Technology, Higher Education and Open Access

Anne Arendt

Public Domain

• Public domain items are available for anyone to use for any purpose.

• Property rights are held by the public at large• Not controlled or owned by anyone

• Consider: http://www.gutenberg.org/

What we normally doFirst let’s talk about what we normally do:

• Google search• Wikipedia • Advanced search (maybe)• Other?

What we normally doNow let’s talk about the results we get:

•Google search http://www.google.com (but lets throw in some boolean stuff)•Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/ (look at what their license is and let’s try an edit)•Advanced search such as http://www.google.ca/advanced_search or http://scholar.google.com/

Considering OER

The open educational resources movement consists of freely accessible electronic access to course materials, but it also involves other aspects such as open access to books and library materials, and access to modules of educational information instead of complete courses. It may also include educational communication tools or implementation resources as well (International Institute, 2005).

OER

Essentially, it is teaching, learning, and research resources, content or otherwise, which reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual-property license that permits their free use or repurposing by others. This may include learning content, tools such as software, or implementation resources such as methods or principles (Smith & Casserly, 2006; Stover, 2005; Trenin, 2007).

OER

Lets look a moment at: Open eLearning Content Observatory Services at http://www.olcos.org/

Their intention, overall, is to foster learning and the acquisition of competencies in both teachers and learners (Open eLearning, 2007).

OER

Let’s look a moment at the Open eLearning Content Repositories they list at http://wikieducator.org/Exemplary_Collection_of_Open_eLearning_Content_Repositories

OER

Let’s try one: http://www.merlot.org/

Huh! Free and actually accessible (without a login or fees) multimedia based educational resources. Novel!

OER

So is that the only one? Absolutely not! Here are some good places to start:

•http://www.oercommons.org/•http://www.ocwfinder.org/•http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=000793406067725335231%3Afm2ncznoswy

Learning Objects

Learning objects are small, reusable pieces of instructional material

•http://academicearth.org/•http://www.khanacademy.org/•http://cnx.org/•http://www.merlot.org/

OpenCourseWare

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) aspect of the open learning initiative was dedicated to the development of freely available, stand-alone college-level online course and teaching materials

MIT OCW

• MIT has perhaps the most well known OCW project known to date at http://ocw.mit.edu/

• The MIT OCW initiative has made content from all of their approximately 1800 courses available on the Internet at no cost for non-commercial purposes (Matkin, 2005; Carson, 2006)

MIT OCW

MIT’s OCW is visited over 1.2 million times per month from individuals around the globe with the help of nearly 80 mirror sites on university campuses around the world including 54 in Africa and 10 in East Asia (Carson, 2006).

MIT OCW

Of the visitors of the MIT OCW,

49% are self-directed learners, 32% are students, and 16% are educators from around the world, with 61% of OCW use originating from outside the United States (Carson, 2006).

MIT OCW

Self-directed learner uses include:

•(a) enhancing personal knowledge (56%), •(b) keeping current in the field (16%), and •(c) planning future study (14%).

MIT OCW

Student uses include:

•(a) complementing a course (38%), •(b) enhancing personal knowledge (34%), and •(c) planning course of study (16%).

MIT OCW

Educator uses include:

•(a) planning a course (26%), •(b) preparing to teach a class (22%), and •(c) enhancing personal knowledge (19%) (Carson, 2006).

OCW Consortium

An OCW consortium is found at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/

•MIT OCW: http://ocw.mit.edu/ •Yale OCW: http://oyc.yale.edu/ •Berkeley: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Reference Materials & Resource Repositories

• http://books.google.com/ http://www.loc.gov/

• http://www.nasa.gov/• http://www.edlproject.eu/ • http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

And some we have already looked at:• http://www.wikipedia.org/ • http://www.oercommons.org

Subject or Source Specific

• http://creativecommons.org/science• http://textbookrevolution.org/• http://mathworld.wolfram.com/• http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/• http://www.flickr.com/• http://www.youtube.com/

Open Access Journals & Publications

Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.doaj.org/

Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org/

Document Sharing

• Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com/ • DSpace: http://dspace.mit.edu • SelectedWorks: http://works.bepress.com/ • 280 Slides: http://280slides.com • Google Docs: http://docs.google.com

Creative Commons & CC Learn

Creative Commons which frees materials from automatically applied copyright restrictions by providing free, easy-to-use, flexible licenses for creators to place on their digital materials that permit the originator to grant rights as they see fit http://creativecommons.org

ccLearn focuses specifically on open learning and open educational resources http://learn.creativecommons.org

Creative Commons

Larry Lessig of Stanford is pursuing something called the Creative Commons which frees materials from automatically applied copyright restrictions by providing free, easy-to-use, flexible licenses for creators to place on their digital materials that permit the originator to grant rights as they see fit (Fitzergerald, 2007; Smith & Casserly, 2006)

Creative Commons

A summary video can be found at http://creativecommons.org/videos/ that explains CC well.

Creative CommonsSix major licenses of Creative Commons:

•Attribution (CC-BY)•Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)•Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)•Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC)•Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)•Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)

http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

Creative Commons

• There is one last one – CC0 • No rights reserved• In contrast to CC’s licenses that allow copyright

holders to choose from a range of permissions while retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another choice altogether – the choice to opt out of copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically grants to creators – the “no rights reserved” alternative to our licenses.

• http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

Creative Commons

Individuals place Creative Commons licenses on individual items. Thus, there is no fool-proof way to search all items with some type of CC release on them.

Resources to gets you started:•http://search.creativecommons.org/•http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators

Creative CommonsEqually, there are a number of area-specific methods of searching for creative commons released items.

Images

•http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en

•http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pictures_and_images •http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

Creative Commons

Video•http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_movies Music & Audio•http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_audio•http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Music_sound •http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SoundOther•http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_using_Creative_Commons_licenses

CcLearn

• A development stemming from Creative Commons is ccLearn (July 2007) focused specifically on open learning and open educational resources. It emphasizes diminishing legal, technical, & social barriers.

• A primary goal of ccLearn is to build a comprehensive directory of open educational resources with the assistance of Google with encourages their discovery and subsequent use (Atkins et al., 2007; Bissell, 2007; Brantley, 2007).

• Learn more about ccLearn and the Open Education Community at http://learn.creativecommons.org/

ClosingAs Smith & Casserly note,

we are aware that all creators of knowledge need a place to put their materials and that flow of knowledge should be multidirectional and adaptable to the local learning environment (2006).