OER is not synonymous with online learning or e-learning, although many people make the mistake of using the terms interchangeably.
A common misconception is that ‘openly licensed’ content belongs in the public domain, and that the author gives up all of their rights to this material. This is not so. In fact, the emergence of open licences has been driven strongly by a desire to protect a copyright holder’s rights in environments where content (particularly when digitized) can so easily be copied and shared via the Internet without asking permission.
A broad spectrum of legal frameworks is emerging to govern how OER are licensed for use. Some of the legal frameworks simply allow copying, but others make provision for users to adapt the resources that they use. The best known of these is the Creative Commons licencing framework (see www.creativecommons.orgLinks to an external site.). It provides legal mechanisms to ensure that authors of materials can retain acknowledgement for their work while allowing it to be shared, can seek to restrict commercial activity if they wish, and can aim to prevent people from adapting it if appropriate. Thus, an author who applies a Creative Commons (CC) licence to their work specifically seeks to retain copyright over that work, but agrees – through the licence – to give away some of those rights.
Open access publishing is an important concept, which is clearly related to, but distinct from that of OER.
Open access publishing is typically referring to research publications of some kind released under an open licence. OER refers to teaching and learning materials released under such a licence. Clearly, especially in higher education, there is an overlap, as research publications typically form an important part of the overall set of materials that students need to access to complete their studies successfully, particularly at postgraduate level.
Nevertheless, the distinction seems worth applying because it allows more nuanced discussion and planning about which kinds of open licences would be most appropriate for different types of resources.
A key concern for educators and senior managers of educational institutions about the concept of OER relates to ‘giving away’ intellectual property, with potential loss of commercial gain that might come from it. This is often combined with a related anxiety that others will take unfair advantage of their intellectual property, benefitting by selling it, plagiarizing it (i.e. passing it off as their own work), or otherwise exploiting it.
In some instances, of course, when educators raise this concern, it actually masks a different anxiety – namely, that sharing their educational materials will open their work to scrutiny by their peers (and that their peers may consider their work to be of poor quality). Whether or not the concern is justified, it is important to determine what is truly driving the concerns of educators. When the concern is the loss of commercial opportunity, this requires a particular response (engaging with the incentives for sharing). But when this is masking a concern about peer and student scrutiny, this needs to be dealt with differently (and will usually involve some policy or management drive to overcome resistance to change).
However, if a resource truly has potential to be exploited for commercial gain through sale of the resource, then it should be possible – and encouraged – for an educator (or an institution) to retain all-rights reserved copyright over that resource. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and copyright policies for education need to be flexible enough to allow the educator and/or institution to retain all-rights reserved copyright for resources that have this potential commercial value.
Sharing of materials provides institutions opportunities to market their services. Educational institutions that succeed economically in an environment where content has been digitized and is increasingly easy to access online are likely to do so because they understand that their real potential educational value lies not in content itself, but in offering related services valued by their students. Within this environment, the more other institutions make use of their materials, the more this will serve to market the originating institution’s services and thereby attract new students.
This question is possibly reflective of a deeply entrenched notion of educational materials as being ‘publications’, the quality of which is controlled by educational publishers. This notion has been – and remains – valid but reflects a partial understanding of the scope and diversity of educational materials used in many teaching and learning contexts. It also reflects a false delegation of responsibility for quality to a third party.
In the final analysis, responsibility for assuring the quality of OER used in teaching and learning environments will reside with the institution, programme/course coordinators, and individual educators responsible for delivery of education. As they have always done when prescribing textbooks, choosing a video to screen, or using someone else’s lesson plan, these agents are the ones who retain final responsibility for choosing which materials – open and/or proprietary – to use.
The most important reason for harnessing OER is that openly licensed educational materials have tremendous potential to contribute to improving the quality and effectiveness of education. The challenges of growing access, combined with the ongoing rollout of ICT infrastructure into educational institutions, indicates that it is becoming increasingly important for them to support, in a planned and deliberate manner, the development and improvement of curricula, ongoing programme and course design, development of quality teaching and learning materials, and design of effective assessment.
Educational institutions need to ensure that their spending on personnel and other related expenses reflects a sustained effort to invest in creating more effective teaching and learning environments for their students. This will require investment in, among other things, the following:
So, how does this relate to OER? As educational institutions make strategic decisions to increase their levels of investment in design and development of better educational programmes, the most cost-effective way to do this is to embrace open licensing environments and harness existing OER.
Thus, commitment to OER implies increased investment in teaching and learning, but promises to increase the efficiency and productivity of those investments by providing new ways of developing better programmes, courses and materials.
Importantly, this implies a demand-driven approach to OER, where the initial rationale for embracing open licensing environments is not to release an institution’s own intellectual capital, but rather to draw in the growing wealth of openly available OER to improve the quality of the institution’s own teaching and learning.
Most importantly, harnessing of OER requires institutions to invest – in programme, course and materials development. Costs will include the time of people in developing curricula and materials, adapting existing OER, dealing with copyright licensing and so on. However, these costs are a function of investing in better teaching and learning environments, not a function of investing in OER.
It may be a worthy aspiration to make all educational content available free of charge, in-principle decisions to exclude commercial content from consideration in teaching and learning environments are likely to be inappropriate. There are many high quality educational materials available for purchase and their use may be more affordable than attempts to produce that content openly. Thus, the most cost-effective way to develop and procure resources for use in teaching and learning is to explore all available options, rather than excluding some on principle.
To be effective and sustainable, institutional decisions to harness OER will likely need to be accompanied by review of policies.
A good starting point for consideration of OER is to have clear policies in place regarding IPR and copyright. A clear policy would for example, plainly lay out the respective rights of the institution and its employees and sub-contractors, as well as students (who might become involved in the process directly or indirectly through use of some of their assignment materials as examples) regarding intellectual capital.
As part of this policy process, it is worth considering the relative merits of creating flexible copyright policies that automatically apply open licences to content unless there are compelling reasons to retain all-rights reserved copyright over those materials. Simultaneously, though these policies should make it easy for staff to invoke all-rights reserved copyright where this is justified.
Once a resource has been developed and an open licence has been selected the resource will need to be stored in an online repository in order for others to access it.
There are various options with regard to where these resources might reside:
Use the institutional repository: Many organizations, and especially universities, are setting up their own collections and making them available online as OER or OCW.
Select an open repository: Various repositories welcome contributions from multiple locations. OER Commons has a facility (https://www.oercommons.org/contribute/Links to an external site.) to allow users to contribute materials. Generally, open repositories require the person submitting the resource to register and log in before uploading the resource. They will also require information about the resource to allow it to be catalogued and tagged. This is necessary in order to allow search facilities to find it. The submitted resource will be vetted by a review team to ensure quality before being added to the repository’s database.
Build the OER online: It is also possible to build a resource online. A few sites that encourage development of OER within their online environments. They can then automate processes such as acquiring a Creative Commons licence and adding the resource to the database. One such example is Connexions (http://cnx.orgLinks to an external site.), which allows teams to develop modules of learning on their site. Users open an account, develop the materials online, and then publish them once they are satisfied. WikiEducator (http://wikieducator.orgLinks to an external site.) uses a similar method to allow educators to develop teaching materials collaboratively online.
Exploit social networks. The world of social networking has also opened new possibilities for publishing OER online.
In most instances, a user has enormous latitude to adapt OER to suit contextual needs where the licence allows adaptation. If, however, the licence restricts adaptation (as, for example, the Creative Commons licence with a ‘No Derivatives’ restriction does), others may not alter the resource in any way. It has to be used ‘as is’. This right is not reserved often in OER.
The vast majority of published OER welcome users to adapt the original resource. Common ways in which OER can be changed include the following:
Mixing: A number of OER are mixed together and additional content is added to create an altogether new resource. This is common when course designers need to develop materials and resources to match a local curriculum or programme. A common concern is that it is rare to find existing OER that fit perfectly ‘as is’.
Adaption: This occurs when one OER is used and multiple adaptations are developed to suit multiple contexts. It could be that the language is translated into others but usually adaptation requires local case studies/examples to be added to make the materials relevant to students in a particular context.
Asset extraction: It is also possible to extract only some of the assets of a resource or course and use them in a completely different context. This is especially true of media elements such as photos, illustrations, and graphs, as developers often lack the skills or resources to develop their own versions of commonly used visual aids.
The term OER is largely synonymous with another term: Open CourseWare (OCW), although the latter may be used to refer to a specific, more structured subset of OER. An Open CourseWare is defined by the OCW Consortium as ‘a free and open digital publication of high quality university‐level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content’. http://www.ocwconsortium.org/courses/searchLinks to an external site.