Educational resources for use by educators and learners, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees. New licensing frameworks remove copying / adaptation restrictions OER hold potential for reducing the cost of accessing educational materials
OUT Institutional Policy Workshop Open University of Tanzania 12th January, 2009
1. OER Africa
An introduction to Open Educational
Resources
OUT Institutional Policy Workshop
Open University of Tanzania
12th January, 2009
CC 3.0 BY –SA
2. Who we are
OER Africa is an innovative new project,
headquartered in Nairobi, under the
auspices of SAIDE.
Established to play a leading role in driving
the development and use of OER in Africa.
Seed funding from the William & Flora
Hewlett Foundation to harness African
experts and expertise to deploy OER to the
benefit of Africa’s higher education systems.
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January 12, 2009
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3. Why do we exist?
OER Africa believes that OER can positively
support development and capacity of
higher education systems and institutions
across Africa
OER Africa is concerned that if the concept
and practice of OER evolves predominantly
outside and for Africa – we will not be able to
liberate its potential
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4. What is the OER Africa
premise?
To ensure that the power of OER is harnessed
by Africans for Africans by building
collaborative networks across the continent.
To facilitate the aggregation of information and
human expertise that produces knowledge
There is a need to establish, encourage, and
promote African communities of practice for
OER that support the entire process of
educational design, not simply use of external
content
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5. A Vision for Higher Education in
Africa:
Vibrant, sustainable African higher
education institutions that play a critical role
in building and sustaining African societies
and economies, by producing the
continent’s future intellectual leaders
through free and open development and
sharing of common intellectual capital
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6. Our Mission
to establish vibrant networks of African OER
practitioners by connecting like-minded
academics from across the continent to
develop, share, and adapt OER to meet the
higher education needs of African societies.
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7. Value Proposition
By creating and sustaining human networks
of collaboration, face-to-face and online –
OER Africa will enable African academics to
harness the power of OER, develop their
capacity, and become integrated into the
emerging global OER networks as active
participants rather than passive consumers.
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8. A proposed approach:
• Work together to enhance higher education
institutional capacity to design, develop,
and deliver quality higher education
programmes and materials;
• Advocate the merits of collaboratively
creating and sharing intellectual capital in
higher education as a mechanism to
improve quality and enhance long-term
cost-effectiveness;
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9. Approach (cont’d)
• Establish an online platform that facilitates
African collaboration in OER development and
sharing, while inter-connecting this platform
with the many OER communities emerging
globally [www.oerafrica.org] ;
• Facilitate the re-development and reinvention
of African higher education programme
curricula and course materials in order to
ensure that higher education programmes on
the continent are of exceptional quality and
direct contextual relevance, producing world
class graduates.
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10. INTRODUCING
OPEN EDUCATIONAL
RESOURCES
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11. Why Open Educational
Resources?
Concept:
Concept
Educational resources for use by educators
and learners, without an accompanying
need to pay royalties or licence fees.
New licensing frameworks remove copying /
adaptation restrictions
OER hold potential for reducing the cost of
accessing educational materials.
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January 12, 2009
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12. What Potential Lies in OER?
Access to the means of production enables
development of educators’ competence in
producing educational materials
Access to instructional design necessary to
integrate such materials into high quality
programmes of learning.
Principle of allowing adaptation of materials
enables learners to be active participants in
educational processes
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13. How do we Capture this
Potential?
Through the potential of a collaborative
partnership of people...
working in communities of practice
focussed on the four main elements of the
OER evolutionary process:
Creation, Organization, Dissemination and
Use.
Use
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14. Dispelling Some Myths
Content = education
Good content will overcome institutional
capacity constraints
OER should be a process of voluntarism
OER will make education cheaper in the short-
term
Openness automatically equates with quality
OER is about e-learning
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15. INTRODUCING
CREATIVE COMMONS
LICENSING
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16. What is the most commonly used
Alternative License Framework?
Most developed alterative licensing approach is
that developed by Larry Lessig of Stanford
University in 2001, called Creative Commons
(CC).
CC licences most often used for OER work and
provide various options.
The CC approach provides user-friendly open
licences for digital materials and so avoids the
automatically applied copyright restrictions.
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17. How do CC Licenses Work?
CC licences are based on four specific conditions:
attribution,
share alike,
non-commercial and
no derivative works
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18. What are the CC License
Conditions? (1)
Creators choose a set of conditions they wish to
apply to their work.
Attribution Share Alike
You let others copy, You allow others to
distribute, display, and distribute derivative
perform your copyrighted works only under a
work — and derivative license identical to the
works based upon it — license that governs your
but only if they give credit work.
the way you request.Policy and OER Workshop
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19. What are the CC License
Conditions? (2)
Non-commercial No Derivative
You let others copy, Works
distribute, display, and
You let others copy,
perform your work — and
distribute, display, and
derivative works based upon
perform only verbatim
it — but for non-commercial
copies of your work, not
purposes only.
derivative works based
upon it.
http://creative commons .org
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20. How do CC Licenses Protect
Intellectual Property?
All CC Licenses 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.
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21. What are the various CC Licenses?
Based on your choices, CC will suggest a license
. formulation that clearly indicates how other
people may use your work.
Attribution (By)
Attribution — Share Alike
Attribution — No Derivatives
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http://creative commons .org
22. What are the various CC Licenses?
. Attribution — Non-Commercial
Attribution — Non-Commercial —
Share Alike
Attribution — Non-Commercial
— No Derivatives
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http://creative commons .org
23. What can Creative Commons
Do for Me?
CC licenses give you flexibility
e.g. you can choose to only pre-clear non-commercial
uses or to combine several license conditions
CC Licenses protect the people who use your work
As long as they abide by the terms you have specified,
they don’t have to worry about copyright infringement.
Relevant content is available to you under various
CC Licenses
If you are looking for content that you can freely and
legally use, there is a giant pool of CC-licensed creativity
available to you.OUT Policy and OER Workshop
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24. Q & A
January 12, 2009 OUT Policy and OER Workshop 24
25. Thank you
Catherine Ngugi Neil Butcher
Project Director OER Strategist
catherine.ngugi@gmail.com neilshel@icon.co.za
CC 3.0 BY –SA
Editor's Notes
As some of you may know, OER Africa was officially launched in February 2008, and is headquartered in Nairobi, under the auspices of the South Institute for Distance Education. The project seeks to play a key role in driving in the development and use of Open Educational Resources on the continent. Seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation has been provided to support African academics in the use of OER in support of the continent’s higher education systems.
Accordingly, OER Africa has been established in the firm belief that OER does indeed have a tremendous potential to positively influence the development and capacity of Africa’s higher education systems and institutions. In establishing OER Africa, we are also clear of the very real possibility that the potential of this movement might bypass Africa if a concerted effort is not made to include African academics in this global movement.
Our premise, therefore is threefold: to help ensure that the power of OER is harnessed by Africans for Africans. to build collaborative networks across the continent and thereby facilitate the aggregation of information and expertise that produces knowledge; to targetiour intervention at both an individual, and an inter-institutional level, so as to encourage, and promote African communities of practice for OER that support the entire process of educational design - not merely the use of content authored elsewhere. All of this can be summed up in our Vision and Mission statements
CATHERINE Our Vision Our vision is one of vibrant, sustainable African higher education institutions that play a critical role in building and sustaining African societies and economies, by producing the continent’s future intellectual leaders through free and open development and sharing of common intellectual capital.
CATHERINE Our Mission (1) OER Africa ’s mission is to establish vibrant networks of African OER practitioners by connecting like-minded academics from across the continent to develop, share, and adapt OER to meet the higher education needs of African societies.
Our Mission (2) ... We believe that by creating and sustaining human networks of collaboration – face-to-face and online – OER Africa will enable African academics to harness the power of OER, develop their capacity, and become integrated into the emerging global OER networks as active participants rather than passive consumers.
Given our understanding of the concepts and principles of the OER movement and our rationale for setting up OER Africa, we hope to make the following specific contributions to higher education on the continent: Enhance institutional capacity in higher education, to design, develop and deliver quality higher education programmes and materials; Advocate collaborative creation and sharing of intellectual capital as a mechanism to improve quality and long-term cost-effectiveness;
Other contributions which OER Africa intends to make to higher education on the continent include: Providing access to an online platform that facilitates this collaboration in OER development and sharing – both for Africa and across the world, and as importantly, face-to-face and online training in how to use the site and customise a space that responds to your specific needs; Finally, in the next session, you will hear from Prof. Mbwette about one of the ways in which we are working with African institutions of higher education – specifically member institutions of the African Council for Distance Education, to facilitate the re-development and reinvention of curricula and course materials of exceptional quality and direct contextual relevance, thereby producing world class graduates.
The concept of OER describes educational resources that are freely available for use by educators and learners, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees. OER are supported by a new spectrum of licensing frameworks that provide an alternative to copyright, which is often expensive and prohibitive in terms of use. These alternative licenses govern how OERs are used and make various provision for users to adapt the resources or simply to copy them – at no cost – except of course those accrued directly by a user who wishes to make copies or distribute them!
A second question is WHY the concept of OER is so potentially powerful for education in Africa? This access, at low or no cost , to the means of producing educational resources allows educators to develop their capacity and in producing educational materials as well as the skills and competences necessary to integrate these new resources into high quality learning programmes. The principle of allowing adaptation of materials also allows l earners to be active participants in educational processes – they can now learn by doing and creating, not just by passively reading and absorbing. In short, OER has the potential to build capacity in African education systems, of both learners and educators.
The next logical question would then be, how do we capture this potential for education in Africa? This is the issue we shall be interrogating over the next hour and a half – how the potential of OER, so powerful as to have influenced what can now be described as a full fledged OER Movement, can be liberated for the benefit of Higher education in Africa. We at OER Africa believe that collaborative partnerships of people working in communities of practice that focus on the Creation, Organization, Dissemination, and Use of OER, is a powerful means of turning this potential to the benefit of Africa’s HE systems.
NEIL
Like Open Educational Resources, New Licensing frameworks emanated as a logical consequence of a clear need felt by many educators and non-educators alike, to share their work with others, without insisting that these others incur huge costs. Whilst retaining the right to be recognised as the creators of their own work. The Creative Commons or CC licensing approach was developed by Professor of Law, Larry Lessig of Stanford University in 2001. This is the most developed of several alternative licensing framework is the Creative Commons. Prof. Lessig borrowed from the concept of the commons – an open space in most traditional European villages – where any villager could graze their cattle or simply enjoy the tranquillity of this commonly held land. As one of the most comprehensive licensing frameworks, CC licenses are most often used for OER work.
Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use legal tools that give everyone from individual creators to major companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to pre-clear copyrights to their creative work. CC Licences take account of different copyright laws in different countries or jurisdictions and also allow for different language versions. Four basic conditions underlie this licensing framework: [read slide]
The creator or author of a work can choose any one of the following four conditions to license their work. You can choose Attribution Share-Alike
Non-commercial and finally, no derivative works, OR You can mix and match them to suit your particular needs [The aspect of CC licensing that is most controversial is the non-commercia l (NC) clause. 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. ]
In the absence of a stipulated license , copyright restrictions automatically apply; an inherent challenge of copy-right is that whilst it automatically protects the rights of an author to be recognised as the owner-originator of their intellectual property, it also automatically prohibits the re-use or adaptation of works – even if the author had wished or intended to share their work with others. CC licenses let people easily change their copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” Creative Commons licenses apply on top of copyright, so you can modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.
If someone wishes to ensure that their IP is recognised AND that it can be shared by others, they can access the Creative Commons site and make use of a licence generator . This license generator suggests the most appropriate licence based on a user’s response to specific questions regarding how their work can be used. There are six main license combinations: [see this slide and next]
If you’ve created something and want people to know that you’re happy to have them share, use, and build upon your work, CC’s legal infrastructure gives you flexibility (for example, you can choose to only pre-clear non-commercial uses) and protects the people who use your work (so that they don’t have to worry about copyright infringement,; If you’re an artist, student, educator, scientist, or other creator looking for content that you can freely and legally use, there are many millions of works — from scientific and academic content to songs and videos— that you can use under the terms of the CC copyright licenses.