To commemorate the event, NDU hosted Naeema Zarif, Creative Commons Regional Coordinator for the Arab World. Ms. Zarif met NDU President Fr. Walid Moussa, who expressed the importance of capitalizing on recent trends in open education to broaden access, foster innovation, and alleviate student textbook costs.

During the symposium, Dr. Fawzi Baroud, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology, described the history of  NDU’s involvement with open education beginning with his own participation in the U.S. State Department sponsored Open Book Project in 2014 and the continued collaboration with Creative Commons to create awareness and devise capacity building projects for an optimal OER culture within the university. He also traced the University’s future trajectory with regard to OER and the role it will play in advancing OER in Lebanon and the region. Ms. Zarif went on to speak about CC licenses in a panel titled “Creative Commons Licenses and the Future of Open Education in the Arab World.”

The symposium’s second day (titled “NDU Student Attitudes toward the Use of OER”) focused on the piloting of OER in a university-wide English course targeting close to 600 students in more than twenty sections across three campuses. Dr. Kamal Abouchedid, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, highlighted the integration of OER as a strategic initiative at NDU and as a means of fostering open education.

The design of the course was described by Dr. Sandra Doueiher, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of English. Joining the discussion from Denmark via Skype, Dr. Ena Hodzik spoke about the scholarship of OER, specifically about the issue of quality and utility in the integration of OER. Dr. Hodzik went on to explain that the student survey administered by NDU closely aligned with the major themes in the literature of OER.

Survey results were presented by Dr. George Abdelnour, Chair of the Department of English and Translation. The extensive survey sought student feedback on the use of OER based on general attitudes, effectiveness, quality, and learning outcomes of the resources used. By a 2 to 1 margin, he explained, students showed high levels of satisfaction and engagement with OER. The findings also showed a favorable inclination toward enrolling in courses using OER in the future.

The post OER Symposium held by affiliate team at NDU in Lebanon appeared first on Creative Commons.

My name is Dr. Jane-Frances Obiageli Agbu. I am from Onitsha, a small but vibrant town in the Eastern part of Nigeria in West Africa. I work with the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). I was the Head of NOUN-OER unit from 2014 till July 2016. Currently, I am the Dean of Faculty of Health Sciences of NOUN, which gives me the opportunity to focus on OER-Health. I am also an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology.

Photo by Jane-Frances Agbu, CC BY.

It is natural to view anything that is ‘open’ and ‘freely available’ with a sort of hesitation or anxiety. It is also natural to presume these types of resources to be of less quality because of our contemporary instinct that almost everything should be paid for, and that the more these materials are hoarded, the pricier they will be. The open movement, with its initiatives around ‘Open Education’, ‘Open Access’, and ‘Open Educational Resources’, can make many people very uncomfortable.

I embraced the concept and practices of Open Education in 2006 when I joined the National Open University of Nigeria. Back then, I was a mother of three very young, and I needed to work close to home. NOUN was just five minutes away from my home. It was a perfect situation, and with very minimal knowledge about open education, I applied and got a job there. At the time, NOUN then was just three years old. However, they offered robust training for new entrants in the open education space, since the concept and practice was relatively new in Nigeria.

My friends and colleagues, who were so used to the conventional face-to-face mode of education, were disappointed with me. They asked me, ‘What is “open” about the open university?’ and said, “You should seek appointment in a ‘normal’ university in order to be respected and advance your career”. these comments were both troublesome and motivating. I wondered whether I made a mistake joining NOUN, but a chance encounter in an elevator with one of our students got me thinking. He simply asked, ‘Do you work here?’, and when I nodded my head, he said ‘thank you for giving me the opportunity to work and learn’. It was heartwarming, and 10 years later I am happily still an advocate of open education.

I became more involved in the Open Educational Resources movement in 2013. It was another chance encounter because the invitation to the workshop that introduced me to OER was initially meant for a senior Professor at my University, but he was busy and I was asked to attend. The workshop took place in Abuja, Nigeria and was organized by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in collaboration with UNESCO and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). There, I met Abel Caine of UNESCO and Alex Gakuru of Creative Commons. Alex said something that really stuck with me: “We are Africans, we live communal lives, we cook together, we work together. It is in us to share, so why are we not sharing knowledge?” I was incredibly captivated with this statement, and I wrote a long proposal to my institution on the need to embrace OER. A year and half later, I was asked to champion OER within NOUN. With support from UNESCO, we were able to organize an OER workshop to educate policy makers, university faculty, and course content developers. In December 2015 we shared our experiences with the Federal government of Nigeria.

You’ll see that my journey toward embracing open education and Open Educational Resources has not been a straightforward one, but it is a life that leaves me with smiles and appreciation. Mysteriously, it appears that some angels have crossed my path in this journey and further helped me to understand the beauty of opening up knowledge for common good.

While pondering on the palpable anxiety for the ‘open’ movement, let me share with you a bit more of my thinking:

• Naturally, with whatever knowledge we have, we want to be the “sage on the stage rather than a guide on the side”. This famous statement from Allison King brings back floods of memories for me. I can still visualize my former professors speaking eloquently in class, filling students with respect and awe. I felt anxious and wondered if I could ever get to be as knowledgeable as my professors. They were knowledge personified. But for me, open education has demystified this sort of reverence toward dissemination of knowledge. Open Educational Resources—with its five Rs (retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) and the flexible license options of Creative Commons—has humanized and democratized teaching and learning. Surely there are some that still believe in sole ownership of knowledge. Those people will continue to feel threatened by the ‘open movement’, but we’ve seen the incredible opportunities of open education, and we’ll continue on our path.
• Some are also hesitant to share knowledge because of fear of scrutiny. This of course is a natural instinct (no one likes to be criticised), but overcoming this shows that you view criticism as an avenue of learning and improvement. I think we will come to see that the costs of being ‘closed’ are much greater than the costs of being ‘open’, and that in the long run ‘open’ will be more personally gratifying, and help the most people.
• Also, is it possible that this initial anxiety toward being more open is triggered by the desire for conformity? It is a lot easier to move with the popular opinion, while advocates of OER and other open initiatives are still in the minority. But we must realize that it takes courage to walk with the less-traveled crowd. And we will realize that we are not alone, and that there is an increasing support network of educators, students, and advocates to rely on and collaborate with.

Photo by Jane-Frances Agbu, CC BY.

In March 2016, I was selected as one of the participants for Institute of Open Leadership (IOL2). I met other beautiful individuals that share a similar vision for ‘open’. In a lush garden up high in mountains of Cape Town, we shared our experiences, our projects, and open policy plans. The beauty remains with me as we continue to receive guidance from our mentors and share information amongst the IOL2 fellows.

IOL2 Fellows + Mentors, by Cable Green , CC BY 2.0

Here are some useful links related to my work:

• The Best of Two Open Worlds at the National Open University of Nigeria
• Embracing the Philosophy of Open Educational Resources
• “It upholds the dignity of mankind”: The power of OER in West Africa
• OER for Teachers video

The post Pondering the Future of Open Education in Nigeria appeared first on Creative Commons.

I was privileged to attend the second Institute for Open Leadership (IOL2), held in Cape Town, in March of this year. It was an amazing experience, during which I worked with various mentors and a small group of fellow open colleagues from around the world. One of the plusses of the Institute was hearing about the challenges that everyone faced and how they had gone about, or were going about overcoming them albeit, in some cases, with what many would consider relatively small wins. That, however, is the nature of the OER world. Lots of small wins are what ultimately lead to the big wins.

IOL Fellows atop Table Mountain, by bella_velo, CC BY 2.0

One issue that emerged is that there are no quick fixes when it comes to promoting the concept of open educational resources (OER). Tertiary institutions are a particularly difficult nut to crack, as the concept of knowledge sharing is not a popular one in what is, more often than not, an environment in which research ideas are cultivated and jealously guarded in the safe spaces of minds and offices. Not surprisingly, this does not make for fertile ground in which to plant the idea of knowledge sharing, but we persevere.

The fact that the OER movement has not quite taken off has been a cause of frustration for many of us for some time now. To those of us involved in the movement, the benefits of sharing would appear be a ‘no brainer’. However, over the course of my time as an OER Specialist at my current institution, I have had time to reflect on why the concept of OER is such a difficult one to communicate, even on a basic level.

To put things into perspective: We are on the brink of finalizing a joint Open Access/Open Educational Resources policy. We have been working on an internal online OER course and a booklet on Creative Commons licensing and OER, both of which will soon be released. We are also currently in the process of developing a range of courses together with the Office of Student Support in the Faculty of Health Sciences, which are intended to support the first year experience and will be released with an open license. I should be elated by these wins but, in my opinion, the impetus created by them will be difficult to maintain without a larger mindset change—that goes well beyond the reach of our current two-year project.

Many people become rather uncomfortable when you start to talk about openness in this somewhat esoteric vein, which is why I suspect so many OER projects are expected to produce facts, stats, quantity and research. What I think mitigates against the full success of projects which use this sort of approach, and structure, is that the concept of openness is not, at its heart, a purely quantitative or researchable one. True openness, and a willingness to share, will not flourish in an environment that is dominated, primarily, by a production line or microscopic analysis. It seems to me that we have become too cautious about addressing the real face of openness which is, in essence, an altruistic project which should ultimately benefit the world at large. In my opinion, it is the main reason why so many open initiatives disappear into the ether once the funding dries up. We have lost sight of the real spirit of the open movement because we are reluctant to admit that it doesn’t lend itself readily to the commercial, quantitative structures of our world.

We have been conditioned to believe that by being truly open to the world and people around us that we will lose something of ourselves and gain nothing in return. In some circumstances this may be true but, in reality, the world will gain something from us and something of our unique perspective on the world. All of us have knowledge to share, openly and freely, that will be of benefit to others and that can be repurposed in a way that will communicate that benefit across a range of cultures.

Openness and trust go hand-in-glove. Trust can only come from a willingness to share which, in the final analysis, stems from a concern for the common good. It really is as simple as that. That, in my opinion, is the foundation upon which the future of the open movement lies. If we don’t come from that starting point, we will remain trapped in theoretical frameworks, and the initial impetus of the movement will eventually be relegated to the world of academic research. Is that something we really want, or do we still believe that the open movement will ultimately be of benefit to the world at large?

The post Cultivating a Culture of Knowledge Sharing appeared first on Creative Commons.

By way of some background, I am currently the digital publishing manager at the African branch of Cambridge University Press (CUP), the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining CUP, I worked as a consultant conceptualising and implementing innovative digital solutions for academic and local government initiatives in South Africa. During this period I launched The Ulwazi Programme with collaborators from the eThekwini Municipality. This collaborative digital library project collated user-generated, local-language, indigenous knowledge content and published it openly under a Creative Commons license. Based on this experience, as well as my desire to explore how a traditional publishing business could engage with with the open movement and the plethora of freely-available content online, I applied to attend the Institute of Open Leadership (IOL) workshops. The week-long sessions were intense; a bootcamp in open licensing and open education. More importantly, the workshop brought together some of the top minds currently working on open ideas. In formal and informal discussions, these mentors shared their thinking with me on open business models, providing examples of successful and sustainable open initiatives.

Mabusi Kgwete from the Ulwazi Programme training volunteer fieldworkers on how to use the MediaWiki platform. Photo by Niall McNulty, CC-BY

Understanding rights, and why they matter now more than ever

Everyone who spends time online is now a producer of content. It’s how the digital world works. And this content is multifaceted too. It could be the blog posts you write, photographs you take and share, research articles you publish, videos you upload – the list goes on and on. Fortunately ,as the producer of the content, you get to decide how to license it. You can retain copyright (current standard and in most cases automatically assigned); you can decide to use a Creative Commons license and retain some rights; or you can release the content into the public domain, relinquishing all rights.

One of the direct outcomes of attending the IOL workshops was to critically examine my personal content output, and how I had licensed it. I have a Flickr account, where I have uploaded several hundred photographs, as well as a personal blog where I write about education and technology. Both were licensed using Creative Commons, but with noncommercial and sharealike restrictions. I’ve realised that these licenses, while open, did not allow the adaptation and re-use I believe in, especially when it comes to the potential for innovation and new creations. I also realised that I had chosen them out of a misplaced fear that someone might benefit commercially from using the content I’ve created. Logically I know this fear is largely unfounded and any commercial benefit will be because they have spent time and effort developing this content further. Based on this realisation, I have now changed the licensing on all my online output to CC-BY, allowing for both adaptation and commercial use. Let’s see what happens

A lotus flower blooming in the Durban Botanic Gardenes – now available for re-use and remixing. Photo by Niall McNulty, CC-BY

Part of my work now, as a member of the IOL group, is to look how open resources can be incorporated into existing product development processes at CUP, building a business case for open through small, successful projects. At the same time, I am interested in the changing role of the publisher – what purpose does it serve when there is an excess of freely available, high-quality content available online?

But first, is Cambridge an open university?

The University of Cambridge states that it “is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible” and supports staff in making their research freely available. There is an open policy in place at the institution, which guides how researchers and staff make content and data available, and a board that oversees this work. The University itself hosts a research repository which includes published articles, conference papers, datasets, theses and video content – basically anything that is considered research output. There are also internal teams available who assist with preparing content and data for open distribution, advise on funding requirements with regard to open access, and provide guidance on sharing datasets.

Cambridge, United Kingdom. By Niall McNulty, CC-BY. [Cropped from original]

CUP, as a unit of the University, has an open access publishing division called Cambridge Open, centered on academic journal and book publishing. The principles of Cambridge Open (paraphrased) are:

• Knowledge is for everyone. No one should be denied the discoveries and advances of learning or the ability to contribute to the pool of knowledge – whatever their academic status, means of funding or country of origin.
• CUP has long history and reputation for producing high quality, authoritative content and the Open Access programme develops this further by bringing together a greater diversity of researchers and thinkers, creating a vigorous and fertile exchange of ideas.

They do this by supporting Gold Open Access, where the author or institution pays an article processing charge to be published and the article is then made freely available, as well as Green Open Access, where authors deposit articles or research (submission copies as opposed to final published copies) in institutional repositories. Both these approaches allows authors to comply with funding requirements of many research donors.

Open business models

Sub-Saharan Africa has a vibrant and diverse publishing industry, with local and international players producing content in a number of languages across various genres. Due to market conditions, however, many print books need to be sold at low-price points, e.g. full-colour, senior level textbooks are sold for less than $3 in some countries. At the same time governments and NGOs are constantly looking for ways to make content freely available as budgets for learning and teaching resource material are squeezed. See for example Siyavula, which develops free maths and science textbooks, and ELRU which maintains an open access database of early childhood development resources, both in South Africa. So, my interest lies in what the publisher’s’ role is when content is freely available in the digital environment, how a publisher can engage with and use open resources, how this sits alongside copyrighted content, and what other revenue streams or business models can a publisher embrace to develop sustainable businesses. Paul Stacey, one of our IOL mentors, has written extensively about open business models and how they can generate revenue while contributing to social good (see also the very useful Open Business Model generation tool, adapted by Paul Stacey), and I must thank him for some really interesting conversations we had when he was in Cape Town.

In the past few months I’ve worked on two example projects, outlined below, as well as developing my thinking around a few other potential business models.

Re-using existing content

The first of these involved a recent submission of materials to the Namibian education ministry. The Ministry released a call for submission for curriculum-based content for secondary schools. CUP developed print resources for learners and teachers, as well as an additional digital component. The digital component was originally simply positioned as a value-add, provided freely to teachers who had adopted the CUP course. It included things such as class evaluation tools, rubrics, teaching guidelines, and multimedia content. For the mathematics course, the Namibian authors highlighted the difficulty learners had with certain concepts in algebra and geometry. After some online research, I discovered the 2,600 videos James Sousa had released under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. This license is the most open of the Creative Commons license suite. It permits  adaptation, sharing, and repurposing for any use, even commercially, as long as the creator of the work is attributed. The video clips explain mathematical concepts clearly and succinctly, using easy to understand animations. The videos were pitched at the correct level for the Namibian learners and covered the subjects highlighted by the authors as problematic. I contacted James directly to explain how I would like to use his content and to confirm whether he was happy with this. He was, and I agreed to get back to him with any comments from the Namibian teachers. The video clips were selected from those available and mapped to the Namibian curriculum. These were made available on a CD-ROM (Internet connectivity in Namibia is still an issue, precluding online delivery), alongside copyrighted and other licensed content. The open content provided content unavailable from commercial video libraries, allowing us to make the course affordable for Namibian teachers and fulfilling CUP’s mission of disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education and learning.

A sample of one of James Sousa’s openly-licensed videos.

Adapting content for local context

The second project I am currently developing involves conceptualising and producing an online course for South African teachers on using technology to aid teaching and learning in the classroom. The course will prepare teachers inexperienced with regard to digital tools  to effectively use them in the classroom to enhance teaching and learner and fulfil curriculum requirements. Written to the ICT level of teachers in South Africa, the course content will be aware of the particular issues that teachers might experience in their classrooms.

At the suggestion of colleagues from Cambridge University, I made contact with Dr. Sara Hennessy from the Education Department at University of Cambridge. Dr. Hennessy has done extension work in training African teachers to use ICTs in the classroom in Zambia, as part of an ongoing research project (see www.oer4schools.org). Content produced by Dr. Hennessy and her team is available for re-use and adaptation under a Creative Commons license. This content includes professional learning resources for teachers – focusing on interactive pedagogy for teaching with  ICTs – and consists of videos, images, lesson and activity plans and templates.

Although contextualised mainly for Zambian teachers, the content is largely appropriate for the South African environment and can be adapted and rewritten for the local teachers and curriculum requirements. We plan to match (and use) appropriate content from the OER4Schools project and then develop missing modules or components for the course. The course will be made freely available to teachers in South Africa, complying with the original content license of CC-BY-NC.

Introducing digital Open Educational Resources into Zambian schools.

At the same time I have been exploring other open business models that could support the development and distribution of educational content.

Data as a commercial model

We are constantly generating data by using digital tools and platforms. Feedback in education is a two-way process: learners, through feedback, can revise and improve, but teachers benefit equally from getting feedback on learners’ progress. Learning analytics in educational technology make it easy to identify and flag issues and provide learners with responsive, adaptive learning opportunities. Particular kinds of learner data collection have always been used to monitor progress and reward achievement in education, such as the grading systems used around the world. Learning analytics today are being used to track many more elements, such as:

• The time learners spend completing specific online tasks
• How learners engage with educational content both in learning management systems and on social media, e.g. what they access and how long they spend engaging with specific content

In 2011, education theorist George Siemens described how analytics empower educators to make informed changes in education. Educators can understand better ‘how [their] inputs influence or produce outputs.’ When high-quality content is provided freely and openly to learners they generate data through engaging with this content. The data, and its analysis, has value to education ministries, schools and teachers, and can be used as revenue a stream to fund the creation and publishing of open content. This data would need to be anonymised and follow local privacy laws, such as POPI in South Africa. Tech companies such as Facebook and Google have built entire business models out of the commoditisation of data generated by users.

Innovation, pedagogy, and the changing nature of content

The global buzz unleashed by the release of the Pokémon Go game for smartphones in 2016 exemplifies how augmented reality (AR) technology is growing. AR refers to  the use of technology (such as smartphones and tablets that have integrated microphones and cameras) to augment or overlay additional digital content to a real-world activity, in real time. Simply put, AR is used to superimpose visual data over real-world backgrounds. As would be expected, the educational possibilities of the technology are innumerable. In 2015, for example, CUP made use of AR when they released the ‘Cambridge Experience’ app for iOS devices. Cambridge designed this AR app to ‘bring classroom materials to life’ and so when users point their smartphones or tablets at the companion  posters, course books and other learning materials, additional information such as fact pop ups, educational videos or illustrative photography is displayed on-screen. This functionality adds value to the physical products and makes it possible for educators to give learners a more interactive, novel learning experiences.

In terms of further possibilities in this field, UK-based magazine Education Technology identified applications such as:

• Enhancing static content such as posters with helpful facts and newer insights
• Helping learners to visualize complex problems such as maths equations
• Making abstract concepts easier to understand via animated visualizations

In this scenario, the core content is made available freely to the learner but additional resources that complement the open resource or extends the learner, such as AR data or additional assessment, is available as a premium.

Conclusion

While still in the early phases of my thinking and experimentation around open business models and the relationship to education and publishing, it does seem that opportunities exist to explore new revenue streams that can embrace and re-use open content while at the same time providing sound pedagogic solutions to learners in sub-Saharan Africa that are innovative and of a high-standard. I am interested in developing these ideas further and encourage interested readers to leave comments below or contact me at niallmcnulty.com.

Thanks to my mentor Kelsey Wiens (Creative Commons South Africa Lead) for assistance in developing these ideas and guidance in the IOL process.

The post The changing role of the publisher in the age of plenty appeared first on Creative Commons.

June was a big month for OER in the United States, so here’s a quick roundup of some highlights, including a new open copyright policy from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the launch packet for districts incorporating open educational resources into their curriculum, and new funding for OER degrees in California!

• US Department of Education: #GoOpen Launch Packet released
  The #GoOpen launch packet supports “districts that have decided to implement a systematic approach to incorporating openly licensed educational resources into their curriculum.”

• Allocations for OER degrees in California

  California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the state’s budget for 2016-2017, including a$5M allocation (see p. 18) for the creation of OER-based degrees (see SEC. 16. Article 4) at California Community Colleges. This funding will facilitate the creation of approximately 25 OER-based Z-degrees at CA community colleges.
  

• Hillary Clinton announces open technology and innovation initiative

  Hillary Clinton calls for: effective copyright policy and open licenses on publicly funded education & science. 

• Bringing down the high cost of textbooks

  The Washington Post published a concise article about the cost of textbooks and its effect on students. As textbook costs soar, Achieving the Dream announced $9.8 million dollars in grants for developing OER degree programs.

The post ICYMI: a June #OER roundup appeared first on Creative Commons.

Open Textbooks for Africa Logo, by: Kelsey Wiens, CC BY 4.0

This is a guest blog post written by Kelsey Wiens, founder of Open Textbooks for Africa and public lead for Creative Commons South Africa. On March 11-12, 45 experts from around the world and across South Africa met to discuss opportunities for Open Textbooks in Africa. The goal of the event was to support the adoption and adaption of currently available open textbooks, as well as build and design a South African focused open textbook.

The first Open Textbook Summit in Africa was hosted in Cape Town on March 11-12 by Open Textbooks for Africa (OT4A). This two-day event bought together 45 local University lecturers, open education practitioners, and open textbooks experts from around the world. OT4A is a pilot project designed to support the adoption and adaption of currently available open textbooks as well as build and design our own textbooks to showcase African knowledge to the world.

Day one included a panel discussion and debate on the challenges of open textbooks in the South African context. Day two was a workshop to develop an astronomy open textbook with a global south perspective. Textbooks currently used by the Astronomy department at the University of Cape Town feature the sky from the northern hemisphere (i.e., upside down). The working group for the open Astronomy textbook has met twice since the workshop, established a work plan, and is anticipating a classroom usable draft by the end of 2016 – for use in the first term of 2017.

The physics group, also based out of the University of Cape Town, is adapting an OpenStax (CC BY licensed) open textbook. They have listed the OpenStax Physics open textbook as a “recommended book” in the second semester of 2016; aiming for full adoption in classrooms in 2017. This shift will save over 180,000 South African Rands to 150 first year students in first year (equivalent to US$11,860) at one institution over one academic year.  Additional meetings are planned with University of Witwatersrand, University of Western Cape & TSiBA to promote open textbooks.

For more details and to inquire about how your university can use open textbooks, please contact OT4A at: https://ot4a.org

The post Open Textbooks 4 Africa appeared first on Creative Commons.

This is a guest blog post written by Alek Tarkowski, Director of Centrum Cyfrowe and co-founder of Creative Commons Poland. On April 14, 2016, 60 experts from 30 countries are meeting in Kraków, Poland for the first OER Policy Forum. The goal of the event is to build on the foundations for OER strategy development and define collective paths towards greater, active OER adoption.

In 2015, the Polish government launched an online repository of open, Creative Commons Attribution-licensed e-textbooks, covering the core curriculum for primary and lower secondary education. After five years, open education activists finally saw their advocacy work bear fruit. In parallel, the government changed the textbook funding model, which translated into massive cost savings for parents and students.

With this goal achieved, we ask ourselves: is our work done? Or is this just the first step in fully achieving the potential for Open Educational Resources (OER) in education? Do we just need textbooks that parents and students don’t have to pay for, or do we need educators and learners actively engaging with resources, and trying out new pedagogies?

The issue surfaces from time to time in discussions on OER policies, but not often enough. We need to move beyond strategies that ensure open availability of content, and supplement them with active policies that support engagement of educators and learners with open resources. Scale of usage, and not just the number of available resources, should be our key metric of success.

Just free, or also open?

In February, at the annual meeting of the OER community, organised by the Hewlett Foundation, David Wiley and John Hilton III organised a discussion on “free vs. open”. The terminology itself was a bit confusing, because by “free” they meant “freely available”, and by “open” they meant allowing the “5 Rs” of active reuse of content. Such use of terms would cause a violent outburst from any orthodox Free Software advocate, since that community has clear definitions of “libre” and “gratis”. But the strange choice of key terms made sense in a way—it drew our attention from the typical way we have been naming things to the problem at heart of OER developments.

We’ve spent too much time arguing about the virtues of “libre” vs. “gratis”, which usually are rooted in moral arguments centered around the value of freedom. Not enough effort has been made to relate the value of OER to real-life educational challenges and the  everyday practices of educators and learners. The OER movement, like much of the open movement, has not paid enough attention to the actual value that openly-licensed resources provide to their users—in such as way that is defined in more precise terms than a potential for greater personal freedom. (This issue has been raised by John Wilbanks in his keynote at the OpenEd conference in 2014).

Wiley and Hilton rightly asked participants of the discussion: what do we gain from policies that lead to the provision of freely available resources? And how do we support open use of resources? The conversation is timely: OER policies are gaining important footholds in the United States. On the one hand, the federal government is committing to making openly available the educational content funded with public tax dollars. Also, at the state level—in particular colleges—educational systems are switching from proprietary to open resources, with the “Z degree” (zero resource cost college degree) leading the way. Using the terms of the debate, these are “gratis”, but not necessarily “libre” policies.

Strong and weak forms of open policies

The same challenge became clear to me over the last five years, as the Polish government has been implementing its open textbooks program. In 2011, Poland adopted a strong open model, which ensures legal openness (through open licensing), technical openness (for example use of open formats and dealing with accessibility issues) and which makes content available with no costs for end users. Polish open textbooks are available for free, in open formats, and under an open license. This is different from a weak open model, in which open licensing is not used.

This weak open model has been for almost two decades at the heart of the Open Access model of scientific publishing, in which academic research articles published in scholarly journals are made available to freely access and read (without carrying a specific open license), typically after an embargo period. Yet in recent years we see a shift toward strong openness in Open Access publishing. This has been explicitly expressed through the re-formulation of principles at the 10th Anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Open licensing ensures strong openness by ensuring, through legal means, rights defined in the educational sphere by Wiley’s “5 Rs”. Recommendations to do so are based on a very well developed argument that goes back to Richard Stallman’s thinking on user freedoms, and Lawrence Lessig’s idea of remix as core activity for free culture. But while reuse of code is a common practice in computer programming, reuse of educational content remains an elusive phenomenon. Open licensing advocates usually argue on the basis of future gains: we need to provide a reuse potential by removing legal barriers so that one day we can see novel types of reuse happen. The challenge our community faces is whether the positive changes advocates say will be realized by adopting strong open policies (i.e. policies that deliberately contain an open licensing mandate) can be observed quickly enough in order to validate their development and implementation. Without solid data on why strong open models are needed, they might be evaluated as overly challenging or ineffective.

We need to remember that strong openness is much more controversial than its weak form. In Poland, the willingness of the government to support a strong open policy led to a conflict with a strong lobby of educational publishers. The controversy focused solely on legal issues around ownership of content – and would have been easily solved by adopting a weak policy model (which the Polish government refused to do, fortunately).

Free or Open? Wrong question?

Making the distinction between “libre” and “gratis” (or “free” and “open”, to use terminology proposed by Wiley and Hilton) is a first, important step. Only then we become aware that there is more to OER policies than just open licensing requirements. It becomes possible to define a spectrum of policies through which educational change happens thanks to openly shared and reused resources.

Yet this does not mean that we need to choose between one strategy or the other. Lowering textbook and materials costs for parents and students has been an important aspect of the education policy introduced in Poland. Similarly, open licensing is an important standard for public funding of educational resources and  should remain core to any impactful OER policy. These are important policies, with the potential of introducing greater equality into the educational system.

But we need to be aware that such a policy, on its own, is a “passive” one if we consider broader goals defined by the open education movement. It’s one that creates only potential action for further change. We need to ask the question, what is happening to content that we have openly provided? And build policies that later support not just passive provision of OER, but their active reuse.

Mapping paths toward open education

Reuse is not something that can only happen “in the wild” once the adequate conditions are created. In fact, such organic reuse is quite rare. Although we lack empirical data, I would assume that less than 5% of users is willing to modify content, remix it, create own versions and mash-ups.

If we agree that empowerment and engagement of educators and learners is an important goal, we need to implement active policies that build on and support the potential ensured by passive ones. These could include incentives for teachers to create, reuse and share OER, investing in repositories and other types of infrastructure for discovery and analytics of content, or paying attention to digital literacy of teachers and formulation of new pedagogies. Developing, testing and implementing such active policies in educational systems around the world has to compliment efforts to open resources.

Almost five years after the signing of the Paris OER Declaration and ten years after the foundational meeting in Cape Town, it is time to define new strategies. For the last few years, I have been advocating for the definition of such “paths to open education”. In response, I’ve often heard that education is too varied for such standard scenarios to be defined. But if we want policies that support active reuse of OERs, then we need to define such standard paths. It is clear to me that these would be useful for policymakers asking the same questions. And the answers to some of these questions might even be easier than focusing most of our efforts and outreach on open licensing.

The post Active OER: Beyond open licensing policies appeared first on Creative Commons.

In addition to the Open Education Search App, Creative Commons license integration and search is available on Microsoft’s Docs.com. Both OpenEd.com and Microsoft are #GoOpen platform partners working to create the environment where educators and students can access the tools, content and expertise necessary to thrive in a connected world. Creative Commons will continue to work closely with both to integrate CC license choice and content discovery across platforms.

Learn more about Creative Commons work with platforms: https://creativecommons.org/platform/.

The post New Open Education Search App by OpenEd.com and Microsoft appeared first on Creative Commons.

Open Education Week 2016 Banner, by: Open Education Consortium, CC BY 4.0

Happy Open Education Week everyone!

Open Education Week is an annual convening of the global open education movement to share ideas, new open education projects and to raise awareness about open education and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.

Join this weeklong celebration of the benefits of free and open sharing in education.

Creative Commons is actively participating with:

• Creative Commons for Academics, Community Stakeholders and Business Leaders


• OER mini-hackaton
• An Introduction to: Creative Commons, Open Educational Resources & Open Policies
• Exponential Teachers Hangout with Creative Commons
  • hangout live

Be sure to share your Open Education Week activities with: #openeducationwk

What events are you planning this week?

The post Happy Open Education Week! appeared first on Creative Commons.

Creative Commons (CC) believes publicly funded education, research and data resources should be shared in the global commons. The public should have access to what it paid for, and should not be required to pay twice (or more) to access, use, and remix publicly funded resources.

This is why we are pleased to announce that the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has adopted a department-wide Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license requirement on intellectual property developed under a competitive Federal award process.

DOL’s new open licensing policy may be viewed in the federal register (PDF) and on regulations.gov

• 6. Revise § 2900.13 to read as follows:
  • §2900.13 Intangible property.
    • In addition to the guidance set forth in 2 CFR 200.315(d)*, the Department of Labor requires intellectual property developed under a competitive Federal award process to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. This license allows subsequent users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the copyrighted work and requires such users to attribute the work in the manner specified by the recipient.

While the total dollar amount of competitive DOL Federal grants affected by this new open licensing policy is not yet known, Lindsey Tepe at New America estimates the rule change will impact somewhere between $300 and $400 million annually.

The adoption of Creative Commons licensing clarifies to the public how they may access, use, and adapt publicly funded resources. There are multiple benefits of DOL requiring a CC BY license on publicly funded resources:

• Government increases the impact, reach and scalability of its grants.
• Government creates conditions for maximum potential value created from of all resources it funds, more efficiency, and better stewardship of public funds.
• Public has access to the education resources it funded.
• Innovative and entrepreneurial uses of openly licensed materials are enabled.
• Resources are available for reuse and value-add by anyone, including individual citizens, educators, scientists, public sector employees, and entrepreneurs.

This major open licensing policy development codifies DOL’s longtime leadership at the program level where the department required CC BY licenses on multiple grants before making this a department-wide open licensing policy. Examples include:

• Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program
  • CC and its partners have been supporting DOL and its TAACCCT grantees for the last four years and will continue to do so for the next two. TAACCCT grantees are already sharing CC BY licensed education materials in the public Skills Commons OER repository.
• Career Pathways Innovation Fund Grants Program
• H-1B Ready to Work Partnership grant program

DOL has already begun to integrate open licensing into its existing professional development SMART training series. The CC BY license requirement is referenced in the following modules:

• Capital Assets, Equipment, Intellectual Property, and Supplies
• Procurement under the New Requirements
• Uniform Guidance: Administrative Requirements
• Uniform Guidance: Cost Principles

These resources signal that the DOL is off to a great start. Creative Commons looks forward to supporting DOL with its Open Licensing Policy Toolkit and CC certificate (to be developed) for government staff.

Creative Commons and dozens of other organizations urged the U.S. Department of Education to adopt a similar open licensing policy. We hope DOL’s policy will be a useful guide as the Department of Education as it considers its proposed Open Licensing Requirement for Direct Grant Programs.

We applaud the U.S. Department of Labor for leading the way.  Well done!

The post U.S. Department of Labor adopts CC BY licensing policy department-wide appeared first on Creative Commons.