run.
Podcasting, for instance, is communication (interactivity, activity) but, as it remains, it becomes immediately content. And this applies whether the podcast is a teacher’s or a student’s.
Questions ahead
Can distance universities survive in a World where content is free?
Should we put more emphasis on supporting students to reuse content developed elsewhere and less on developing our own resources?
Can we build self-sustaining communities around open resources where learners and teachers discuss and enhance the content?
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UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges (2006)
The Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) realizes how fast a published book gets out-of-date, especially in the fast-moving field of information and communications technology for development (ICT4D). APDIP has therefore donated 15 of its e-Primers to Wikibooks for free use and update (see list below).
In my opinion, this is good news twofold:
On one hand, the reason APDIP says its leading the opening of the books — easy and fast content updating — is a heavy weight one, specially in the field of ICTs for Development (and Information Society in general) where things change at the speed of bytes.
On the other hand, it does not make any more sense to copyright material issued by public institutions, and I would consider any organization under the umbrella of the United Nations system to be a public institution. While things made out of atoms are fair to be charged because of the concurring “materializing” costs, digital supports should be made freely available. In this issue, I expect the (c) on the APDIP materials to drop (also on their site) and be changed by a (cc) or a GNU FLD or whatever. And I’d also expect to see some other “products” (such as ITU’s databases), clearly of a wide public interest, to be entering the open access paradigm too.
These ICT4D Books belong to two previously issued collections, namely, the APDIP ICT4D e-Primers and the IOSN FOSS Primers, and can be found in the following places:
