The document discusses the potential for digital tools and open educational resources (OER) in education, but identifies several barriers that must be addressed. It notes that digital education can enable differentiated instruction and 24/7 learning, but is only cost-effective and democratic if resources are freely available to all students. Major challenges include lack of broadband access, digital literacy, awareness of OER, and issues around copyright and censorship. The use of Creative Commons licensing is presented as a way to help address linguistic, technical, cultural and legal barriers, but additional work is still needed to advance open education.

1. The Right to Education Realizing the Potential of Digital Tools in Education Esther Wojcicki Chair, Creative Commons A2K4 Yale Law School February 12, 2010

8. Additional road blocks to digital education in U.S. U.S. telecommunications policy Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

9. Many schools BLOCK student access to the Internet

10. CENSORSHIP “ All schools that accept eRate money (and I don’t know how many there are) filter , because they are required to in the eRate regulations” Karen Cator, Director for Office of Educational Technology

11. The basis for censorship:

14. Many companies are in the business of censoring the web for schools Even Google , Yahoo , and IE are blocked in many schools

15. ANOTHER MAJOR PROBLEM: CONFUSION ABOUT DEFINITION OF OPEN

16. This is all commercial licensing even though it looks like it is open.

17. This has one tier defined as CC-licensed and two as commercial.)

18. PEOPLE CONFUSE OPEN WITH FREE

19. CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSING HELPS BUT DOES NOT SOLVE ALL THE PROBLEMS

20. CC helps eliminate Linguistic barriers - by allowing translation

21. CC Licenses Improve Technical Access By Allowing reformatting and repackaging, OER can be made available to those with only low bandwidth or small screen access, even if OER was originally developed for high-bandwidth rich-UI users

22. CC helps Cultural barriers By allowing adaptation, OER can be repurposed and made culturally appropriate, even when originally developed for a specific cultural setting

23. CC is tackling legal interoperability issues for OER

25. A FEW EXAMPLES OF LICENSE USAGE

29. IN 119 COUNTRIES

30. BEGINNING OF THE eTEXTBOOK MOVEMENT

31. A concrete example of effective interoperable metadata

32. Creative Commons licensed downloads started in Feb 2009 with Stanford, Duke, UCtv, Berkeley, UCLA . More resources needed to add more universities. 300+ universities on YouTube.EDU right now.

33. OPEN MEANS HAPPY STUDENTS

34. Your IDEAS welcome to help move OER and CC forward [email_address]