On 29 January 2015, Leicester City Council, in partnership with De Montfort University, held a free day conference for schools focusing on finding, using, creating and sharing Open Educational Resources (OER). The event builds on the council’s recently released OER guidance and resources, which can be downloaded from http://schools.leicester.gov.uk/openeducation During the panel session, Josie Fraser reviewed the permission provided by Leicester City Council to community and voluntary controlled schools, and discussed how schools can take advantage of this. She followed this up with two policy workshops for schools, designed to take them through the process of developing a community based local OER policy.

1. OER Schools Conference
#OERSCH15
29th January 2015

2. OER Schools:
Permission, Policy, Practice
Josie Fraser
ICT Strategy Lead (Children’s Capital)
Leicester City Council

3. Why has Leicester City Council given
permission for staff at community and
voluntary controlled schools in the city
to openly license the educational
resources they produce in the line of
their employment?

4. • Empowering schools and school staff
• Promoting & sharing great work
• Ensuring Public Value
• Equality of access to learning for all
• Understanding & modelling copyright
• Supporting collaborative & open
practice

5. What does the permission mean?
• “Educational resources”
• “Openly licence”
• Why do we need a local policy in place?
• What about voluntary aided schools,
foundation schools (or trusts), and
academies?

6. Leicester City Council recommend
CC BY 4.0
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)

7. Key questions for schools
• Do staff know about open licensing?
• Are all staff aware of the new permission?
• Which is your schools preferred open licence?
• What resources should/could schools and staff
be sharing?
• How staff be supported to share work openly?

8. OER Schools
Policy Workshop
Josie Fraser
ICT Strategy Lead (Children’s Capital)
Leicester City Council

9. In this workshop we will…
• Review the model schools policy
• Ask questions about anything we want to be
totally clear on – there are no foolish
questions!
• Create a draft school policy for discussion at
our school Governing Body meeting

10. Any questions about the permission Leicester
City Council has given to staff at community and
voluntary controlled schools in the city to openly
license the educational resources they produce
in the line of their employment?

11. Why do we need a school policy?

12. Section one:
Openly Licensing
Educational Resources

13. Activity – Creative Commons Licences
Working in pairs, look at the different kinds of
Creative Commons licences available. You can go
online, or use page 20-21 of your OER Guidance
documents. Decide which kind of licence you
think is best for your school, and why.

15. Section two:
Definitions

16. Section three:
Clarity of Licensing
Page 41 of your guidance document will help you here. The model policy document also has a recommended example
of what your licence and accreditation should look like. The Creative Commons licence selector can be useful, but you
may want to add information or edit fields.

17. Section four: Disputes &
Commercial Exploitation

18. Activity: practical issues
Scenario A:
A staff member applies to you to because they have accepted a commercial offer to
sell materials they have developed for their class.
How do you respond?
Scenario B:
A staff member has created some excellent resources. You suggest they openly licence
and share their resources more widely. The staff member refuses point blank.
Why do you think they might not want to share their resources?
Scenario C:
As Head of Department, you are looking to embed open sharing of educational
resources in order to support professional development and collaboration.
What key practices would you implement to support staff in sharing their resources?

19. Thank you for attending, and thank
you for helping take the benefits of
open licencing and open education
resources forward in your school
community!