Open Educational Resources (OER) &

OpenCourseware (OCW)

Anne Arendt

Public Domain

Public domain items are available for anyone to use for any purpose. Property rights are held by the public at largeNot controlled or owned by anyone

OERThe 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).

OEREssentially, 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).

OERLets 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).

OERGood places to start:•http://discovered.creativecommons.org/search/

•http://www.ocwfinder.com/•http://www.oerrecommender.org/

Learning ObjectsLearning objects are small, reusable pieces of instructional material

•Academic Earth: http://academicearth.org/ •Connexions: http://cnx.org/ •Merlot: 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 OCWMIT 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 OCWMIT’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.

MIT OCWOf 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 OCWSelf-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 ConsortiumAn 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/ •OCW at UVU: https://open.uvu.edu

Reference Materials & Resource Repositories

•European Digital Library Project: http://www.edlproject.eu/ •Google Books Library Project: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html •BCR Collaborative Digitization Program: http://www.bcr.org/cdp/ •Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/ •OER Commons: http://www.oercommons.org •Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/•NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/

Social Software •YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/edu/

•Ning: http://www.ning.com

•Lymabean: http://www.lymabean.com

Open Access Journals & Publications

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

Document SharingDecision was recently made (July 31, 2009) to subscribe to SelectedWorks and create a branded institutional repository at UVU. Catherine McIntyre can be contacted for more information.

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 LearnCreative 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 CommonsLarry 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/about/ that explains CC well. Other videos, equally good in explain CC, can be found at http://creativecommons.org/videos/

Creative CommonsSix major licenses of the 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)See http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

Creative CommonsThere is one last one – CC0 No rights reservedIn 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. Imageshttp://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en (usage rights section)http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

•http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pictures_and_images

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

Creative CommonsVideohttp://www.archive.org/details/opensource_movies Music & Audiohttp://www.archive.org/details/opensource_audiohttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Music_sound http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SoundOtherhttp://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/

ccLearn

A good place to find educational resources that are creative commons released, visit one of the below resources:http://discovered.creativecommons.org/search/ http://www.ocwfinder.com/http://www.oerrecommender.org/

Social BookmarkingShare links: * Del.icio.us: http://delicious.com/ * Trailfire:

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Ranked news: http://digg.com/ Share scholarly resources:

http://www.citeulike.org/

In Summary“Among many other forms, one form of rampant lawlessness on the Internet consists of copyright infringement, that is, the unauthorized copying and distribution of material created and owned by others. Given the scope of the problem, a number of movements to mitigate copyright infringement on the Internet have begun. One such movement involves the use of digital tools and legal action to prohibit copyright infringement. Another movement, copyleft, seeks to build a richer public domain and change the assignment of rights from the automatic "all rights reserved" to a more egalitarian version dubbed "some rights reserved." At the forefront of this second movement is Creative Commons, a web-based intellectual property sharing schema developed by a consortium headed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School” (Broussard, 2009)http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7081/is_3_26/ai_n28457434/?tag=content;col1

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).