queensland university of technology cricos no. 000213j the oak law project open educational...

Queensland University of Technology

CRICOS No. 000213JThe OAK Law Projectwww.oaklaw.qut.edu.au

Open Educational Resources (OER): OECD and Other Projects

Scott Kiel-ChisholmProject ManagerThe Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law ProjectSchool of LawQueensland University of [email protected]

CRICOS No. 000213Ja university for the worldrealR The OAK Law Project

www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au Slide 2

Open Educational Resources (OER)

• Open courseware and content;

• Open software tools;

• Open material for e-learning capacity building

of faculty staff;

• Repositories of learning objects; &

• Free educational courses.Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) http://www.oecd.org/document/26/0,2340,en_2649_33723_35733402_1_1_1_1,00.html



OECD CERI OER Project

• The Open Educational Resources project was launched by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in August 2005.

• Concentrates on Open Educational Resources initiatives in tertiary education.

• Examines fundamental issues affecting the whole educational spectrum.




• The issues:– Access, quality and costs of information and knowledge over the

Internet;– Provision of content and learning material;– Opportunities for improving access and transfer of knowledge

and information;– The urgent need to clarify these issues with special focus on

OER initiatives; and– A need to define the technical and legal frameworks as well as

business models to sustain these initiatives.

Source: OECD, “Background Paper - Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges” available at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/1/49/36243575.pdf.




• Four main questions:

1. How to develop sustainable costs/benefits models for OER initiatives?

2. What are the intellectual property right issues linked to OER initiatives?

3. What are the incentives and barriers for universities and faculty staff to deliver their material to OER initiatives?

4. How to improve access and usefulness for the users of OER initiatives?




• Four main activities:

1. A concept analysis of “open educational resources”;

2. A mapping activity to show contours of an “OER initiates map” in

order to grasp the scope and scale of OER activities;

3. Two web-surveys: one to a restricted number of higher educational

institutions and one open survey to investigate how institutions

tackle the issues; and

4. Close co-operation with UNESCO International Institute for

Educational Planning (IIEP) Forum on Open Educational

Resources/Open content.



Formal OER Initiatives

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has provided OER in the form of MIT OpenCourseWare.

This is the first OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative that seeks to:

1. provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world; and

2. extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the “opencourseware” concept (Mirror sites make MIT OCW available to users in Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese).

Source: UNESCO Virtual University, http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/forumsfiche.php?queryforumspages_id=24.




• The development of Learning Activities Management System (LAMS) which enables teachers to design, manage and deliver online collaborative learning activities gave rise to the LAMS Community which seeks to provide OER.

•See http://lamsfoundation.org/ and http://www.lamscommunity.org.




• An initiative of State and Commonwealth governments in Australia and New Zealand, “The Le@rning Federation (TLF), employs emerging technologies to produce world-class online curriculum content to encourage student learning and support teachers in Australian and New Zealand schools”.

• The online curriculum content takes the form of interactive multimedia learning objects.

Source: http://www.thelearningfederation.edu.au/tlf2/.




•The European Schoolnet (EUN), is promoted as “The gateway to education in Europe”. Based in Brussels, the EUN:

Is an international partnership of more than 26 European Ministries of Education developing learning for schools, teachers and pupils across Europe and serves schools and other communities in education by, amongst other things, running a leading European education portal for teaching, learning, collaboration, and innovation to create a vibrant European community of educators and learners.

Sources: http://www.eun.org/portal/index.htm and http://www.europeanschoolnet.org/ww/en/pub/eun/about/euninfo.htm.



Open Content Licences

• The Open Content Movement has developed a range of licensing models to broaden the means by which users can use and reuse digital without infringing copyright than is available under statutory exceptions to copyright.

• Creative Commons, AEShareNet and other types of open content licences provide avenues for educational institutions and education communities to share Open Educational Resources (OER).



AEShareNet

• To facilitate OA to such knowledge in the educational environment, AEShareNet has developed a Free for Education Licence (FfE) that it is requesting the government and others to use in labelling content that can be utilised for educational activities.

Source: http://www.aesharenet.com.au.



Creative Commons

• The Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence is used, or has been adapted for use, by a number of educational institutions for OCW materials (MIT OCW, Utah State University OCW, Johns Hopkins OCW and University of Tokyo OCW).



Trust-DR

• In the United Kingdom, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded Trust-DR project is establishing an approach for educational institutions to “create, express and enforce a set of rights policies for their learning materials, and the rights information that they consequently need to be able to share with those materials”.

Sources: http://digbig.com/4gfam and Jacobs, N “Digital Repositories in UK universities and colleges”, FreePint, No. 200 16 February 2006, pp. 13-15, at http://www.freepint.com/issues/160206.htm accessed 23 February 2006, p. 15.



The OAK Law Project

• A Department of Education, Science and Training funded project that seeks to develop legal protocols for copyright management: facilitating open access to research at the national and international levels.

• The project aims to ensure that people can legally and efficiently share knowledge across domains and across the world.

• The protocols developed may assist educational institutions and communities to facilitate OER initiatives.

• See www.oaklaw.qut.edu.au.



Questions for The OAK Law Project

1. What is the legal status of a the educational content?

2. What are the IP issues that need to be resolved?

3. Is licensing the best tool for IP issue management?

4. How to manage licensing of distribution, and interests of the parties?

5. How to manage cited materials?

6. How to manage contributions by others? (eg technician photos, cite charts etc)?

7. How to manage derivative works?

8. Liability and risk management?

9. What protocols should be adopted?



Unlocking IP

• An ARC funded project which seeks to how determine how Australia's digital commons can be expanded and protected.

• Results sought include more efficient public rights licences, incentives to copyright owners to create them and technical aids to allow users to find commons content.

See http://www.bakercyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/project.html17



X4L and JORUM

• The JISC Exchange for Learning development program (X4L) and JORUM learning object repository service offer a way for educators to share the learning materials they create, and to reuse those created by others.



Informal OER Initiatives

• Wikis. (eg. Wikiversity - http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikiversity).

• iPods (eg. Students listening to recorded presentations).

• Podcasts and vodcasts (eg. The Podcast Network - http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/).

• Community websites (eg. Lawyers – http://www.qls.com.au).



Sustainability

• Financial support for OER initiatives is being received by the following bodies:

• The Hewlett Packard Company Foundation, established by the Hewlett-Packard Company, provides substantial grants to educational institutions http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/story.asp?S=1865441 and launched the World e-Inclusion, a new program to bring high-tech solutions to traditionally excluded markets, in 2000 with a plan to contribute billions of dollars http://fdncenter.org/pnd/archives/20001010/003698.html;



Sustainability

• The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation supports the Developmental Gateway site that serves as a freely accessible venue for the aggregation and dissemination of OERs worldwide http://topics.developmentgateway.org/openeducation;

• Microsoft provides support for education through global programs such as Partners in Learning http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/freedomtolearn.mspx; and

• Sun Microsystems has its Sun Microsystems Foundation that provides grants to schools and non-profit organisations http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/comm_invest/giving/foundation.html.

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