Open educational resources

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

UNESCO Global Open Educational Resources Logo

Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. There is no universal usage of open file formats in OER. They are available online, often through e-learning programs and online course providers.

The term OER describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve and redistribute under some licenses.

The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm or create more accessible means of professional and personal development.

Definition and scope

The idea of open educational resources (OER) has numerous working definitions. The term was firstly coined at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work". Often cited is the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation term which defines OER as:

teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines OER as: "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences". (This is the definition cited by Wikipedia's sister project, Wikiversity.) By way of comparison, the Commonwealth of Learning "has adopted the widest definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) as 'materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research'". The WikiEducator project suggests that OER refers "to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing'.

The above definitions expose some of the tensions that exist with OER:

• Nature of the resource: Several of the definitions above limit the definition of OER to digital resources, while others consider that any educational resource can be included in the definition.
• Source of the resource: While some of the definitions require a resource to be produced with an explicit educational aim in mind, others broaden this to include any resource which may potentially be used for learning.
• Level of openness: Most definitions require that a resource be placed in the public domain or under a fully open license. Others require only that free use to be granted for educational purposes, possibly excluding commercial uses.

These definitions also have common elements, namely they all:

• cover use and reuse, repurposing, and modification of the resources;
• include free use for educational purposes by teachers and learners
• encompass all types of digital media.

Given the diversity of users, creators and sponsors of open educational resources, it is not surprising to find a variety of use cases and requirements. For this reason, it may be as helpful to consider the differences between descriptions of open educational resources as it is to consider the descriptions themselves. One of several tensions in reaching a consensus description of OER (as found in the above definitions) is whether there should be explicit emphasis placed on specific technologies. For example, a video can be openly licensed and freely used without being a streaming video. A book can be openly licensed and freely used without being an electronic document. This technologically driven tension is deeply bound up with the discourse of open-source licensing.

There is also a tension between entities which find value in quantifying usage of OER and those which see such metrics as themselves being irrelevant to free and open resources. Those requiring metrics associated with OER are often those with economic investment in the technologies needed to access or provide electronic OER, those with economic interests potentially threatened by OER, or those requiring justification for the costs of implementing and maintaining the infrastructure or access to the freely available OER. While a semantic distinction can be made delineating the technologies used to access and host learning content from the content itself, these technologies are generally accepted as part of the collective of open educational resources.

Since OER are intended to be available for a variety of educational purposes, most organizations using OER neither award degrees nor provide academic or administrative support to students seeking college credits towards a diploma from a degree granting accredited institution. In open education, there is an emerging effort by some accredited institutions to offer free certifications, or achievement badges, to document and acknowledge the accomplishments of participants.

In order for educational resources to be OER, they must have an open license. Many educational resources made available on the Internet are geared to allowing online access to digitised educational content, but the materials themselves are restrictively licensed. Thus, they are not OER. Often, this is not intentional. Most educators are not familiar with copyright law in their own jurisdictions, never mind internationally. International law and national laws of nearly all nations, and certainly of those who have signed onto the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), restrict all content under strict copyright (unless the copyright owner specifically releases it under an open license). The Creative Commons license is the most widely used licensing framework internationally used for OER.

History

The term learning object was coined in 1994 by Wayne Hodgins and quickly gained currency among educators and instructional designers, popularizing the idea that digital materials can be designed to allow easy reuse in a wide range of teaching and learning situations.

The OER movement originated from developments in open and distance learning (ODL) and in the wider context of a culture of open knowledge, open source, free sharing and peer collaboration, which emerged in the late 20th century. OER and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), for instance, have many aspects in common, a connection first established in 1998 by David Wiley who coined the term open content and introduced the concept by analogy with open source. Richard Baraniuk made the same connection independently in 1999 with the founding of Connexions (now called OpenStax_CNX).

The MIT OpenCourseWare project is credited for having sparked a global Open Educational Resources Movement after announcing in 2001 that it was going to put MIT's entire course catalog online and launching this project in 2002. In a first manifestation of this movement, MIT entered a partnership with Utah State University, where assistant professor of instructional technology David Wiley set up a distributed peer support network for the OCW's content through voluntary, self-organizing communities of interest.

The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries.

In 2005 OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) launched a 20-month study to analyse and map the scale and scope of initiatives regarding "open educational resources" in terms of their purpose, content, and funding. The report "Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources", published in May 2007, is the main output of the project, which involved a number of expert meetings in 2006.

In September 2007, the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation convened a meeting in Cape Town to which thirty leading proponents of open education were invited to collaborate on the text of a manifesto. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration was released on 22 January 2008, urging governments and publishers to make publicly funded educational materials available at no charge via the internet.

The global movement for OER culminated at the 1st World OER Congress convened in Paris on 20–22 June 2012 by UNESCO, COL and other partners. The resulting Paris OER Declaration (2012) reaffirmed the shared commitment of international organizations, governments, and institutions to promoting the open licensing and free sharing of publicly funded content, the development of national policies and strategies on OER, capacity-building, and open research. In 2018, the 2nd World OER Congress in Ljubljana, Slovenia, was co-organized by UNESCO and the Government of Slovenia. The 500 experts and national delegates from 111 countries adopted the Ljubljana OER Action Plan. It recommends 41 actions to mainstream open-licensed resources to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 4 on “quality and lifelong education".

An historical antecedent to consider is the pedagogy of artist Joseph Beuys and the founding of the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1973. After co-creating with his students, in 1967, the German Student Party, Beuys was dismissed from his teaching post in 1972 at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The institution did not approve of the fact that he permitted 50 students who had been rejected from admission to study with him. The Free University became increasingly involved in political and radical actions calling for a revitalization and restructuring of educational systems.

Licensing and types

Play media

Turning a Resource into an Open Educational Resource

Open educational resources often involve issues relating to intellectual property rights. Traditional educational materials, such as textbooks, are protected under conventional copyright terms. However, alternative and more flexible licensing options have become available as a result of the work of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that provides ready-made licensing agreements that are less restrictive than the "all rights reserved" terms of standard international copyright. These new options have become a "critical infrastructure service for the OER movement." Another license, typically used by developers of OER software, is the GNU General Public License from the free and open-source software (FOSS) community. Open licensing allows uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone.

Types of open educational resources include: full courses, course materials, modules, learning objects, open textbooks, openly licensed (often streamed) videos, tests, software, and other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. OER may be freely and openly available static resources, dynamic resources which change over time in the course of having knowledge seekers interacting with and updating them (such as this Wikipedia article), or a course or module with a combination of these resources.

OER policy

Open educational resources policies are principles or tenets adopted by governing bodies in support of the use of open content and practices in educational institutions. Many of these policies require publicly funded resources be openly licensed. Such policies are emerging increasingly at the country, state/province and more local level.

Creative Commons hosts an open educational resources policy registry lists 95 current and proposed open education policies from around the world.

Creative Commons and multiple other open organizations launched the Open Policy Network to foster the creation, adoption and implementation of open policies and practices that advance the public good by supporting open policy advocates, organizations and policy makers, connecting open policy opportunities with assistance, and sharing open policy information.

Costs

One of the most frequently cited benefits of OER is their potential to reduce costs. While OER seem well placed to bring down total expenditures, they are not cost-free. New OER can be assembled or simply reused or repurposed from existing open resources. This is a primary strength of OER and, as such, can produce major cost savings. OER need not be created from scratch. On the other hand, there are some costs in the assembly and adaptation process. And some OER must be created and produced originally at some time. While OER must be hosted and disseminated, and some require funding, OER development can take different routes, such as creation, adoption, adaptation and curation.

Each of these models provides different cost structure and degree of cost-efficiency. Upfront costs in developing the OER infrastructure can be expensive, such as building the OER infrastructure. Butcher and Hoosen noted that “a key argument put forward by those who have written about the potential benefits of OER relates to its potential for saving cost or, at least, creating significant economic efficiencies. However, to date there has been limited presentation of concrete data to back up this assertion, which reduces the effectiveness of such arguments and opens the OER movement to justified academic criticism.”

Institutional support

A large part of the early work on open educational resources was funded by universities and foundations such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was the main financial supporter of open educational resources in the early years and has spent more than $110 million in the 2002 to 2010 period, of which more than $14 million went to MIT. The Shuttleworth Foundation, which focuses on projects concerning collaborative content creation, has contributed as well. With the British government contributing £5.7m, institutional support has also been provided by the UK funding bodies JISC and HEFCE.

UNESCO is taking a leading role in "making countries aware of the potential of OER." The organisation has instigated debate on how to apply OERs in practice and chaired vivid discussions on this matter through its International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP). Believing that OERs can widen access to quality education, particularly when shared by many countries and higher education institutions, UNESCO also champions OERs as a means of promoting access, equity and quality in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2012 the Paris OER Declaration was approved during the 2012 OER World Congress held at UNESCO's headquarters in Paris.

Initiatives

A parallel initiative, OpenStax CNX (formerly Connexions), came out of Rice University starting in 1999. In the beginning, the Connexions project focused on creating an open repository of user-generated content. In contrast to the OCW projects, content licenses are required to be open under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 (CC BY) license. The hallmark of Connexions is the use of a custom XML format CNXML, designed to aid and enable mixing and reuse of the content.
In 2012, OpenStax was created from the basis of the Connexions project. In contrast to user-generated content libraries, OpenStax hires subject matter experts to create college-level textbooks that are peer-reviewed, openly licensed, and available online for free. Like the content in OpenStax CNX, OpenStax books are available under Creative Commons CC BY licenses that allow users to reuse, remix, and redistribute content as long as they provide attribution. OpenStax's stated mission is to create professional grade textbooks for the highest-enrollment undergraduate college courses that are the same quality as traditional textbooks, but are adaptable and available free to students.

Other initiatives derived from MIT OpenCourseWare are China Open Resources for Education and OpenCourseWare in Japan. The OpenCourseWare Consortium, founded in 2005 to extend the reach and impact of open course materials and foster new open course materials, counted more than 200 member institutions from around the world in 2009.

OER Africa, an initiative established by the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide) to play a leading role in driving the development and use of OER across all education sectors on the African continent. The OER4Schools project focusses on the use of Open Educational Resources in teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa.

Wikiwijs (the Netherlands), was a program intended to promote the use of open educational resources (OER) in the Dutch education sector.

The Open educational resources programme (phases one and two) (United Kingdom), funded by HEFCE, the UK Higher Education Academy and Jisc, which has supported pilot projects and activities around the open release of learning resources, for free use and repurposing worldwide.

In 2003, the ownership of Wikipedia and Wiktionary projects was transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization whose goal is to collecting and developing free educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally. Wikipedia ranks in the top-ten most visited websites worldwide since 2007.

OER Commons was spearheaded in 2007 by ISKME, a nonprofit education research institute dedicated to innovation in open education content and practices, as a way to aggregate, share, and promote open educational resources to educators, administrators, parents, and students. OER Commons also provides educators tools to align OER to the Common Core State Standards; to evaluate the quality of OER to OER Rubrics; and to contribute and share OERs with other teachers and learners worldwide. To further promote the sharing of these resources among educators, in 2008 ISKME launched the OER Commons Teacher Training Initiative, which focuses on advancing open educational practices and on building opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning.
One of the first OER resources for K-12 education is Curriki. A nonprofit organization, Curriki provides an Internet site for open source curriculum (OSC) development, to provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for students up to the age of 18 (K-12). By applying the open source process to education, Curriki empowers educational professionals to become an active community in the creation of good curricula. Kim Jones serves as Curriki's Executive Director.

In August 2006 WikiEducator was launched to provide a venue for planning education projects built on OER, creating and promoting open education resources (OERs), and networking towards funding proposals. Its Wikieducator's Learning4Content project builds skills in the use of MediaWiki and related free software technologies for mass collaboration in the authoring of free content and claims to be the world's largest wiki training project for education. By 30 June 2009 the project facilitated 86 workshops training 3,001 educators from 113 different countries.

Between 2006 and 2007, as a Transversal Action under the European eLearning Programme, the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project carries out a set of activities that aim at fostering the creation, sharing and re-use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in Europe and beyond. The main result of OLCOS was a Roadmap, in order to provide decision makers with an overview of current and likely future developments in OER and recommendations on how various challenges in OER could be addressed.

Peer production has also been utilized in producing collaborative open education resources (OERs). Writing Commons, an international open textbook spearheaded by Joe Moxley at the University of South Florida, has evolved from a print textbook into a crowd-sourced resource for college writers around the world. Massive open online course (MOOC) platforms have also generated interest in building online eBooks. The Cultivating Change Community (CCMOOC) at the University of Minnesota is one such project founded entirely on a grassroots model to generate content. In 10 weeks, 150 authors contributed more than 50 chapters to the CCMOOC eBook and companion site.

In 2011-12, academicians from the University of Mumbai, India created an OER Portal with free resources on Micro Economics, Macro Economics, and Soft Skills – available for global learners.

Another project is the Free Education Initiative from the Saylor Foundation, which is currently more than 80% of the way towards its initial goal of providing 241 college-level courses across 13 subject areas. The Saylor Foundation makes use of university and college faculty members and subject experts to assist in this process, as well as to provide peer review of each course to ensure its quality. The foundation also supports the creation of new openly licensed materials where they are not already available as well as through its Open Textbook Challenge.

In 2010 the University of Birmingham and the London School of Economics worked together on the HEA and JISC funded DELILA project, the main aim of the project was to release a small sample of open educational resources to support embedding digital and information literacy education into institutional teacher training courses accredited by the HEA including PGCerts and other CPD courses. One of the main barriers that the project found to sharing resources in information literacy was copyright that belonged to commercial database providers.

In 2006, the African Virtual University (AVU) released 73 modules of its Teacher Education Programs as open education resources to make the courses freely available for all. In 2010, the AVU developed the OER Repository which has contributed to increase the number of Africans that use, contextualize, share and disseminate the existing as well as future academic content. The online portal serves as a platform where the 219 modules of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, ICT in education, and teacher education professional courses are published. The modules are available in three different languages – English, French, and Portuguese, making the AVU the leading African institution in providing and using open education resources.

In August 2013, Tidewater Community College become the first college in the U.S. to create an Associate of Science degree based entirely on openly licensed content – the "Z-Degree". The combined efforts of a 13-member faculty team, college staff and administration culminated when students enrolled in the first "z-courses" which are based solely on OER. The goals of this initiative were twofold: 1) to improve student success, and 2) to increase instructor effectiveness. Courses were stripped down to the Learning Outcomes and rebuilt using openly licensed content, reviewed and selected by the faculty developer based on its ability to facilitate student achievement of the objectives. The 21 z-courses that make up an associate of science degree in business administration were launched simultaneously across four campus locations. TCC is the 11th largest public two-year college in the nation, enrolling nearly 47,000 students annually.

During this same time period from 2013-2014, Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) also created 2 zero cost OER degree pathways: one an associate's degree in General Studies, the other an associate's degree in Social Science. One of the largest community colleges in the nation, NOVA serves around 75,000 students across six campuses. The Extended Learning Institute (ELI) is the centralized online learning hub for the entire college. Dr. Wm. Preston Davis, Director of Instructional services at ELI, led this OER initiative called the OER-Based General Education Project. Davis led the ELI team of faculty, instructional designers and librarians on the project to create what NOVA calls "digital open" courses. During the planning phase, the team was careful to select core, high-enrollment courses that could impact as many students as possible, regardless of specific course of study. At the same time, the team looked beyond individual courses to create depth and quality around full pathways for students to earn an entire degree. Currently, 20% of students at NOVA have taken an OER course and enrollment in these courses is rising. From Fall 2013 to Fall 2016, more than 15,000 students have enrolled in NOVA OER courses yielding textbook cost savings of over 2 million dollars over the three-year period. Currently, NOVA is working to add a third OER degree pathway in Liberal Arts.

Nordic OER is a Nordic network to promote open education and collaboration amongst stakeholders in all educational sectors. The network has members from all Nordic countries and facilitates discourse and dialogue on open education but also participates in projects and development programs. The network is supported by the Nordic OER project co-funded by Nordplus.

In Norway the Norwegian Digital Learning Arena (NDLA) is a joint county enterprise offering open digital learning resources for upper secondary education. In addition to being a compilation of open educational resources, NDLA provides a range of other online tools for sharing and cooperation. At project startup in 2006, increased volume and diversity were seen as significant conditions for the introduction of free learning material in upper secondary education. The incentive was an amendment imposing the counties to provide free educational material, in print as well as digital, including digital hardware.

In Sweden there is a growing interest in open publication and the sharing of educational resources but the pace of development is still slow. There are many questions to be dealt with in this area; for universities, academic management and teaching staff. Teachers in all educational sectors require support and guidance to be able to use OER pedagogically and with quality in focus. To realize the full potential of OER for students' learning it is not enough to make patchwork use of OER – resources have to be put into context. Valuable teacher time should be used for contextual work and not simply for the creation of content. The aim of the project OER for learning OERSweden is to stimulate an open discussion about collaboration in infrastructural questions regarding open online knowledge sharing. A network of ten universities led by Karlstad University will arrange a series of open webinars during the project period focusing on the use and production of open educational resources. A virtual platform for Swedish OER initiatives and resources will also be developed. The project intends to focus in particular on how OER affects teacher trainers and decision makers. The objectives of the project are: To increase the level of national collaboration between universities and educational organisations in the use and production of OER, To find effective online methods to support teachers and students, in terms of quality, technology and retrievability of OER, To raise awareness for the potential of webinars as a tool for open online learning, To increase the level of collaboration between universities' support functions and foster national resource sharing, with a base in modern library and educational technology units, and To contribute to the creation of a national university structure for tagging, distribution and storage of OER.

Founded in 2007, the CK-12 Foundation is a California-based non-profit organization whose stated mission is to reduce the cost of, and increase access to, K-12 education in the United States and worldwide. CK-12 provides free and fully customizable K-12 open educational resources aligned to state curriculum standards and tailored to meet student and teacher needs. The foundation's tools are used by 38,000 schools in the US, and additional international schools.

LATIn Project brings a Collaborative Open Textbook Initiative for Higher Education tailored specifically for Latin America. This initiative encourages and supports local professors and authors to contribute with individual sections or chapters that could be assembled into customized books by the whole community. The created books are freely available to the students in an electronic format or could be legally printed at low cost because there is no license or fees to be paid for their distribution, since all they are released as OER with a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. This solution also contributes to the creation of customized textbooks where each professor could select the sections appropriate for their courses or could freely adapt existing sections to their needs. Also, the local professors will be the sink and source of the knowledge, contextualized to the Latin American Higher Education system.

In 2014, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation started funding the establishment of an OER World Map that documents OER initiatives around the world. Since 2015, the hbz and graphthinking GmbH develop the service with funding by the Hewlett Foundation at https://oerworldmap.org. The first version of the website was launched in March 2015 and the website is continuously developing. The OER World Map invites people to enter a personal profile as well to add their organization, OER project or service to the database.

In March 2015, Eliademy.com launched the crowdsourcing of OER courses under CC licence. The platform expects to collect 5000 courses during the first year that can be reused by teachers worldwide.

In 2015, the University of Idaho Doceo Center launched open course content for K-12 schools, with the purpose of improving awareness of OER among K-12 educators. This was shortly followed by an Open Textbook Crash Course, which provides K-12 educators with basic knowledge about copyright, open licensing, and attribution. Results of these projects have been used to inform research into how to support K-12 educator OER adoption literacies and the diffusion of open practices.

In 2015, the MGH Institute of Health Professions, with help from an Institute of Museum and Library Services Grant (#SP-02-14-0), launched the Open Access Course Reserves. With the idea that many college level courses rely on more than a single textbook to deliver information to students, the OACR is inspired by library courses reserves in that it supplies entire reading lists for typical courses. Faculty can find, create, and share reading lists of open access materials.

Today, OER initiatives across the United States rely on individual college and university librarians to curate resources into lists on library content management systems called LibGuides. Find OER repositories by discipline through the use of an individualized LibGuide such as the one found here from Indian River State College.

International programs

High hopes have been voiced for OERs to alleviate the digital divide between the global North and the global South, and to make a contribution to the development of less advanced economies.

• Europe – Learning Resource Exchange for schools (LRE) is a service launched by European Schoolnet in 2004 enabling educators to find multilingual open educational resources from many different countries and providers. Currently, more than 200,000 learning resources are searchable in one portal based on language, subject, resource type and age range.
• India – National Council Of Educational Research and Training digitized all its textbooks from 1st standard to 12th standard. The textbooks are available online for free. Central Institute of Educational Technology, a constituent Unit of NCERT, digitized more than thousand audio and video programmes. All the educational AV material developed by CIET is presently available at Sakshat Portal an initiative of Ministry of Human Resources and Development. In addition, NROER (National Repository for Open Educational Resources) houses variety of e-content.
• US – Washington State's Open Course Library Project is a collection of expertly developed educational materials – including textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments – for 81 high-enrolling college courses. All course have now been released and are providing faculty with a high-quality option that will cost students no more than $30 per course. However, a study found that very few classes were actually using these materials (http://www.nacs.org/Portals/NACS/Uploaded_Documents/PDF/Research/OCLresults2014.pdf).
• Dominica – The Free Curricula Centre at New World University expands the utility of existing OER textbooks by creating and curating supplemental videos to accompany them, and by converting them to the EPUB format for better display on smartphones and tablets.
• Bangladesh is the first country to digitize a complete set of textbooks for grades 1-12. Distribution is free to all.
• Uruguay sought up to 1,000 digital learning resources in a Request For Proposals (RFP) in June 2011.
• South Korea has announced a plan to digitize all of its textbooks and to provide all students with computers and digitized textbooks.
• The California Learning Resources Network Free Digital Textbook Initiative at high school level, initiated by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
• The Michigan Department of Education provided $600,000 to create the Michigan Open Book Project in 2014. The initial selection of OER textbooks in history, economics, geography and social studies was issued in August, 2015. There has been significant negative reaction to the materials' inaccuracies, design flaws and confusing distribution.
• The Shuttleworth Foundation's Free high school science texts for South Africa.
• Saudi Arabia had a comprehensive project in 2008 to digitize and improve the Math and Science text books in all k-12 grades.
• Saudi Arabia started a project in 2011 to digitize all text books other than Math and Science.
• The Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) and the U.S. State Department launched an Open Book Project in 2013, supporting "the creation of Arabic-language open educational resources (OERs)".

OER global logo adopted by UNESCO

With the advent of growing international awareness and implementation of open educational resources, a global OER logo was adopted for use in multiple languages by UNESCO. The design of the Global OER logo creates a common global visual idea, representing "subtle and explicit representations of the subjects and goals of OER". Its full explanation and recommendation of use is available from UNESCO.

Critical discourse about OER as a movement

External discourse

The OER movement has been accused of insularity and failure to connect globally: "OERs will not be able to help countries reach their educational goals unless awareness of their power and potential can rapidly be expanded beyond the communities of interest that they have already attracted."

More fundamentally, doubts were cast on the altruistic motives typically claimed by OERs. The project itself was accused of imperialism because the economic, political, and cultural preferences of highly developed countries determine the creation and dissemination of knowledge that can be used by less-developed countries and may be a self-serving imposition.

To counter the general dominance of OER from the developed countries, the Research on OER for development (ROER4D) research project, aims to study how OER can be produced in the global south (developing countries) which can meet the local needs of the institutions and people. It seeks to understand in what ways, and under what circumstances can the adoption of OER address the increasing demand for accessible, relevant, high-quality and affordable post-secondary education in the Global South.

Internal discourse

Within the open educational resources movement, the concept of OER is active. Consider, for example, the conceptions of gratis versus libre knowledge as found in the discourse about massive open online courses, which may offer free courses but charge for end-of-course awards or course verification certificates from commercial entities. A second example of essentially contested ideas in OER can be found in the usage of different OER logos which can be interpreted as indicating more or less allegiance to the notion of OER as a global movement.

Stephen Downes has argued that, from a connectivist perspective, the production of OER is ironic because "in the final analysis, we cannot produce knowledge for people. Period. The people who are benefiting from these open education resource initiatives are the people who are producing these resources."

Science 2.0

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Science 2.0 is a suggested new approach to science that uses information-sharing and collaboration made possible by network technologies. It is similar to the open research and open science movements and is inspired by Web 2.0 technologies. Science 2.0 stresses the benefits of increased collaboration between scientists. Science 2.0 uses collaborative tools like wikis, blogs and video journals to share findings, raw data and "nascent theories" online. Science 2.0 benefits from openness and sharing, regarding papers and research ideas and partial solutions.

 

A general view is that Science 2.0 is gaining traction with websites beginning to proliferate, yet at the same time there is considerable resistance within the scientific community about aspects of the transition as well as discussion about what, exactly, the term means. There are several views that there is a "sea change" happening in the status quo of scientific publishing, and substantive change regarding how scientists share research data. There is considerable discussion in the scientific community about whether scientists should embrace the model and exactly how Science 2.0 might work, as well as several reports that many scientists are slow to embrace collaborative methods and are somewhat "inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools."

Definitions

Current model	Emerging model
Research done privately; then submitted to journals; then peer-reviewed by gatekeepers in major journals; published	Research data shared during discovery stages; ideas shared; scientists collaborate; then findings are disseminated online
Scientific literature behind paywalls online	Scientific discoveries free online
Credit established by journal name or journal impact factor.	Credit established by citation count, number of views or downloads.
Data is private until publication	Data is shared before publication
Papers generally protected by copyright	Many different licenses possible: copyright, public domain, Creative Commons 3.0, etc.
Publishers raise funds by charging for access to content	Publishers seek alternative funding models
Journal article summaries available online after publication	Share methods, data, findings via blogs, social networking sites, wikis, computer networking, Internet, video journals

The term has many meanings and continues to evolve in scientific parlance. It not only describes what is currently happening in science, but describes a direction in which proponents believe science should move towards, as well as a growing number of websites which promote free scientific collaboration.

Ben Shneiderman

The term Science 2.0 suggests a contrast between traditional ways of doing science, often denoted Science 1.0, with more collaborative approaches, and suggests that the new forms of science will work with Web 2.0 technologies. One description from Science is that Science 2.0 uses the "networking power of the internet to tackle problems with multiple interacting variables - the problems, in other words, of everyday life." A different and somewhat controversial view is that of Ben Shneiderman, who suggested that Science 2.0 combines hypothesis-based inquiries with social science methods, partially for the purpose of improving those new networks.

While the term describes websites for sharing scientific knowledge, it also includes efforts by existing science publishers to embrace new digital tools, such as offering areas for discussions following published online articles. Sometimes it denotes open access which, according to one view, means that the author continues to hold the copyright but that others can read it and use it for reasonable purposes, provided that the attribution is maintained. Most online scientific literature is behind paywalls, meaning that a person can find the title of an article on Google but they can not read the actual article. People who can access these articles are generally affiliated with a university or secondary school or library or other educational institution, or who pay on a per-article or subscription basis.

Traditional scientific journals are part of this social evolution too, innovating ways to engage scientists online and enable global collaboration and conversation. Even the 187-year-old Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences has joined the digital age. The Academy now permits free public access to selected online content and has digitized every volume dating back to 1823.

— Adrienne J. Burke in Seed Magazine, 2012

One view is that Science 2.0 should include an effort by scientists to offer papers in non-technical language, as a way of reaching out to non-scientists. For others, it includes building vast databases of case histories. There is a sense in which Science 2.0 indicates a general direction for scientific collaboration, although there is little clarity about how exactly this might happen. One aim is to "make scientific collaboration as easy as sharing videos of trips home from the dentist," according to one view.

Closely related terms are "cyberscience" focussing on scientists communicating in the cyberspace and "cyberscience 2.0" expanding the notion to the emerging trend of academics using Web 2.0 tools.

History and background

The rise of the Internet has transformed many activities such as retailing and information searching. In journalism, Internet technologies such as blogging, tagging and social networking have caused many existing media sources such as newspapers to "adopt whole new ways of thinking and operating," according to a report in Scientific American in 2008. The idea is that while the Internet has transformed many aspects of life, it has not changed scientific research as much as it could. While firms such as eBay, Amazon and Netflix have changed consumer retailing, and online patient-centered medical data has enabled better health care, Science 2.0 advocate Ben Shneiderman said:

It's time for researchers in science to take network collaboration like this to the next phase and reap the potential intellectual and societal payoffs.

— Ben Shneiderman, 2008

According to one view, a similar web-inspired transformation that has happened to other areas is now happening to science. The general view is that science has been slower than other areas to embrace the web technology, but that it is beginning to catch up.

Before the Internet, scientific publishing has been described as a "highly integrated and controlled process." Research was done in private. Next, it was submitted to scientific publications and reviewed by editors and gatekeepers and other scientists. Last, it was published. This has been the traditional pathway of scientific advancement, sometimes dubbed Science 1.0.

Established journals provided a "critical service", according to one view. Publications such as Science and Nature have large editorial staffs to manage the peer-review process as well as have hired fact-checkers and screeners to look over submissions. These publications get revenue from subscriptions, including online ones, as well as advertising revenue and fees paid by authors. According to advocates of Science 2.0, however, this process of paper-submission and review was rather long. Detractors complained that the system is "hidebound, expensive and elitist", sometimes "reductionist", as well as being slow and "prohibitively costly". Only a select group of gatekeepers—those in charge of the traditional publications—limited the flow of information. Proponents of open science claimed that scientists could learn more and learn faster if there is a "friction-free collaboration over the Internet."

Yet there is considerable resistance within the scientific community to a change of approach. The act of publishing a new finding in a major journal has been at the "heart of the career of scientists," according to one view, which elaborated that many scientists would be reluctant to sacrifice the "emotional reward" of having their discoveries published in the usual, traditional way. Established scientists are often loath to switch to an open-source model, according to one view.

Timo Hannay explained that the traditional publish-a-paper model, sometimes described as "Science 1.0", was a workable one but there need to be other ways for scientists to make contributions and get credit for their work:

The unit of contribution to the scientific knowledge base has become the paper. Journals grew up as a means for scientists to be able to share their discoveries and ideas. The incentive for doing so was that by publishing in journals their contributions would be recognized by citation and other means. So you have this pact: be open with your ideas and share them through journals and you will get credit... There are all kinds of ways in which scientists can contribute to the global endeavor. ... The incentive structure has not caught up with what we really want scientists to do.

— Timo Hannay, 2012

In 2008, a scientist at the University of Maryland named Ben Shneiderman wrote an editorial entitled Science 2.0. Shneiderman argued that Science 2.0 was about studying social interactions in the "real world" with study of e-commerce, online communities and so forth. A writer in Wired Magazine criticized Shneiderman's view, suggesting that Shneiderman's call for more collaboration, more real-world tests, and more progress should not be called "Science 2.0" or "Science 1.0" but simply science.

There are reports that established journals are moving towards greater openness. Some help readers network online; others enable commenters to post links to websites; others make papers accessible after a certain period of time has elapsed. But it remains a "hotly debated question", according to one view, whether the business of scientific research can move away from the model of "peer-vetted, high-quality content without requiring payment for access." The topic has been discussed in a lecture series at the California Institute of Technology. Proponent Adam Bly thinks that the key elements needed to transform Science 2.0 are "vision" and "infrastructure":

Open science is not this maverick idea; it’s becoming reality. About 35 percent of scientists are using things like blogs to consume and produce content. There is an explosion of online tools and platforms available to scientists, ranging from Web 2.0 tools modified or created for the scientific world to Web sites that are doing amazing things with video, lab notebooks, and social networking. There are thousands of scientific software programs freely available online and tens of millions of science, technology, and math journal articles online. What’s missing is the vision and infrastructure to bring together all of the various changes and new players across this Science 2.0 landscape so that it’s simple, scalable, and sustainable—so that it makes research better.

— Adam Bly, 2012

Proliferation on the web

Benefits of Science 2.0	Drawbacks of Science 2.0
more productive	difficulty getting credit for discoveries
more collaborative	difficulty getting paid
more collegial working environment
freer, less expensive	risk others will copy preliminary work to get credit, patents, money
faster development	how will reviewers and editors get paid?
wider access	it is not clear how Science 2.0 will work
diverse applications: homeland security, medical care, environment etc.	needs infrastructure
easier
lets other scientists see results instantly and comment

There are numerous examples of more websites offering opportunities for scientific collaboration.

• Public Library of Science. This project, sometimes termed PLoS, is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license. By 2012, it publishes seven peer reviewed journals. It makes scientific papers immediately available online without charges for access or restrictions on passing them along, provided that the authors and sources are properly cited with the Creative Commons Attribution License. According to one report, the PLoS has gained "pretty wide acceptance" although many researchers in biomedicine still hope to be published in established journals such as Nature, Cell, and Science, according to one report. PLoS publishes 600 articles a month in 2012.
  
• 

 Paul Ginsparg helped develop the arXiv online database which is now run by Cornell University.

  arXiv, pronounced archive, is an online-accessible archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance.

Galaxy Zoo is an online astronomy project which invites members of the public to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It has been termed a citizen science project. The information has led to a substantial increase in scientific papers, according to one account.

A website entitled Science 2.0 lets scientists share information. It has been cited by numerous publications, many of which have been written stories with links to Science 2.0 articles such as USA Today, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and others. The Science 2.0 topics included neutrino interactions, cosmic rays, the human eye's evolution, the relation between sex and marital happiness for elderly couples, human evolution, hearing loss, and other topics.

OpenWetWare is a wiki site started by biologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to foster open research, education, and discussion in the biological sciences and engineering.

Some examples of pioneering use of Science 2.0 to foster biodiversity surveys were popularized by Robert Dunn, including urban Arthropods and human body bacteria.

OpenWorm is a collaborative research project with several publications that aims to simulate the nervous system, body mechanics, and environment of the C. elegans worm.

Creative Commons

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Creative Commons

Founded	January 15, 2001; 17 years ago
Founder	Lawrence Lessig
Type	501(c)(3)
Tax ID no.	04-3585301
Focus	Expansion of "reasonable", flexible copyright
Method	Creative Commons license
Key people	Ryan Merkley (CEO)
Website	creativecommons.org

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but are based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management, with a "some rights reserved" management employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The result is an agile, low-overhead and low-cost copyright-management regime, benefiting both copyright owners and licensees.

The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred with the support of Center for the Public Domain. The first article in a general interest publication about Creative Commons, written by Hal Plotkin, was published in February 2002. The first set of copyright licenses was released in December 2002. The founding management team that developed the licenses and built the Creative Commons infrastructure as we know it today included Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Glenn Otis Brown, Neeru Paharia, and Ben Adida.

In 2002 the Open Content Project, a 1998 precursor project by David A. Wiley, announced the Creative Commons as successor project and Wiley joined as CC director. Aaron Swartz played a role in the early stages of Creative Commons, as did Matthew Haughey.

As of May 2018 there were an estimated 1.4 billion works licensed under the various Creative Commons licenses. Wikipedia uses one of these licenses. As of May 2018, Flickr alone hosts over 415 million Creative Commons licensed photos.

Creative Commons is governed by a board of directors. Their licenses have been embraced by many as a way for creators to take control of how they choose to share their copyrighted works.

Purpose and goal

Golden Nica Award (2004)

 

Lawrence Lessig (January 2008)

 

Creative Commons Japan Seminar, Tokyo (2007)

 

CC some rights reserved

 

A sign in a pub in Granada notifies customers that the music they are listening to is freely distributable under a Creative Commons license.

 

Made with Creative Commons, a 2017 book describing the value of CC licenses.

Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all rights reserved" copyright, and has been dubbed "some rights reserved". David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of intellectual property and contributing to the re-thinking of the role of the "commons" in the "information age". Beyond that, Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical and legal support for individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate with culture more freely."

Creative Commons attempts to counter what Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. Lessig describes this as "a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past." Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.

Creative Commons Network

Until April 2018 Creative Commons had over 100 affiliates working in over 75 jurisdictions to support and promote CC activities around the world. In 2018 this affiliate network has been restructured into a network organisation. The network no longer relies on affiliate organisation but on individual membership organised in Chapter.

South Korea

Creative Commons Korea (CC Korea) is the affiliated network of Creative Commons in South Korea. In March 2005, CC Korea was initiated by Jongsoo Yoon (in Korean: 윤종수), a Presiding Judge of Incheon District Court, as a project of Korea Association for Infomedia Law (KAFIL). The major Korean portal sites, including Daum and Naver, have been participating in the use of Creative Commons licences. In January 2009, the Creative Commons Korea Association was consequently founded as a non-profit incorporated association. Since then, CC Korea has been actively promoting the liberal and open culture of creation as well as leading the diffusion of Creative Common in the country.

• Creative Commons Korea
• Creative Commons Asia Conference 2010

Bassel Khartabil

Bassel Khartabil was a Palestinian Syrian open source software developer and has served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria. From March 15, 2012 he was detained by the Syrian government in Damascus at Adra Prison. On October 17, 2015 Creative Commons Board of Directors approved a resolution calling for Bassel Khartabil's release. In 2017 Bassel's wife received confirmation that Bassel had been executed shortly after she lost contact with him in 2015.

Criticism

All current CC licenses (except the CC0 Public Domain Dedication tool) require attribution, which can be inconvenient for works based on multiple other works. Critics feared that Creative Commons could erode the copyright system over time or allow "some of our most precious resources – the creativity of individuals – to be simply tossed into the commons to be exploited by whomever has spare time and a magic marker."

Critics also worried that the lack of rewards for content producers will dissuade artists from publishing their work, and questioned whether Creative Commons is the commons that it purports to be.

Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig countered that copyright laws have not always offered the strong and seemingly indefinite protection that today's law provides. Rather, the duration of copyright used to be limited to much shorter terms of years, and some works never gained protection because they did not follow the now-abandoned compulsory format.

The maintainers of Debian, a GNU and Linux distribution known for its rigid adherence to a particular definition of software freedom, rejected the Creative Commons Attribution License prior to version 3 as incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) due to the license's anti-DRM provisions (which might, due to ambiguity, be covering more than DRM) and its requirement that downstream users remove an author's credit upon request from the author. Version 3.0 of the Creative Commons licenses addressed these concerns and except for the non commercial variants are considered to be compatible with the DFSG.

Kent Anderson, writing for The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, criticizes CC as being dependent on copyright and not really departing from it, and as being more complex and complicating than the latter – thus the public does not scrutinize CC, reflexively accepting it as one would a software license – while at the same time weakening the rights provided by copyright. Anderson ends up concluding that this is the point, and that "Creative Commons receives significant funding from large information companies like Google, Nature Publishing Group, and RedHat", and that Google money is especially linked to CC's history; for him, CC is "an organization designed to promulgate the interests of technology companies and Silicon Valley generally".

License proliferation and incompatibility

Mako Hill asserted that Creative Commons fails to establish a "base level of freedom" that all Creative Commons licenses must meet, and with which all licensors and users must comply. "By failing to take any firm ethical position and draw any line in the sand, CC is a missed opportunity. … CC has replaced what could have been a call for a world where 'essential rights are unreservable' with the relatively hollow call for 'some rights reserved.'" He also argued that Creative Commons worsens license proliferation, by providing multiple licenses that are incompatible.

The Creative Commons website states, "Since each of the six CC licenses functions differently, resources placed under different licenses may not necessarily be combined with one another without violating the license terms." Works licensed under incompatible licenses may not be recombined in a derivative work without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.

Richard Stallman of the FSF stated in 2005 that he couldn’t support Creative Commons as an activity because "it adopted some additional licenses which do not give everyone that minimum freedom", that freedom being "the freedom to share, noncommercially, any published work". Those licenses have since been retired by Creative Commons.

License misuse

Creative Commons guiding the contributors. This image is a derivative work of Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix.

Creative Commons is only a service provider for standardized license text, not a party in any agreement. Abusive users can brand the copyrighted works of legitimate copyright holders with Creative Commons licenses and re-upload these works to the internet. No central database of Creative Commons works is controlling all licensed works and the responsibility of the Creative Commons system rests entirely with those using the licences. This situation is, however, not specific to Creative Commons. All copyright owners must individually defend their rights and no central database of copyrighted works or existing license agreements exists. The United States Copyright Office does keep a database of all works registered with it, but absence of registration does not imply absence of copyright.

Although Creative Commons offers multiple licenses for different uses, some critics suggested that the licenses still do not address the differences among the media or among the various concerns that different authors have.

Lessig wrote that the point of Creative Commons is to provide a middle ground between two extreme views of copyright protection – one demanding that all rights be controlled, and the other arguing that none should be controlled. Creative Commons provides a third option that allows authors to pick and choose which rights they want to control and which they want to grant to others. The multitude of licenses reflects the multitude of rights that can be passed on to subsequent creators.

Criticism of the non-commercial license

Erik Möller raised concerns about the use of Creative Commons' non-commercial license. Works distributed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license are not compatible with many open-content sites, including Wikipedia, which explicitly allow and encourage some commercial uses. Möller explained that "the people who are likely to be hurt by an -NC license are not large corporations, but small publications like weblogs, advertising-funded radio stations, or local newspapers."

Lessig responded that the current copyright regime also harms compatibility and that authors can lessen this incompatibility by choosing the least restrictive license. Additionally, the non-commercial license is useful for preventing someone else from capitalizing on an author's work when the author still plans to do so in the future. The non-commercial licenses have also been criticized for being too vague about which uses count as "commercial" and "non-commercial".

Great Minds, a non-profit educational publisher that released works under an -NC license, sued FedEx for violating the license because a school had used its services to mass-produce photocopies of the work, thus commercially exploiting the works. A U.S. judge dismissed the case in February 2017, ruling that FedEx was an intermediary, and that the provision of the license "does not limit a licensee's ability to use third parties in exercising the rights granted [by the licensor]." Great Minds appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit later that year. The 2nd Circuit upheld the lower court's decision in March 2018, concluding that FedEx neither infringed copyrights nor violated the license. One of circuit judges Susan L. Carney argued in the court statement:

We hold that, in view of the absence of any clear license language to the contrary, licensees may use third‐party agents such as commercial reproduction services in furtherance of their own permitted noncommercial uses. Because FedEx acted as the mere agent of licensee school districts when it reproduced Great Minds’ materials, and because there is no dispute that the school districts themselves sought to use Great Minds’ materials for permissible purposes, we conclude that FedEx’s activities did not breach the license or violate Great Minds' copyright.

Personality rights

In 2007, Virgin Mobile Australia launched a bus stop advertising campaign which promoted its mobile phone text messaging service using the work of amateur photographers who uploaded their work to the photo-sharing site Flickr using a Creative Commons by Attribution license. Users licensing their images this way freed their work for use by any other entity, as long as the original creator was attributed credit, without any other compensation being required. Virgin upheld this single restriction by printing a URL, leading to the photographer's Flickr page, on each of their ads. However, one picture depicted 15-year-old Alison Chang posing for a photo at her church's fund-raising carwash, with the superimposed, mocking slogan "Dump Your Pen Friend". Chang sued Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons. The photo was taken by Chang's church youth counsellor, Justin Ho-Wee Wong, who uploaded the image to Flickr under the Creative Commons license.

The case hinges on privacy, the right of people not to have their likeness used in an ad without permission. So, while Mr. Wong may have given away his rights as a photographer, he did not, and could not, give away Alison's rights. In the lawsuit, which Mr. Wong is also a party to, there is an argument that Virgin did not honor all the terms of the nonrestrictive license.

On 27 November 2007, Chang filed for a voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit against Creative Commons, focusing their lawsuit against Virgin Mobile. The case was thrown out of court due to lack of jurisdiction and subsequently Virgin Mobile did not incur any damages towards the plaintiff.