The Right to Education

Realizing the Potential of Digital Tools in Education

Esther WojcickiChair, Creative CommonsA2K4 Yale Law SchoolFebruary 12, 2010

A Vision for Digital Education in the US in K12

Digital Tools Enable•Curriculum Support for the teacher

•Online community support for the teacher

•Technology support in the classroom

•Dfferentiated instruction

•Distance learning

•Online collaborative learning

•24/7 opportunity to learn worldwide

Is Digital Education cost effective?

Yes, provided it is free and open

Is it more effective than classroom instruction?

No

The most effective is digital education + classroom instruction but it is not inexpensive

Is Digital Education more democratic?

Only If students have equal access to

• Open Educational Resources

• Web Literacy Training

• Broadband

• Functioning Hardware

Five Chief Barriers To Broadband Adoption Nationwide & Worldwide

•Affordability •Hardware•Digital technology literacy levels•Lack of awareness of relevance and utility of online content & OER•Inability to use existing technology•Linguistic barriers•Accreditation

ADDITIONAL CHALLENGES OF Open Education Resources (OER)

•OER is not a known name•Materials hard to find (metadata problem)•Uneven quality •Not tied to state or national standards

Copyright would be a major barrier to digital education if CREATIVE COMMONS licenses were not available.

Copyright is not as big an issue as

•Legal barriers

•Technological barriers

•Linguistic barriers

•Cultural barriers

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)

Many schools

BLOCK

student access to the Internet

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

The basis for censorship:

Many companies are in the business of censoring the web for schools

Even Google, Yahoo, and IE are blocked in many schools

ANOTHER MAJOR PROBLEM:

CONFUSION ABOUT DEFINITION OF

OPEN

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

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

PEOPLE CONFUSE

OPENWITH

FREE

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSING HELPS BUT DOES NOT SOLVE ALL

THE PROBLEMS

CC helps eliminate

Linguistic barriers - by allowing translation

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

CC helps Cultural barriers

By allowing adaptation, OER can be repurposed and made culturally appropriate, even when originally developed for a specific cultural setting

CC is tackling legal interoperability issues

for OER

CC is working on

interoperable OER metadata

•Essential for discovery of resources.

A FEW EXAMPLES OF

LICENSE USAGE

IN 119 COUNTRIES

BEGINNING OF THE eTEXTBOOK MOVEMENT

A concrete example of effective interoperable metadata

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.

OPEN MEANS HAPPY STUDENTS

Your IDEAS welcome to help move OER and CC

forward

Esther@creativecommons.org