A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources

Front matter

A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)

Prepared by Neil Butcher for the Commonwealth of Learning & UNESCO

Edited by Asha Kanwar (COL) and Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić (UNESCO)

Appendix One

Appendix One: Overview of Open Licences

Introduction

When considering open licences, it is useful to remember that these are legal tools that make use of existing copyright laws. In particular the exclusive right copyright law that allows a copyright holder to license material with the licence of their choice (Hofman & West, 2008). Liang (2004) notes that:

While phrases such as 'free software' and 'copyleft' conjure up an image of alternatives to copyright, it is relevant to note that it is not a model that abandons copyright. In fact quite the opposite, it relies on copyright law, but uses it creatively to articulate a positive, rather than a negative rights discourse (Liang, 2004, p. 24).

Open licences for content developed out of the success of the licensing approach being used for open source software. One of the earliest open licences for nonsoftware material was published in 1998 by David Wiley. This licence is no longer used, since newer alternatives are now more appropriate and adaptable to different conditions. In 2000, the Free Software Foundation released its first version of an open licence for non-software materials. Essentially this licence was to allow open-source software developers to produce open manuals and support materials, free of standard copyright restrictions. This licence is known as the GNU FDL (Free Documentation Licence). Although it was used by the popular site Wikipedia until recently (having been replaced by the Creative commons licence), this licence is not widely used within the OER movement partly because it is technically confusing and cumbersome in terms of procedural requirements (Liang, 2004). In some cases, authors also create their own copyright conditions, although this is noted to be legally challenging in many instances and so tends not to be recommended for OER materials (Hofman & West, 2008). Instead the focus has turned to the Creative Commons (CC) set of licence options. Since CC licences are most commonly used, they are described in greater detail in this paper.

A range of other open licences exist such as licences specifically for music and art. Given the focus of this paper on OER this review has not presented details of the full range of open licences. For a comparative analysis of a wide range of open licences please see Liang (2004).

Creative Commons Licences ()

The most developed alternative licensing approach is that developed by Larry Lessig of Stanford University in 2001, called Creative Commons (CC). The CC approach provides user-friendly open licences for digital materials and so avoids the automatically applied copyright restrictions. The popularity of CC licences has grown incrementally since its launch in 2002 and by 2006 it was estimated that 45 million web pages had been licensed with a CC licence (Smith & Casserly, 2006). Liang (2004, pg. 78) describes the philosophy of Creative Commons as follows:

Inspired by the free software movement, the Creative Commons believes that a large vibrant public domain of information and content is a pre-requisite to sustained creativity, and there is a need to proactively enrich this public domain by creating a positive rights discourse. It does this by creating a set of licenses to enable open content and collaboration, as well as acting as a database of open content. Creative Commons also serves to educate the public about issues of copyright, freedom of speech and expression and the public domain.

The CC licences take account of different copyright laws in different countries or jurisdictions and also allow for different language versions. To make the licensing process as simple as possible for users the Creative Commons site makes use of a licence generator that suggests the most appropriate licence based on a user's response to specific questions regarding how their work can be used. In order to facilitate searching for resources licences in a particular way, the CC licence is expressed in three versions:

Commons deed: this is a plain language version of the licence, with supporting icons (see table below);

Legal code: the legal fine print that ensure the licence is recognised in a court of law; and

Digital code: a machine readable translation that allows search engines to identify work by its terms of use (‘About–Creative Commons’; Liang, 2004).

All CC licences include ‘Baseline Rights’: the rights to copy, distribute, display, perform publicly or by digital performance, and to the change the format of the material as a verbatim copy (Hofman & West, 2008, p. 11). In addition, all CC licences assert the author’s right over copyright and the granting of copyright freedoms and require licensees to:

Obtain permission should they wish to use the resource in a manner that has been restricted;

Keep the copyright notice intact on all copies of the work;

Publish the licence with the work or include a link to the licence from any copies of the work;

Not change the licence terms in anyway;

Not use technology or other means to restrict other licences' lawful use of the work (Liang, 2004, p. 82).

Licence Conditions

Creators choose a set of conditions they wish to apply to their work.

Attribution by | Share Alike sa | Non-Commercial nc | No Derivative Works nd

You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request. | You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the licence that governs your work. | You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for non-commercial purposes only. | You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

The Licences

The following are the key CC licences:

Attribution

cc by

This licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licences offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

Attribution Share Alike

cc by-sa

This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This licence is often compared to open source software licences. All new works based on yours will carry the same licence, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

Attribution No Derivatives

cc by-nd

This licence allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution Non-Commercial

cc by-nc

This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work noncommercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

cc by-nc-sa

This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work noncommercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd licence, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same licence, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

cc by-nc-nd

This licence is the most restrictive of our six main licences, allowing redistribution. This licence is often called the “free advertising” licence because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially.

CC Licensing Considerations

The aspect of CC licensing that is most controversial is the non-commercial (NC) clause (Commonwealth of Learning, 2007; Hofman & West, 2008; Rutledge, 2008). There are several reasons for this, including at the most basic level, what 'non-commercial' in fact means. Since CC licences are a new phenomenon within copyright law, little previous case history exists to assist in interpreting this clause. The most extreme interpretation of non-commercial is that no money should change hands as part of the process of using of the materials. However, Hofman and West (2008) note that this is not how non-commercial is usually interpreted. A transaction is not commonly seen as commercial when it includes refunding for expenses such as travel, for example. The transaction becomes commercial when making a profit is the purpose of the transaction. Similarly, writing from the CC perspective, Rutledge notes that:

CC considers intent to be the primary test of whether a use is noncommercial. If the intent of a particular use is to generate profit, that use is commercial. Under this reasoning, cost recovery per se is not a commercial use (Rutledge, 2008).

While this approach may seem intuitive, many legal examples could be found demonstrating the complexity of defining 'intent'. The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Copyright Guidelines specifically address the issue of the NC clause and note that profit and cost recovery, which includes operating costs, should not be confused. This means that an organisation may still charge registration fees, recover materials duplication costs and overhead costs incurred during customisation, duplication and distribution of materials. The COL guidelines continue to note that:

If an institution declares and/or pays a net profit to shareholders, and a part of the net profit emanates from the sale of learning materials marked with the NC clause, a calculation should be done to determine the amount of net profit that has been earned by that section of the materials that has been marked with the NC clause. This is the critical point when the NC and non-NC materials differ. Organisations that provide materials without the NC clause have accepted that the materials they offer may be used to profit any other organisations' stakeholders (in addition to covering all reproduction costs) (Commonwealth of Learning, 2007, p. 2).

In working to better understand how the non-commercial clause is applied in different contexts, Creative Commons is conducting research into this issue (Rutledge, 2008). Rutledge ends her commentary by suggesting that readers should also seriously consider whether the non-commercial clause is really necessary.

Rutledge (2008) notes that some believe that any for-profit businesses should not be able to charge course fees or make use of open content, hence the NC restriction. However, this would imply that a private school may not use NC materials (Hofman & West, 2008), nor potentially a for-profit organisation using materials for non-profit work such as a corporate social investment project. Other arguments against using the NC restriction include that it makes the materials incompatible with materials licensed without this restriction (see for example Bissell & Boyle, 2007; Moller, 2005).

While it is understandable that an author who openly releases their materials would not want others to make a profit from them, this can be achieved in other ways. For example, it could be argued that, when materials can be freely accessible via the internet, charging for the materials themselves becomes irrelevant, and to make a profit the individual or company would need to add sufficient additional value beyond what is available for free to make it worthwhile for users to pay. Work released under an attribution-share alike licence requires that any work that is derived from the original work is released under the same licence. Thus, the value added by the for-profit individual/company would itself need to be released freely under an attribution-share alike licence (Moller, 2005).

Appendix References

Bissell, A., & Boyle, J. (2007). Towards a Global Learning Commons: ccLearn. Educational Technology, 4(6), 5-9.

Commonwealth of Learning. (2007, May). Copyright Guideline. Commonwealth of Learning.

Hofman, J., & West, P (2008). Chapter 6: Open Licences. In Copyright for authors, educators and librarians. Retrieved May 4, 2008, from www.col.org/resources/knowServices/copyright/Pages/openLicense.aspx.

Liang, L. (2004). Guide to Open Content Licenses. Piet Zwart Institute, Willem dr Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam. Moller, E. (2005). Creative Commons -NC Licenses Considered Harmful. Retrieved June 26, 2008, from www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/11/16331/0655.

Rutledge, V. (2008). Fair Comment: Towards a Better Understanding of NC Licenses. Connections, February. Retrieved May 15, 2008, from www.col.org/news/Connections/2008feb/Pages/fairComment.aspx.

Smith, M. S., & Casserly, C. (2006). The Promise of Open Educational Resources. Change, Fall. Retrieved June 24, 2008, from http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/changearticle.pdf.

Appendix Two

Appendix Two: The Components of a Well-Functioning Distance Education System

The Components

1. Course Design and Development

a. Well-designed courses

In good distance education, the course, rather than the educator, provides an appropriate learning environment for students. Rather than simply referring to a set of materials, however, the course is the structure of learning that is designed into the materials. It has three basic elements:

i. Conceptual pathways to command of its knowledge, conceptualizing skills and practical abilities.

ii. Educational strategies for helping the student find his or her way through these pathways.

iii. Summative and formative assessment should be integral to the learning process.

The materials and presentation of the course as a whole must excite, engage, and reward the student. Courses should be designed so as to involve students actively in their own learning and should allow students quick access and clear movement through them. Although there is no need for courses to use advanced technologies, most, but not necessarily all, will make use of a variety of media. Provision should also be made, in the design of courses, for the necessary practical work. In order to be as flexible and open as possible, courses should be organized in modules.

b. Programme and course development in a team

An essential component in the successful design of courses is collaboration. This can be achieved by using an approach where a group of people, each with particular skills and competencies, develop a course as a team. Although there is no golden mean, nor indeed an absolute minimum, a substantial ratio of staff course design time to student study time will be inevitable in developing courses. Some of the better courses in more challenging subjects, however, might have ratios of fifty to one hundred hours of design time to one hour of student study time. This has clear implications for courses designed for small numbers of students: they are simply not financially viable if collaborative design processes are to be used.

2. Counselling and Support

a. Counselling

Provision should be made by distance education providers to advise and help individuals who would otherwise be isolated throughout the learning process, and, in particular, to help them to make choices before enrolling for educational programmes. It should be made easily available through a variety of devices including, most importantly, human intervention.

b. Learner support

If students are to adapt to the special requirements of guided self-study, they require various forms of support, for example satisfactory access to tutors and facilitators, opportunity to interact with other students, and access to the necessary facilities.

c. Provision of adequate administrative support to students

This would involve administrative support on a number of levels, including enrolment procedures, payment of fees, delivery of materials, and in keeping channels of communication open. The aim, throughout, should be to keep administrative procedures few and simple.

3. Quality Assurance

a. Quality assurance in all learning programmes

Several mechanisms need to be established to ensure the quality of learning programmes and their capacity for self-improvement. One of the most critical of these is a mechanism which enables meaningful and reliable feedback from students and tutors into the ongoing performance of the institution.

b. Research, evaluation, and development

As with all aspects of education, continuing research, evaluation, and development is necessary for the improvement of distance education provision. Distance education providers also need to have effective research as the basis for improving the quality of their performance.

4. Effectively Managed Distance Learning

Effectively managing distance education involves establishing performance criteria and targets for the institution, together with mechanisms for publicly and regularly evaluating performance and incorporating lessons learned into improved practices. It also includes ensuring that governance structures are representative of South African society and that the student body is adequately represented in such structures.

The Rationale for Use of Distance Education Methods

Whether consciously or unconsciously, attempts to make use of distance education methods have generally been driven by a desire to build on some or all of the following lessons emerging from the history of distance education practices:

1. Providing access to students who would–either because of work commitments, geographical distance, or poor quality or inadequate prior learning experiences– be denied access to traditional, full-time contact education opportunities. This motivation has possibly been the key motivating factor behind use of distance education methods. The drive has been motivated partly by growing awareness of the importance of lifelong learning and corresponding attempts to respond to market needs. It has also been motivated by dwindling student numbers in some of the more traditional areas of educational provision, and a corresponding need to find new educational markets.

2. Seeking to expand access to educational provision to significantly larger numbers of students. This motivation is linked to, but not the same as, the previous one. Its difference lies chiefly in the scale of programmes. Many programmes motivated by a desire to provide access to students who would be denied access to traditional full-time contact education do not really have goals of reaching significantly larger numbers of students. Indeed, it is notable that large-scale distance education programmes are, in general, confined to very few educational sectors, most notably nursing and teacher education. Most other programmes tend to be small-scale interventions, although it is fair to suggest there may be a change in this regard as alignment between industry/commerce and programme providers gathers momentum.

3. Shifting patterns of expenditure to achieve economies of scale by amortizing identified costs (particularly investments in course design and development and in effective administrative systems) over time and large student numbers. This motivation draws together the above two motivations, and has been an underlying economic rationale for many distance education institutions around the world. Its success depends on limiting numbers of courses, while maximizing enrolments on these courses. Many distance education programmes we have worked with simply have no intention or capacity to exploit these economic benefits. Reasons for this are varied, but are most commonly because market demand is simply not big enough to create programmes enrolling thousands of students or because institutions or programmes have neither the financial nor human capacity to make large-scale venture capital investments in course design and development or administrative systems to support large-scale distance education implementation. The latter problem is exacerbated by the reality that administrative systems at these institutions have been so narrowly designed to support full-time, contact education that the investments necessary to adapt these systems would often be more than would be necessary to set up new systems from scratch.

Appendix Three

Appendix Three: Technology Applications

Note: This Appendix is taken from another report written by Neil Butcher for the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (GeSCI) African Leaders in ICT (ALICT) capacity building programme. The original report can be located at:

www.gesci.org/assets/file/12.Sharing%20Knowledge%20Based%20Society%20Perspectives%20The%20ICT,%20Education%20Development%20Perspective%20Neil%20Butcher%20and.pdf

This Appendix provides a quick guide to some of the technology applications which are available to support education and development initiatives and that are helping to stimulate creation and use of openly licensed or, at least openly available, educational resources.

Social network sites – social network sites are web-based services that allow people to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, define a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. Possibly the most well known of these sites are Facebook and MySpace, although many such sites exist. Some also focus on specific dimensions of social networking. For example, social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us allow people to save bookmarks to websites and tag them with keywords, generating community-driven, keyword-based classifications known as 'folksonomies'. Likewise, photo-sharing websites such as Flickr allow people to upload, tag, browse, and annotate digital photographs, as well as participate in self-organizing topical groups. While social networking sites have massive potential for influencing the way in which we organize and find information and how we interact with people, it is important to note that the for-profit sector is selling itself as the provider of choice for these Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities, predominantly in an effort to create new platforms for funding consumers and selling advertising.

Blogging – blogging is remarkable for the speed with which it has grown as an online communication vehicle. Blog is an abbreviated version of 'weblog', which is a term used to describe websites that maintain an

ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles or other websites (and, in the case, of video-blogging, video). Given the personal perspectives presented on blogs, they often generate ongoing discourse and a strong sense of community. Blogs provide diverse, alternative sources of information for higher education, as well as providing tools that can be used by academics and students for a wide range of educational purposes.

Wikis – a wiki enables documents to be written collaboratively, in a simple mark-up language using a web browser. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring, the most famous example of which is Wikipedia, an online phenomenon that has played a massive role in challenging notions of what constitutes 'expertise' and about reliability of information. Wikis are already extensively used in many higher education programmes for educational purposes, and are one of the authoring tools being used to generate 'open' content (see below).

RSS – Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is a protocol that allows users to subscribe to online content by creating lists of preferred sources of information in a 'reader' or 'aggregator' that automatically retrieves content updates, saving users time and effort. RSS feeds can be very helpful in managing information and undertaking ongoing research.

Podcasting – 'podcasting' refers to any combination of hardware, software, and connectivity that permits automatic download of (usually free) audio and video files to a computer, smart phone, or MP3/MP4 player to be listened to or watched at the user's convenience. This is typically done by subscribing to an RSS feed linked to the specific podcast, so that when new editions of a podcast are made available, they are automatically downloaded by podcasting software. Podcasting has made available a very broad spectrum of educationally useful audio and video material, including radio programmes from around the world, lectures, conference speeches, and custom-produced podcasts created by enthusiasts. Growing numbers of universities and academics are making lectures available as podcast series usually making these freely available to anyone around the world with Internet access.

Virtual Worlds – virtual worlds are immersive online environments whose 'residents' are avatars representing individuals who participate via the Internet. Some, such as the very popular World of Warcraft, are explicitly focused on gaming and entertainment. However, possibly the most well known of these from an educational perspective is Second Life, a fully threedimensional world where users with many varying interests interact, but within which many universities and businesses are now constructing virtual campuses for their students.

Voice-Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – VOIP is a protocol optimized for the transmission of voice through the Internet or other packet-switched networks. VOIP is often used abstractly to refer to the actual transmission of voice (rather than the protocol implementing it). VOIP facilitates applications such as Skype, which allow users to make free telephone calls between computers.

Instant messaging (IM) – IM is a form of online communication that allows real-time interaction through computers or mobile devices. It is often bundled into applications such as Skype and social networking sites, so that it can be used seamlessly while within those applications. It has become such an integral part of students' lives that many universities are working to move IM beyond the social sphere into teaching and learning.

Online applications – these are web-based programmes that run in web browsers and typically replicate the functionality currently available on desktop-based applications. A good example is Google Apps, which provides access to office productivity, communication, and file storage tools. Another more specialized example is Lulu, which offers online access to the tools one needs to design, publish, and print original material, facilitating inexpensive production of publications. The online nature of such tools is intended also to facilitate collaboration, peer review, and collective generation of knowledge.

Wielding the applications – by drawing on the potential of the above technologies, several new possibilities are emerging that are worth documenting:

Mashups, which are web applications that combine data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. The power of mashups for education lies in the way they help us reach new conclusions or discern new relationships by uniting large amounts of data in a manageable way. Web-based tools for manipulating data are easy to use, usually free, and widely available.

Digital storytelling, which involves combining narrative with digital content to create a short movie or presentation.

Data visualization, which is the graphical representation of information to find hidden trends and correlations that can lead to important discoveries.

Open journaling, which manage the process of publishing peer-reviewed journals online, allowing authors to track submissions through the review process, which creates a sense of openness and transparency uncommon in traditional, peer-reviewed publications.

Google jockeying, which involves a participant in a class surfing the Internet during the class for terms, ideas, websites, or resources mentioned by the presenter. These searches are then displayed simultaneously with the presentation.

Virtual meetings, which are real-time meetings taking place over the Internet using integrated audio and video, chat tools, and application sharing.

Grid computing, which uses middleware to coordinate disparate IT resources across a network, allowing them to function as a virtual whole, providing remote access to IT assets and aggregating processing power.

Note: A version of the material in this appendix is available in a thematic paper:

ICT, Education, Development, and the Knowledge Society, prepared for GeSCI by Neil Butcher & Associates. This paper is available on: www.gesci.org/assets/files/ICT,%20Education,%20Development,%20and%20the%20Knowledge%20Society%281%29.pdf.

Footnotes

Appendix Four

Appendix Four: Open Source Software Applications in Education

Open source is the concept and practice of enabling access by both users and developers, to the programme source code, enabling both developers and users to be able to modify or add features to the source code and redistribute it. In this regard, collaboration and circulation are central tenets to the open source movement. Open source software offers an alternative to proprietary courseware, in education. Open source software is cost effective as it does not entail licence fees, has open standards that facilitate integration with other systems and can be easily customised. Aberdour has highlighted that the low cost of open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) allows institutions to dedicate funds they would otherwise have spent on licensing, to the development of the open source LMSs or on professional development for efficient use of the LMSs. Further, open source LMSs open up spaces for participation in communities of practice that support each other in the development of the software.

Aberdour specifies that there are over 50 open source LMSs to choose from, but only a few of these are recommended as they

Have an open source initiative approved licence;

Have an active development community

Have released stable versions

Are SCORM compliant

Have published details about previous adopters

Have a stable organization supporting ongoing development

Have had third party reviews published.

Examples of some commonly used Open Source Educational Software and their compatibility and usage are specified in the following table.

LMS Tool | Compatibility | Usage

Moodle www.moodle.org | Linux, UNIX, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and any other system that supports PHP | Downloaded about 500 times a day. More than 28,000 registered sites, over a million courses, a learning community of 10 million.

Bodington www.bodington.org | Shibboleth, Linux, Microsoft, Mac OS X, or UNIX | Implemented at University of Leeds, UHI Millennium Institute, and University of Oxford. Provides services to 15,000 users with a single server.

Claroline www.claroline.net | Microsoft, Linux/GNU, Mac OS X; complies with SCORM and IMS/QTI. | Available in 35 languages and has users in more than 80 countries.

Dokeos www.dokeos.com | Supports SCORM import and LDAP. Data can be imported using CSV or XML files. | In 30 languages and more than a thousand organizations. Implemented at Ghent University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. More than 28,000 users and 3,600 courses.

LRN www.dotlrn.com | LORS Central, Curriculum, LORS Management, .LRN Ecommerce, Project Manager, Page Editor, Staff List, Syllabus, Expense Tracking | Almost half a million users in 18 countries

ATutor www.atutor.ca | Complies with W3C WCAG 1.0 and W3C XHTML 1.0; supports content developed in IMS or SCORM. | More than 17,000 registered installations worldwide.

OLAT www.olat.org | Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and UNIX. Conforms to SCORM, IMS QTI, and IMS Content Packaging | Popular within the European higher education community

Sakai www.sakaiproject. org | Complements commercial software like WebCT, Blackboard, ANGEL Learning, and Desire2Learn. | Adopted by many reputable universities worldwide.

The criteria by which software can be licensed as open source are set by the Open Source Initiative as follows:

Unrestricted distribution. Users can distribute or sell the software without paying royalties.

Source code distribution. The source code of the entire open source product must be easily modifiable. In the absence of the source code, the product must cite a low-cost resource where users can obtain it.

Modifications. The license allows modifications, and its terms remain unchanged for distribution of improved versions.

Author’s source code integrity. If the license allows patch file distribution along with the original source code, a user cannot modify the code and distribute it except by giving the new version a new name.