RSS feed for Creating open educational resources

Quiz

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the open educational resource (OER) quiz. By embarking on this course you are no doubt already considering that OER may benefit your own teaching and learning practices; the purpose of this quiz is to start you thinking about the wide range of themes, tools and resources available to those who wish to engage with OER. The quiz consists of a range of multiple choice and free text questions. The quiz should take between 30 and 45 minutes to complete.

Round 1: Images

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Identify the Creative Commons licences

Question 1

What does the Creative Commons licence mean for each of these images?

dsbnola

Figure 1 A trumpeter

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

This picture has an Attribution (CC BY) licence. This lets others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licences offered and is recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Question 2

zmtomako

Figure 2 A dog

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

This picture has an Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) licence. This licence lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This licence is often compared to ‘copyleft’ free and open source software licences. All new works based on yours will carry the same licence, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the licence used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Question 3

Sen

Figure 3 A flower

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

This picture has an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. It is the most restrictive of the six main Creative Commons licences, allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Name the significant locations

Question 4

What is the significance of these locations for OERs?

Janet Dyson

Figure 4 The Open University

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

The Open University has put more than 600 free online free courses on its website.

Question 5

Charlie Dave

Figure 5 Cape Town

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Cape Town is the home of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

Question 6

Tjeerd

Figure 6 Stata Center

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

This is the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2001, MIT was the first university to work on putting many of the teacher-defined support materials from its undergraduate and graduate courses online, in MIT OpenCourseWare.

Define the symbols

Question 7

What do each of these logos symbolise?

Figure 7 A rights logo

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Question 8

Figure 8 A rights logo

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Copyleft.

Question 9

Figure 9 A rights logo

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

To remix.

Question 10

Figure 10 A rights logo

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

To share.

Round 2: Acronyms

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Define the acronyms

Question 1

What do the following acronyms stand for?

OER

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Open educational resource

Question 2

SCORE

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Support Centre for Open Resources in Education

Question 3

JISC

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Joint Information Systems Committee

Question 4

OCWC

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

OpenCourseWare Consortium

Question 5

VLE

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Virtual learning environment

Question 6

VUSSC

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth

Question 7

OERu

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Open educational resources university

Question 8

Jorum

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

A repository of learning and teaching materials, but not an acronym. The word ‘jorum’ is of biblical origin and means a collecting (or drinkning) bowl.

Round 3: Facts and figures

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Answer these questions

Question 1

Answer the following questions in the space provided.

What was announced in 2001?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which at the time of writing has more than 1900 courses available freely and openly online for anyone, anywhere, to adapt, translate and redistribute.

Question 2

How many members are in the OpenCourseWare Consortium? And how many open courses must they each provide?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

Today there are more than 200 members, each of which has agreed to make at least ten courses available in open form.

Question 3

How many of MIT’s OCW free courses have been downloaded from iTunes U?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

3.7 million.

Question 4

How much has the British government spent on OERs?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

£12 million.

Question 5

How many visitors have there been to the OU’s Open Research Online since its launch in 2006?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

More than 1.2 million.

Question 6

How much would an OER university degree cost?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Answer

According to a 2011 article on the Times Higher Education’s website, Wayne Mackintosh (director of the Open Education Resource Foundation) said that an OER university degree could cost ‘10–15 per cent’ of a traditional degree.

Round 4: Proprietary or open source?

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Define the applications

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is a.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is b.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is a.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is a.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is c.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is a.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is c.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is b.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is b.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is c.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is c.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is a.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is c.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is a.

Proprietary

Mixed or neither

Open source

The correct answer is c.

Round 5: Odd one out

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Wikis

Wikipedia

Wikileaks

Wikiversity

Wikimedia Commons

Wikibooks

The correct answer is b.

Answer

Wikileaks is the odd one out.

Broadcasters

BBC

Al Jazeera

CNN

The correct answer is b.

Answer

Al Jazeera is the odd one out because it applies a Creative Commons licence.

In early 2009, Al Jazeera launched a Creative Commons Repository, a section of its website dedicated to posting videos under the CC Attribution licence. More recently Al Jazeera launched Al Jazeera Blogs, a website featuring posts written by prominent journalists and correspondents from Al Jazeera television network, all released under a CC BY-NC-ND licence.

https://creativecommons.org/ who-uses-cc

Governments

The Élysée Palace

10 Downing Street

The Kremlin

The White House

The correct answer is d.

Answer

The White House is the odd one out because the Obama Administration has used Creative Commons licences in a variety of ways, from licensing presidential campaign photos, releasing information on transition site Change.gov via a CC Attribution licence, to requiring that third party content posted on Whitehouse.gov be made available via CC Attribution.

https://creativecommons.org/ who-uses-cc

Copyrights

Creative Commons Corporation

The OER Foundation

International Intellectual Property Alliance

The correct answer is c.

Answer

The International Intellectual Property Alliance is the odd one out because it is anti-Creative Commons and open source.

Repositories

Humbox, Flickr, Gemstone, Knowledge Cloud

Knowledge Network, EduTube, Jorum, Sky

Jorum, OpenLearn, MITOpenCourseWare, MERLOT

OpenLearn, Humbox, Walk, Flickr

The correct answer is c.

Answer

The coprrect answer is ‘Jorum, OpenLearn, MITOpenCourseWare, MERLOT’.

1 What is open learning and why OERs?

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Names quickly become loaded: distance learning, supported self-study, computer-based training/computer-aided instruction, home study and flexistudy, to name but a few, have all been used to describe self-instruction or self-study and many of these terms are thought wanting. The UK Open University is sometimes described as a ‘distance learning institution’, yet the support that students receive from their tutor through telephone, email and face-to-face tutorials, and through correspondence tuition by commenting extensively on assignments is often greater than a student receives at a ‘conventional’ bricks-and-mortar university. The Open University prefers to use the term ‘supported open learning’, and you can find out more about its approach at the OU’s study pages. Furthermore, the use of the word ‘instruction’, rather than ‘study’ or ‘learning’, implies training over education and a narrower focus.

Similarly, ‘open educational resources’ (OERs) as a term is often used interchangeably with – but can be distinguished from – ‘open content’ and OpenCourseWare.

Briefly, according to the OpenCourseWare Consortium, a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions:

An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organised as courses.

In 2001, MIT was the first university to work on putting many of the teacher-defined support materials from its undergraduate and graduate courses online, in MIT OpenCourseWare.

The term ‘open educational resources’ was coined by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2002 (Caswell et al., 2008) and it embraces OpenCourseWare but would also include any educational materials, technologies and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licences to remix, improve and redistribute. OpenLearn is an example of a collection of OERs. The term ‘open content’ was first used by David Wiley, an academic now working at Utah State University and a key figure in OERs (read his open content blog Iterating Toward Openness), and the term tends to refer to all types of materials (music, video, text and so on) that are available for use under an open, ‘some rights reserved’ copyright licence that enables people to use, adapt and share the materials. So open content may not necessarily have an educational purpose. There are a number of different types of open licence and so the content may be ‘open’ but not necessarily free to use as one would like. A good review of open licences can be found on the Commonwealth of Learning website – see ‘Open licenses’ – and this is discussed in more detail later.

Rather than spend more time looking at differences in terminology, we will now look at some examples of OERs to investigate their purpose and structure. Specifically, we will consider some different examples from this OpenLearn site. Even though a course is not a whole course, these OERs use different elements such as text, pictures and audio-visual elements that are together known as ‘assets’.

Activity 1

Timing: 3 hours 0 minutes

Have a detailed look at the following OpenLearn courses.

For each one, consider and write brief notes about:

the intended learning outcomes
the activities that learners are asked to do
the range of media that are employed
the teaching sequence.

Discussion

As you look through these courses you will have seen a range of activities that learners are asked to engage with. Some, such as Play, learning and the brain, use Flash to animate diagrams and to set up quizzes. Maths everywhere uses video to exemplify mathematics being used in an everyday setting and has audio clips too to talk the learner through some pictures of ‘mathematical musings’.

It is clear that assumptions have been made about the intended learner. For example, Play, learning and the brain was written for a teacher or helper working in something like a nursery or similar education setting, so it has a professional focus. Maths everywhere is from an introductory course for those adults who may feel have felt in the past that mathematics is not for them.

Activity 2

Has your institution been involved in any OER projects? What lessons can you draw on from other projects to inform colleagues and further promote your use of OER? How might you collaborate with other institutions to create and use OER?

You can complete this activity in a downloadable reflection tool, which also includes reflective questions for other topics in this course.

Section 1 resources

‘What does “open” mean in OER?’:

Download this video clip.Video player: What is the meaning of open in OER

What is the meaning of open in OER

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: What is the meaning of open in OER

PRESENTER:

What does ‘open’ mean in Open Education Resources? Or what do you think it means? So who’s for saying it’s just enough that it’s openly accessible online? That's good enough to be open. No? Why not? Why is that not good enough?

SPEAKER 1:

I don’t think that’s what Open Education Resources are about. I link Open Education Resources more to the open source movement and such, because that’s partly my background. And I think that a lot of things are openly available online, in that you can go and view them.

But you might not be able to use it in your education, in your teaching, because you actually only want a part of what is available, and you can’t take that part because it’s wrapped up in a way that you can’t access it. And that is the significant difference to me for OER, is that I could take the middle chunk of a package and just pull that out to use it with my students. And I don’t have to take the whole thing.

PRESENTER:

Okay. Anybody want to disagree with that?

SPEAKER 2:

I wouldn’t disagree, as I think it’s really frustrating when you come across a resource that you can’t actually just take the pieces. But I’d still say that I think some of the ideas in this sort of – we’re talking about a resource that Ursula found – and it’s the idea of it, and the presentation of it that you can take away as well.

And so that might mean that you have to put some work in to create something based on it, but you’re still openly using that resource, I think. Technically, I think it should be something you have openly available. You can reuse, re-create. But then, yeah, I think there’s sort of all sorts of ideas about you put a piece of work up, and it might be in a PDF format, but you can still use the wording or the ideas, or the check sheet, and re-create something in your own resource.

SPEAKER 3:

Is that just not using an idea, then? If I have a conversation with you ...

SPEAKER 2:

But I’ve still got it out openly.

PRESENTER:

It seems that, you’ve got to be openly licensed. Just being up there in full copyright is no good. You could use it as is. You want it to be openly licensed because, as you’ll learn about later, as I’m sure didn’t know, open licensing is prior permission for you to use, reuse, adapt that material. Should it be in open formats? Should it be in Open Office? Should you just use Open Office? Open document format?

SPEAKER 4:

I think it’s gotta to whatever’s easiest for people to use. To try to make it as inclusive as possible. So even like we said before, as much as you may hate Microsoft, you’ve still got to acknowledge that most people are using that. So I think it needs to be available in all formats. As widely as possible.

SPEAKER 1:

You’ve got to mention accessibility. So you’ve got an extra layer there, haven’t you? You’re putting things up on the web. You have a legal responsibility to make it as accessible as possible to people with a range of disabilities.

So, inevitably, you should already be putting things up in PDF for people who’ve got a visual impairment, or Word for people who’ve got [INAUDIBLE]. You should already be exploring those alternatives.

SPEAKER 3:

Accessibility. Doesn’t that answer your question, then? Because you’re saying about Word. That’s not an open format. You can’t have it. I mean, you can save it as an open ...

SPEAKER 4:

ODT.

SPEAKER 3:

ODT. You can say it is, but people don’t. They save it as doc. So in a sense, I presume accessibility to me is read doc files. I presume it can read ODT files as well, but, you know.

SPEAKER 4:

Screenreader.

PRESENTER:

So you don’t need to use open source software, then, to create it?

SPEAKER 4:

I don’t think so, no. But you can.

SPEAKER 5:

But if you haven’t used open source software, and it’s safe in a proprietary format, that excludes a lot of people from being able to use it to mix and match, and create other objects from it.

SPEAKER 3:

I think it depends what you mean by ‘proprietary’. Word is proprietary, but everybody uses it. The fact that it’s proprietary isn’t the problem. It’s the availability of the software that would be the problem.

SPEAKER 4:

I think it’s trying to include as many people as possible. To make it as inclusive as you can. That’s my opinion.

SPEAKER 6:

With open source software, it can be quite limiting to some extent. Like I was accessing one a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a tool that someone was trying to do a presentation on. It was open source, and there was a chat functionality. And it was all on the left-hand side, there was all the information about, you know, links to documentation, and basically all open educational resources.

And yet most of the time, everyone was complaining about how it wasn’t actually useful at all, because they might have just had it as a static web page instead of something that wasn’t as interactive as they thought.

So I think really it’s not just a case of being openly accessible, even through an open source software. I think it was that you need to consider if it’s going to be viable for everyone to use, even though most are computer illiterate. I think that is definitely a factor. It’s not just a case of obviously using Word or open source.

PRESENTER:

So, there are lots of different factors involved here.

SPEAKER 7:

I think that I would use it. I would definitely use it if it could fit to my target audience. It’s something like you said about implicitness. For example, I’m in favour of using Xerte. Xerte has the layer of accessibility. You can go and put extra HTML and modify it if you want to. You can create a different template if you want to.

It has many functions. I mean, you can enlarge the screen. You can change the colours, you can change the fonts. It’s up to the user to adapt it to the circumstances, individual circumstances.

So if it does fit, I’m in favour of using it. Like Moodle, for example. The majority of institutions are moving towards Moodle. So we are trying to find ways of making Moodle more user friendly, or to adapt it somehow. [INAUDIBLE]. I think it’s very important.

SPEAKER 4:

Do you think the issue of community is more important than resources, though? Because, from my point of view, it’s like I want as many people as possible to be coming to that place to share their knowledge. And to contribute, to build up a sort of shared resources, shared knowledges. And to sort of build that knowledge community together.

PRESENTER:

Yes. It’s very important. I’ll come back to that. And while we were starting out, I was just thinking about what it is about Open Education Resource, and what’s there. Here’s some meanings of open, one of the four questions there. Because there are different types of openness, and they affect different aspects of the resource and how people use. There’s the availability, as we talked about.

There’s accessibility. This is affordability. Do you have to buy proprietary software? Do you have to be able to get it? Do you have to be able to pay high charges to access the internet? To actually access it, as is the case in many parts of the world. And is that resource actually acceptable? Is it acceptable in the form it’s in? Is it acceptable for the use? Is there other things about it?

One thing, there is many different aspects of this, and often you hear people talk about Open Education Resource is about being free resources for free, and it’s just with open source software this is starting to blur the distinctions of something being free, free to access, although it might not be totally free to access, because you’ve got to get onto the internet to do it. There are charges there.

As opposed to the freedoms. What’s important about open licensing is with open source software or with education resources is the freedoms that it gives you as a user to do that. And so, with all these dimensions, and you’ll find some people who think all these are important in terms of Open Education Resources should be free cultural works, and you should be using open and free throughout.

But of course, in terms of the pragmatics, it can be, as we discussed, that open access to something online to use as is may be sufficient for the situation in which you’re using it. Either you as a teacher or, perhaps more importantly, as you as a learner or a student. Does it matter to you as a student that it, oh I can change this, but why do I want to change it? I just want to learn from this.

And so there’s different elements about openness, and you have to think about them in terms of who it is that’s involved. We’ve already seen one definition of OER. There’s a lot of definitions go around here, because there is a lot of this, not fuzziness, but there’s different issues and complexity built into that.

But I like this one, which Stephen Downes, a quite renowned person in e-learning circles, did – ‘Open educational resources are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified, and shared by anyone’. It still doesn’t overcome this ...

There are still other issues behind that, but it is a quite simple definition to show that these are resources which are to be freely accessed, reused, modified, and shared. They’re free, and that freely is about the freedoms, not about that it’s at no cost. Because there is always some cost involved.

End transcript: What is the meaning of open in OER

Download

What is the meaning of open in OER

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

‘Implications of OER for mediating teaching and learning opportunities – what are you trying to present?’:

Download this video clip.Video player: The implications of OER for mediating teaching

The implications of OER for mediating teaching

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: The implications of OER for mediating teaching

PRESENTER:

As Jonathan’s already said, there are many implications for Open Education Resources in sort of mediating these teaching and learning opportunities. One is granularity with the size. Well, at The Open University, we use the term big OER and little OER. And to some degree he was talking about big OER being institutional projects, and little OER things that an individual might be doing.

But the same applies to, is it a whole course? That’s a hundred hours’ worth of study. That’s like a textbook. Wow, that’s big. How do I take and modify? It could be good for a learner to take it like that, but as a teacher, you might say, well how do I pull apart and use something that big? As opposed to going right down to yes, I’m using the animations.

I’ll just create the animation. Oh, I don’t have to do that. That’s very neat. I can just take that two-minute animation, I can take that, drop that into my presentation, to my education resource. It’s that great difference between there. And of course, in terms of thinking about educational resources in the roundabout educational practices in general, and for any things ...

Well, I like to think about it in terms of judging that appropriate mix between pedagogic support, which is built into the content. You might provide the scaffolding, the structure, within the content to help a learner be a self learner and work with it, and not require too much input from you as a teacher, or a supporter, or whatever. There’s also thinking about what’s the personal support.

What is that learner bringing to the equation? The peer support – are they doing it on their own? Will they have that peer interaction so they can also talk to fellow learners at the same time? And of course the professional support. It’s what we do. We provide the professional support. And of course with an Open Education Resource on a website, out there, you’re only got the first one.

Think about it from the learner’s point of view. What assumptions do you make about what learners can cope with? Do you change what you put out there because you think, oh, there’s going to be lots of people looking at this who haven’t got A-levels. But it could be anybody looking at it.

Does it need something up front to help explain it, or do you just put it out there as it would be, as you’d use it in the classroom? Does it make a difference? That’s something I never really thought about, but that’s an issue. What are you trying to present if you’re putting Open Education Resources out there? Are you mainly aiming it at the education or the teacher audience?

And are you also thinking, this is out there to a student, a learner audience? So what things do you have to put in to that? Those types of things about personal support and peer support. I mean, on Open Learn, they use Moodle as the platform, meaning we could have forums, every free course, a little sample from every module out there. There’s plenty have forums around it.

We’ve enabled, made it possible for people to communicate with each other. It’s another issue as to whether they did much or not, but in other words do you also put that within what you do, or do you just say, oh, we just stick our resources into Jorum, that’s just the repository. It’s just a warehouse for stuff. We just put it in there and have people access it.

Because it’s in Jorum it’s mostly going to be teaches getting it, or are we going to have a nice, glossy institutional repository, which is a public face of our institution? In which case, we’re to do. So it’s something when you start thinking about it, it’s not quite so simple as necessarily you can just take what you do in the classroom and put it out there.

Or you can take something you’re doing, and try to adapt it or modify it and create it, but you’ve also got to think beyond is this something just you’re doing in a little corner for your own students? Is it a departmental, is it a faculty issue? Is it a whole institution issue? We all talked about that to a certain extent.

And of course behind all that is all these social computing technologies, these Facebooks and things. What do we do about that? It’s an issue of in general a face for our students as we do more and more e-learning. We move more away from just purely face to face to more blended, more e-learning. What do we do and not do? How do we take account of that? And there are all those different aspects.

But behind it all, we have to remember, is it about greater sharing of practice amongst teachers and learners? In principle, we can be moving from individual to collective practices. Remember, and when you’ve got stuff out there, it’s not just about your students. It’s about students at other universities.

It might be about school students. At MIT, in OpenCourseWare, they found in all their surveys that not only do their own students look at MIT OpenCourseWare to decide which classes they’re going to study and to review, and go back over things of classes they had been to. They’ve also found that lots of students at other universities do the same.

Oh, you know, I’ve got this class on quantum mechanics. Oh, we’re just going to see what the MIT stuff on quantum mechanics is like. They’re starting to make those comparisons. Or they’re saying, I didn’t really understand what he was saying in that class. I’m going to go and look at somebody else’s stuff, see if I can understand it better.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:

There’s all sort of issues to do with teaching style, as well. I mean, I was at a committee meeting the other week, and the students were saying that they were looking at somebody’s lecture materials from a third-year undergraduate degree to understand what they were doing at the postgraduate level, because their lecturer wasn’t so good at the postgraduate level.

Or they perceived it. And saying that some of the material was saying conflicting things, and they got confused in that. And that’s just within one institution of both degrees were at the same place.

PRESENTER:

Of course. That is one of the issues. This is one of the consequences of being open, and having much more material out there, is that some of those clashes might not have been as apparent before. They were always there. They were always there in the sense you’ll get one lecturer say X in this class, and somebody will say Y about the same subject.

Interestingly, that was happening at MIT. Now I know from talking to people at MIT that what they found was, as they got more and more of their courses online, is that some of the professors were starting to look at what the other professors were teaching, and they were suddenly realising, god, I see you’re teaching about this sort of mathematics, you’re teaching it that way, and I’m teaching it this way.

No wonder they get confused about it. Because we’re going about it in totally different ways. Both valid ways, but it’s just that they weren’t recognising those students were having to cope with having this varying stuff. So they can then start talking together, and start saying can we have better articulation?

But even if there are these different ways of approaching it, you make this explicit rather than just leaving students floundering, and saying, oh, god, he said that and he said that. Who’s right?

But equally, what I’m saying is where stuff is out there, and there is more and more stuff out there, you’ll find your students will increasingly be looking to see, oh, can I find anything on the MIT, on the Harvard website, on the Yale, on the Oxford? Can I find something on this? I didn’t understand this, can I find ...

More so than perhaps going to a textbook now, they want to go and say, oh, a renowned professor from University X, surely he’s going to tell me how this subject should be thought about. And so that’s just one of those other things which needs to be taken into account. Keep pressing twice. And just coming back, yes.

Communities. It’s about open communities as much as open content, because it is about sharing. If Open Education Resources is about anything, it is about that sharing culture in many ways between teachers and learners, teachers and teachers, learners and learners.

And sharing between institutions, which I’ll come on to. It’s the whole philosophy behind it is about sharing. Sharing endeavour, sharing effort, sharing the pain in some ways.

End transcript: The implications of OER for mediating teaching

Download

The implications of OER for mediating teaching

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

‘OERs are what people make of them’:

Download this video clip.Video player: OER are what people make them

OER are what people make them

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: OER are what people make them

PRESENTER:

But it still comes back to saying that Open Education Resources are what people make of them. There are different people who want to use Open Education Resources for different purposes. It's not straight forward. And you can never be sure, once you've got it out there open, who might pick it up and use it.

In very interesting, novel ways. All sorts of work-based learning, continuing professional development, in-house training within companies. Because it’s there. Because people value it. Then some of it can be used and incorporated and done in all sorts of different settings. You might not have thought it would happen before it become openly available.

So they can be designed specifically for educational use. But, as Jonathan said, there can be other content use for educational purposes, or it could be just purely used as an information source. A thing that has been said, the Open Learn, the OU, has had over 20 million visitors in the five and a half years it’s been running. So it’s 20 million unique visitors from more than 200 countries and territories.

I don’t know if there is a country or territory around the world which we haven’t had somebody accessing it from. That’s an awful lot of people but, as with any website like this, we have a high bounce rate. People come in, what am I doing here? Go off again, because they’re searching.

Because so many people are saying I want to get some information on – they’ll say, oh, the philosopher Hume. [MAKES TYPING SOUNDS] And up comes the top of the Google rankings, comes something on Open Learn. Just because we happen to have something on Hume. And they go there and look at that, and they say oh, no, that doesn’t help me.

I don’t want that, I wanted something else. So you’re still getting a lot of people coming. It’s also the case, it’s about thinking about it. But if you’ve got your own institutional website, or your own website with resources in it, you’ve also got to be thinking about who might be coming there, how they’re doing it, will anybody notice your actual repository? There are lots of them out there. There are lots of websites out there.

Why are they going to come to yours? That’s another issue. So it’s also, you do have to think about who do you think is a primary audience for the things that you do? Aren’t you doing this mainly inwardly for your own students? In which case, why does it matter if it’s open? Or are you doing this because you think, oh, this could be good for potential students?

Or we’re doing this because it could be because we’re doing work-based learning. We’ve got these industrial partners, and we want them to be able to access this easily, accessing the internet in our own platform is difficult, and difficult to arrange. And it just makes some ways of teaching and learning much easier.

Practice, particularly sort of practice-based areas, professions, the health service. If a nurse can access it immediately on the ward, rather than having to do it through other particular mechanisms, is that better? They can openly get to it by whatever means. Don’t have any specific log-ins or whatever. There are pros and cons with all of that, but you have to think about it.

End transcript: OER are what people make them

Download

OER are what people make them

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

‘What OER can do for individuals, teachers, institutions and governments’:

Download this video clip.Video player: OER and the four major groups of people

OER and the four major groups of people

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: OER and the four major groups of people

PRESENTER:

So in terms of Open Education Resources, there’s three or four main major sort of groups of people we can think about. But obviously there are individuals, the individual learner students. And for them the evidence seems to be that’s coming from the literature and from the research and scholarship that is going on that these are the types of things that individual learners like.

They like to learn new things, or enrich their studies. They do like to share and discuss topics. They often use them to assess what they wish to participate in further formal education. Many are using it to decide which institution they want to study at. It’s becoming part of recruiting, it’s part of that public image, as I said, of the institution.

Happened with MIT. MIT say they’ve seen a change in the types of people who apply to them to study. Since they’ve had OpenCourseWare. They know that the majority of students who do apply have looked at MIT OpenCourseWare before they’ve applied. That happens everywhere. They might want to improve their own work performance. As I say, a lot of people might be saying, oh, this is great.

I just want to learn how to – I need to know about this. They say I’ll go back to that quantum mechanics one. Oh, god, I can’t remember. How do I do this? I need to find out how to do this. Oh, there’s this great little class on MIT OpenCourseWare. I can find out how to do that. It’s a bit more about information, but it’s a bit of that sort of informal professional development, creative development, they want.

They might want to create a revised OER themselves. But one of the issues that does come out with a lot of individual learners, they still often need guidance. Of course, and there’s lots of people, not just in this country but around the world, whose educational attainment is low in terms of being able to use these types of materials. They need a lot of support and activity.

Just because it’s there doesn’t mean it’s valuable to them. The next big group, you’re in teachers. Individually and collectively, the hope is through that sharing activity and endeavour, through Open Education Resources, we’ll create resources more efficiently and effectively.

And particularly perhaps those rich media resources. Maybe animation. Things which you have the technologies, you could do that. Particularly in this room, in the middle of training, you can create these things. But this is the time and effort involved in learning how to do it and doing it. Somebody else has already produced nice animation, this nice little bit of video, audio there. Isn’t that great?

Somebody else has done it. Or it’s saying instead of one person doing it, why don’t lots of people get together and collectively produce something like that? Shared effort. And they say they’ve all got that to use. I think we already heard about obviously looking at this stuff. It can be just a way of saying oh, I don’t want to use this material, but I want to see how they’ve approached it.

What’s their teaching strategy here? Ah. That’s an interesting way of doing it. So a lot of OER can be useful just to say umm, I never thought about putting it that way, or a type of activity like that, which is embedded in it. But creating resources of course is in collaborations with others. It’s important, I’ve already mentioned that. Joining communities of practice.

Customise and adapt resources by translating or localising them. Don’t underestimate how important it is, or can be, to have material translated into other languages so people can readily access them. And because it’s open licence, now this can be across countries.

And there are aspects, people might say, well, there is an element in the OER movement worldwide about is this a form of neo-colonialism? This is, whoa, these rich western countries producing these nice OER, and can’t all those poor countries who don’t have so many resources and things take these on and use them? Well, in essence they don’t have to. They can do whatever they want.

They’re there. No one’s pushing it on them. But you might even find within a country this could be important. Take South Africa. South Africa has ten national languages. For many South Africans, their first language is not going to be English, not going to be Afrikaans, necessarily.

In which case, if you create one OER in one language, if you could easily just translate and mould it to other languages, it means that everybody can study the same material in their first language, and not have to worry about studying in their third language, second language, third language, fourth, whatever it is.

Make it important. And it’s also important, I think I’ll probably say this later equally, those small, what might be seen as minority languages, of course you don’t find educational publishers producing stuff for them. It will be all in English, it will be in Spanish. These big languages.

So again, OER enables these ideas that it’s an open textbook, that it might be translated into a language that’s relevant to that learner. But you all know this. Remember that technology only supports, not supplants good teaching. And so for institutions, thinking as an educational institution, don’t dismiss that one. Showcase teaching research programmes to wider audiences.

Why not? Again, if you’re having an institutional repository, as I said, it is a window into your institution, just like any website. You have websites, and they are a window upon your institution. You might think it’s a very poor window, a very opaque window, whatever it is. A distorting window at the moment, but when your education resource is out there, it is showing something about your institution.

Just as an open access repository of research publications is showing something of your research. All its openness, it is a different type of take when your institution has already said, hey, I can help widen the pool of applicants with courses and programmes. Because it’s more visible, people can see it. There can be a lot of myths about what it is to study at institution X, and what it might be.

If people are worried about it. They can see something of those materials, and particularly if they are video lectures. They can see something of those, and they think, ah, I understand a bit better what the experience will be like for those who are unfamiliar with our education. For those who have not had anybody in the family go into that. Again, it’s just exposing that a bit.

Lowering the lifetime costs of developing OER. Of course that can be important by sharing these things. That’s one of the things that online learning does force us about, things like UK HE can be more cost effective. But collaborating, collaborating is not just for other universities.

Public commercial organisations, including educational publishers, this opens up new ways of doing knowledge transfer education. Also work-based learning with all sorts of institutions. Also, it can be used to extend various outreach activities, community based activities and things. Again, being open there. The local community, broader community, the alumni. The ex-students and things like that.

There’s all different ways in which OER provides a link between the institution and learners, students, and others. But of course it requires supportive policies and strategies. I’ll just note at this point, The Open University does not have an OER policy. There is a group of people going round about this, insisting that we have a policy.

It has a learning and teaching strategy in which openness and Open Education Resources – it has an operating policy around open media, as we now call it, in terms of what we’re doing. And that’s because we’re largely seeing in terms of mainstream, we don’t have to have something separate over there. This is about our learning and teaching strategy in general.

And just openness is a feature, a part of it. But just to finish off this bit, it’s governments, national agencies. They’re getting involved, they’re getting interested. We saw the Online Learning Task Force set up by the last Labour administration, carried on through the Coalition.

Certainly the Online Learning Task Force saw it as OER was showcasing UK HE, a way of attracting international students. Again, we already do that. Again, it’s that window not only to just the students in the UK, but to further afield. Developing educational resources in minority languages that commercial publishers might not get involved in can be important.

Develop educational resources that reflect local cultures and priorities. Again, that can be things that – we have done that a bit in the OU in terms of doing stuff specifically for Wales, stuff specifically for Scotland. Focusing on the fact that The Open University teaches across all four nations of the United Kingdom. It’s been doing that. We have to sort of reflect some of that as far as possible.

It’s very difficult to do that in formal programmes, although we try to do that as well. But we can do a lot more of that in this Open Education Resources aspect, and something that Ronald is working on, as you heard earlier. Cooperating international and common resources to meet common needs. I’ll come back to that with some examples.

But again, these need seed funding and supportive policies. There’s no good just government saying this is a good thing. They do need to seed it. Here in the UK, of course, we’ve had the UK OER programme, the – what has it come to? – about [GBP]12 million that’s been invested in various projects and the funding that The Open University’s had from the Higher Education Funding Council for England as well.

End transcript: OER and the four major groups of people

Download

OER and the four major groups of people

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

‘When might it be better to collaborate or compete in HE learning?’:

Download this video clip.Video player: When is it better to collaborate? When is it better to compete?

When is it better to collaborate? When is it better to compete?

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: When is it better to collaborate? When is it better to compete?

PRESENTER:

When might it be better to collaborate? Or when might it be necessary to compete in higher education around teaching and learning? ... hear what you have to say now. When is it better to collaborate? When is it better to compete?

[LAUGHTER AND INTERPOSING VOICES]

PRESENTER:

Does none of it matter then? We just do it?

SPEAKER 1:

I think we talked about collaboration and [INAUDIBLE]. We spoke about collaboration and some of the challenges and benefits. And altruism, what does altruism mean, actually, and so on. But we never got to the competition bit.

PRESENTER:

Has anybody else got to the competition bit? Yes? Go ahead.

SPEAKER 2:

I think we didn’t really. We touched on competition, because it was kind of a why would you want to compete? I think that was the question. I can understand from an institutional perspective – get as many students as possible. But that’s not the teaching and learning thing. That’s the institutional marketing thing.

I’m not sure we ever should – should, would, do? – compete in terms of teaching and learning, unless you’re talking about raising our game. This is an opportunity to see how other people operate, and it spurs us on to do better. So in a sense, we kind of said collaborate and compete is irrelevant.

SPEAKER 3:

Are you competing, then? If your university can show that the materials that you’re producing is as good as MIT, for example, but that’s competing, though, isn’t it?

SPEAKER 2:

No, that’s ...

SPEAKER 3:

You’re putting yourself into the same spaces, then.

SPEAKER 2:

Showcasing what you do is not the same as competing. Is it?

SPEAKER 3:

I think it is. Well, I think it is. But see, if I was a student and I was looking, I did a search on a particular course. And I found yours, I found MIT, maybe. And then yours was underneath it. And it’s like MSA, oh, this is in America. Oh, what’s that one? So you’ve obviously put yourself into the same place as somehow you’re competing with them. Just by being next to them.

SPEAKER 2:

Yes, but if you see it like that then, in effect, nobody would contribute anything, because then, okay, if I can’t – sorry. If I’m not as good as MIT or Oxford, then I’m not going to bother. If you take that, you put stuff in, and if people, especially where the collaboration comes in, you can see what other people are doing. You think, well actually, maybe mine could be better. So you make it better.

I don’t see that you start off from the point of view of saying I’m going to be as good as Oxford, MIT, Rice, whatever. I think if I go in with that attitude, I’m never going to do it. So in a sense, I wouldn’t compete. It’s learning from rather than competing.

SPEAKER 1:

Something that came up when we were talking about collaboration was that what if the people, I had an example where one of the people we’re potentially collaborating with is concerned that we might actually collaborate with their competitor.

So there’s some interesting sort of dynamics that go on in terms of collaboration as well. Who you collaborate with, and at what scale you choose to collaborate.

SPEAKER 4:

Collaboration and competing might be right next to each other. If it’s right nowadays to take something that’s been produced by a high quality institution and vary it by adding in your good ideas to make it even better. And if people do that successively, it’s a bit – I’m trying to think of another analogy for that. There’s something we often do with it. Take the best possible model that we’ve seen, and then just make it that little bit better. Pass it back in, and somebody else also improves it. Unfortunately, I can’t think of what the model is.

SPEAKER 1:

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

SPEAKER 4:

There you go. Exactly. So collaboration and competing are right next to each other. To and fro.

SPEAKER 3:

This is why I find it very strange. Maybe I’m a bit cynical, but I can’t understand why Hewlett Foundation and Gates Foundation are backing things like open systems like this. It just seems sort of counter ...

SOUND RECORDIST:

Sorry. You keep waving the mike around.

SPEAKER 3:

Oh, sorry, yeah. Yeah, it just seems the opposite of the sort of normal model of things.

PRESENTER:

What would you think their normal model is?

SPEAKER 3:

Well I always thought Microsoft was always the opposite of openness, really. And Hewlett Packard was sort of the same sort of thing. [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER:

The foundations – whoever sets up – are separate from whoever it is that set them up. They have deeds of trust. So, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is set up by William Hewlett of Hewlett Packard. There’s actually a separate Hewlett Packard Foundation, just as there’s companies named Packard, there is also [? facts ?], just like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is totally separate from Microsoft.

It’s his own money set up, and in their trust deeds, which all sort of charities or foundations like that would have to have, they have their purposes. For them, their purpose is what you might call social enterprise. They do funding in education and environment, and one or two others. And they have a particular focus on the eastern part of the US.

Mainly the US, and they only do a little bit outside of the US, as it happens. What tends to happen is that as a foundation they will come in and want to think, what’s the sort of new area which we can do? We can add monies to? Perhaps which governments wouldn’t do, which other people wouldn’t do, that we can do as a philanthropic organisation.

And that would be very much driven by the people, by what sort of strategy the board sets out, but then the individual officers they’d employ. So it would be a bit like with Open Source software, the Andrew W Mellon Foundation did a lot in that. You probably didn’t know that. They funded a lot of things in the early days around that. They just saw it as social enterprise.

We’re saying we’re not expecting to get a commercial return out of it. As a foundation, we invest in the hope that there will be some greater benefits and things that come out of this. And so they just saw this as being part of it. So they’re trying to do – fund things which there might not be funding for in any other way.

This is the way other sorts of charities and things like ... Anyway, that’s a slight sort of digression. Things just carry on. And obviously collaboration and competition is one of those things, it’s two sides of the same coin. It’s difficult to separate them out very clearly. One thing which is clear, I think, as Jonathan said in terms of academia and higher education in general, it’s built on a philosophy of sharing. Sharing ideas, sharing knowledge. Unlocking knowledge, sharing knowledge. That’s what the MIT strap line was for their MIT OpenCourseWare. Because that’s part of it. It is a collective endeavour. So a lot of it is collective, and the higher education system actually works on that collective endeavour, by and large. And particularly the external examiner system. You give of your time. And there’s all those types of things. The whole education publishing system works like that.

Most people give of their time, free to run that. And there’s a lot of people questioning that. The open access publishing models, and all sorts of things like that. But it is the case, the basic premise of higher education is that collaboration. But of course both done as an individual, academic level, for departmental to a subject, to an institutional, there are elements of competition that come in there.

You’re competing with the person next door for that research grant. You’re competing with that person to get promotion. You’re competing with those people, that other institution, to get more people into your institution. Or more widening participation of students, or whatever it is. There’s always that element which there is aspects of competition. But it’s also built upon. So it’s difficult.

There is no set answer. You have to look at every circumstance on its own, and work out if you’re collaborating. Obviously all the people are collaborating, it’s for them to try and work out what is it we’re getting out of this in a collaboration. What are the downsides?

Are we putting anybody else out doing this? But that happens throughout. That happens throughout the area. It’s just part and parcel of what we do. It’s just that there’s competition in all sorts of different forms, and there’s collaboration in all sorts of forms.

End transcript: When is it better to collaborate? When is it better to compete?

Download

When is it better to collaborate? When is it better to compete?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

‘OER business models, and their sustainability and viability’:

Download this video clip.Video player: Business models and sustainability

Business models and sustainability

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: Business models and sustainability

PRESENTER:

So I’m just going to finish up with my ideas of views about business models and sustainability. How do you sustain things? How do you make them viable? Now, the general model which The Open University has taken is to mainstream [INAUDIBLE] within existing business model, practices and processes. What I mean is, I said earlier that we don’t have an OER policy.

We have a learning and teaching strategy in which openness and open media are talked about. But it’s talked about in terms of how does that help assist, support, a learning teaching strategy, whether it be for formally registered students. Whether it’s for informal learners using open media. Whether it’s for outreach, whatever it is.

So it’s more about saying how does Open Education Resources support those activities? How does it support collaborative work with industry? Work-based learning. So it’s not just about OER themselves, it’s about how does the openness of Open Education Resources support the activities we’re doing? You looked at the Open Learning Research report, there’s quite a lot about this.

A good example around this is that in the first two years we set up the Open Learning Repository to be out there for learners. Without any formal policy or practice around it, our online advisory staff, also telephone advisory staff, when students or others ring in saying, can you help with this? Because the way we had to operate things with students of a distance all over the place.

Many of those advisers, off their own bat, were using and referring students, potential students, to Open Learn as part of the advisory service they were offering. So we found out they’re doing this and doing that, and we talked to the Student Services Division. They said, oh, yeah. This is great, we need to embed this. This is important. It’s not all those variety of services.

It’s just they’re realising, ah, this repository, this offers a scope for us to help advise students around what’s your mathematical ability? Well go and look at this material on mathematics, basic mathematics. Can you work through this? People who for English is not their first language. Will I cope? Is my English good enough? Go and look at this material. Work through it. Can you understand it?

Can you post to some of the forums in Open Learn? Can you get other people, too? You see, you know, foreign postings in there from people who are saying, how good is my English? I’ve written something, how good is it? And other people saying, yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s not bad. So it’s about some of those confidence building. The ways in which another example that we found is we’ve had little projects involved in this.

Is that one of certainly secondary school teachers, particularly of a sort of sixth form level using Open Learn as a supplement to what they’re teaching in their A-level programmes. Or as part of a guide to saying, for getting some of their students to think about going to university. Not necessarily going to Open University. Just think about you’re concerned about going on to higher education. Look at this material.

Do you think you can cope doing this? This is the toughest type of material you’re going to be finding when you get there. If you can work through this, you can understand this, you’re okay. So again, it’s that way in which once it’s out there, and it’s open, different people can use it for many different purposes. In ways which it wasn’t necessarily set out designed like that.

There are obviously things you can do if that’s what you want to do, to purpose it for those reasons. So, the best way to make OER stick is to make sure that OER is useful and seen as valued to as many parts of the institution’s work as possible. Whether it’s teaching and learning, or it’s research, or whether it’s outreach. Recruitment, whatever it is. Recruitments can be important.

We already talked about it being there as a shop window for recruitment. And typically the second bullet point there, a typical model for online resources, or doing things like that, particularly online academic resources, is what’s called the Freemium model. Freemium model is not new. It’s actually the late 19th century when – I can’t remember if it was Mr Gillette or whether it was one of the others – first came out with the safety razor. And they give away the blades for free. Then people would – I can’t remember which way around it is. But anyway, you can either give away the blades or the holders. Giving millions of them away to people for free. And of course then people say oh, I like this, I’ve tried this, and they have to buy more blades.

Come to think of it, I think it’s probably one free one with one blade in it. Try this, oh, it’s great. Of course then people want to come pay for something. So you provide something for free, which entices people to buy something else. So it’s not new. It’s used throughout. And Open Education Resources – in particular an institution repository – is a typical Freemium approach. Because oh, here’s something for free.

You can see something about what our teaching materials are like. Oh, you want to find out more? Get on things? Oh, register with us, sign up for the course. That happens.

But you can look at that Freemium model in many different ways, because it could be signing up for a whole course, or you could, as is what is happening with a lot of those outfits and institutions, and FreeTechnologyAcademy, and University of the People, is they might be starting to disaggregate some of those functions. You can get all the content for free, but you want some tuition? Ah, you pay for that.

You want somebody as a personal tutor? Ah, you want to have some accreditation, let’s have some assessment. Oh, here’s this little exam. Oh, but you have to pay for that. So again, it’s people looking at those models to do that. I mean, it’s separate to doing the one which is obviously a lot of online internet companies do, which is having the advertising there.

You could have advertising there, and more people advertising. But generally I don’t think many higher education institutions are going to probably go down that model of having lots of advertising on their site. But it could be as well. Of course you can get donations from supporters to keep you going. You can get grants from funding bodies, but say they’re periodic and they never last forever.

And you can get the free labour of volunteers. That would appear to be a university. If you can get a system going which people just give all of their time free, then of course it can sustain itself. It’s just like any community initiative, just on a bigger scale where everybody gives of their time to do something. But it does need those people who’ve got the time. It means they have to have an income of some sort from elsewhere.

They need to be happy and give their volunteer labour. Because even the biggies still need donations, for sure. You’ve been on Wikipedia about every December. You get an appeal from Jimmy Wales saying can you give us some money?

They need about 25 million dollars to run for the small core of full time staff who are sort of maintaining the system and things like that, but they still need some money. Still need to get it. And so let’s make an appeal every year. Let’s get that sort of money in, just to keep them going.

I mean, otherwise Wikipedia rests upon a volunteer labour of all those people who go in and make all the contributions, whether they’re valued or not. But I mean, it’s that contributor to model. You’ve already seen this before, the Open Education Resources Foundation, it’s sitting behind WikiEducator, now the OER University Foundation is such that you join as a member.

You can be a platinum member by offering 10,000, 25,000 US dollars per year. Sign up, join in, you can be part of the club. What do you get in return? I don’t know, you have to look at the details and see what you get in return for that. But it’s a sort of membership model, a bit like the OpenCourseWare consortium is for MIT. Donate now.

It’s all free, but your contribution helps us share MIT’s course materials around the world. So donate. You can make those calls. So it’s not just big players like Wikipedia, it’s other big players like MIT OpenCourseWare can do this. It’s not enough to fund their whole operation by any means, but they’ve got a lot of alumni donations and things, and it does work, it does bring in some monies.

But it’s working hard to go. And of course if you want to work on this, I’ll just point out that there’s a free course on Open Learn about building relationships with donors. Finding out how to do that. And if that’s not enough, you can actually do the module, full module as well.

Hope it’s still running, I can’t remember. I didn’t check whether it is. But there are these things doing. But it’s recognising that obviously getting that type of funding is hard work.

SPEAKER 1:

I guess when you’re kind of looking at this now, with the idea of the collaborate and complete, it brings it very much back to sort of you’re competing for funding.

PRESENTER:

Yes, you can be competing for funding. Because you can do things like this. It’s one of our school fellows has worked on this – CharityWise. It’s another good example of where you can do things for a sector and extend out HE resources where you might not expect to.

So this is about working with the voluntary sector, and all those trustees, those charities have got to run these things, and know what it is they’ve got to do. Can we provide materials to support the training and development of those trustees? And this sort of CharityWise is just pointing to stuff on Open Learn, which is relevant to that.

So there is an element in which when it is free, it does add to that voluntary economy, that sort of sharing gift economy out there. It’s not just about the market economy, it’s not just about can we get some money in? There are other ways in which we can measure that value. Not just in the monies. And as I say, this is not just about publicly funded institutions as well.

It’s a not for profit private corporation, KaplanUniversity. It’s actually a member of the OpenCourseWare consortium. It’s feeling that there’s opportunities in here. And just like some educational publishers have picked up on it, just like the music industry. If you really want to find out about a lot of the sort of models, you can find the just funded Strategic Content Alliance.

And their blog has these business modelling publications. It’s about the different sort of strategies that different institutions are using to fund it. But when you look at them on the whole, you’ll find there’s still many of them seen as projects or activities which are not necessarily central to the institution’s mission.

My view is that, you know, to make OER viable, you have to work out how does it support the vision and mission of your institution. And so it’s equally important that what you put out as Open Education Resources reflects something of the institution or vision and mission. It’s got to fit in with what you’re doing, because quite quickly institutions have tried to evolve.

And it’s not just Open Education Resources. Some of these start with open access publishing of the research and the like, but it’s all a way in which they’re trying to look at how that openness adds value to that institution. And what it does, and how it does it. So it’s again about retaining and being true to your identity as an institution, and thinking about it.

End transcript: Business models and sustainability

Download

Business models and sustainability

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

‘A journey through some OER projects, programmes, usage and issues’ – PowerPoint presentation

2 What makes a good OER?

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

What is an open educational resource?

The term ‘open educational resource’ is one that encompasses a broad range of items. It can describe a single image or an entire short course, and materials can be in any medium or a mixture. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined OERs as ‘digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research’.

Now view the following video.

Download this video clip.Video player: What do we mean by OER?

What do we mean by OER?

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: What do we mean by OER?

PRESENTER:

What do we mean by OER? Just recently, well there’s one definition. There are many, and they range from really quite narrow to pretty broad. ‘Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educated students and self learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research.’

Not necessarily materials that are originally created with education in mind. They merely have to be potentially relevant to education. And you’re talking about a very wide range of granularity. I mean, this ranges from the whole course, which is what the OpenCourseWare initiative focused on initially.

And the OpenCourseWare consortium, again, initially based on. Down to just items like photos or diagrams, which can be incredibly useful. And that’s quite an interesting task to set yourself to find a Creative Commons licence diagram of something even as commonplace as an eye, a human eye, to see just how easy it is to find that.

And many things in between. Modules, topics, case studies or articles from newsletters, magazines, et cetera. The first one is perhaps fairly obvious, but a good OER is ‘findable’. It’s awfully easy to lose something completely. You know it exists, and still you can’t find it.

So it’s really important to put your resource somewhere where people are going to find it. The best place is usually, if you’re lucky enough to be part of a community that has a repository that is specific to them, take for example LORO for language teachers, or Medev run a resource for medical teachers, and so on.

That’s often the best place, but don’t forget you can put resources in multiple places. They don’t have to be in just one place. A good OER is ‘clearly described’. This is also often overlooked. You go to somewhere like, I don’t know, Jorum, which is one of the repositories, and you find a sort of supposed description of the object, the resource.

But it tells you so little. It doesn’t give you nearly enough information to be able to tell without examining the resource itself in some detail, whether it’s going to meet your need or not. So this is a sort of rather neglected area, where we are. The description of it. The whole question of metadata and sort of formal descriptions has come and gone.

But generally it’s a lost cause, really, to have proper metadata to describe learning resources. But, nevertheless, you need something. ‘Clearly licensed’ – you’d be surprised how many OERs are implicitly licensed for use and reuse by others, rather than explicitly. It would appear to be the case, but you search in vain for anything that actually clearly indicates what licence is being applied to this.

And any sort of exceptions that might apply. So that’s a sign of a good resource. Clearly licensed and visibly licensed. ‘From a source you trust’ – it really does make quite a difference, knowing where something comes from. It doesn’t mean to say an OER from someone you’ve never heard of and a university you’ve never heard of couldn’t be a good resource.

It depends (a) on where you found it, as well. If you found it in a place where, generally speaking, you trust what’s put there as being good, worthwhile quality, then that’s probably a reasonable thing. But often the institution it comes from, the reputation of the individual, et cetera, these are good guides.

‘Easy to modify’ – it’s no good just saying something is licensed as share alike, i.e. something that you are entitled to modify. If you’re sharing it as a PDF, and you’ll be amazed how many OERs are published as PDFs. And that’s absolutely fine if all you want to do is use it exactly as is.

But if you want to use it as part of something else, and modify it and adapt it, that’s useless. So it needs to be easy to modify both technically and organisationally. You know, the way it’s structured needs to be such that it can easily be disassembled and reassembled.

‘Free-standing – does not assume knowledge of other resources’ – I mean, this is quite a problem for us, to mention that we now as a matter of routine aim to put 10 per cent of all OU modules out as open educational resources. But it’s quite a lot of work making sure that that 10 per cent doesn’t make all sorts of assumptions about bits that haven’t been included. So it needs to be free-standing.

A good OER is ‘free of copyright content’. You’d have thought all OERs would be free of copyright content, but they’re not. And the OU is certainly, the OU policy has been to include copyright content where we can get it licensed. So you may well have something that isn’t OER, but has been licensed for use in a particular context within an OER.

But then when you reuse it, you would not be covered to use that copyright material, which is a bit of a pain if you’re in that position. So I would say a good OER is free of that. And another sign of a good OER is it’s being used or recommended by people like you.

You know, the recommendation makes a big help. And my last point, a good OER is ‘imperfect’. Now that’s a funny thing to say, but what I mean is you don’t need perfection in OER. The judge of its worth is whether it meets your need.

End transcript: What do we mean by OER?

Download

What do we mean by OER?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

What’s so special about OER?

It is a simple idea – that you license content in a manner that explicitly encourages use and adaptation – but it has proved a very powerful one. Watch the following video for an elaboration of what’s so special about OER.

Download this video clip.Video player: What's so special about OER?

What's so special about OER?

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: What's so special about OER?

PRESENTER:

Just a little bit, you know – what is it we’re talking about? You know, OERs are a slightly nebulous concept. And why are they so important? You know, what’s ...? Because on the face of it, it doesn’t sound like that big a deal. Okay, something has a slightly different licence from what you’d normally have on a piece of content. So what? Well, this is a so what. What are we talking about? Well, obviously, we’re talking about content of some sort or another.

And I come back to what that content might be in a minute. But you increasingly hear the phrase ‘open, educational practice’, or ‘practices’ as well. And this is, if you like, what follows from making the content free to use and reuse and adapt. And this is where you start to use the content to reach to people who otherwise wouldn’t be your students, you know – new categories of learner.

It’s where you explore different ways of delivering your curriculum. I did a bit of research a while back on how students use technology, both to support their learning and in their non-student lives. And what the, sort of, discontinuities between the two were. One of the things that emerged from that was the extent to which students almost totally ignore the huge amount of work that their library had done to pull together resources just for them – creating collections in this sort of nicely walled garden for them – they bypassed entirely.

They use Google, they use Wikipedia. And if they didn’t find it in Google, they missed it – even though some things just for them had been created. So it’s, in a sense, the sort of practices around education are changing. And we’ll be hearing a bit more about some of those. OERs are an amazing tool for collaboration. You’ll be hearing about some of the projects which have OER at the heart.

I don’t know how many of you have been involved in sort of multi-partner projects. I can recall one that I was involved in quite recently. It was a two-year project. And we got the partnership agreement between the five institutions involved agreed in month 23 of the 24-month project. That’s how long it took us to sort everything out.

If you say everything we produce will be published with a Creative Commons licence, you don’t need a partnership agreement. All of that’s gone. And, not only do you have a vastly simplified way of collaborating between members of the consortium, but you also have a tremendously strong selling point to the funder. Namely, that everything you do for the purposes of your consortium members is equally available to help anybody else in a similar situation.

It’s proved to be a strong support tool for communities. I was speaking to a regional grouping of staff developers recently, and they hadn’t been using OER. But they immediately saw how helpful it would be to support them in their collaborative, mutual support activities which were already under way – but as a way to build on that and take it further. You’ll hear from Andy the role we all can play in marketing and bringing in new students.

There are some really interesting new models being built on the back of OER. We mentioned one of them last night which was the OERUniversity. And that’s one. There’s another one called BADGES, which is a new approach to recognition of learning that hasn’t been acquired in the conventional university setting, but has been acquired through use of OER. I also think that you shouldn’t overlook altruism and connecting with people’s strong beliefs.

None of us got into higher education to help strengthen the bottom line of our institutions, important though that might be. We came into it for other reasons. And, in many cases, it’s really caring about the capability of education to change people’s lives, to have an effect on people, to build civic society, et cetera – these reasons. And OER is a tremendous vehicle for people who care about education this way, to actually do more of what they care about.

And, I think, as we move from higher education as something that’s perceived as being a common good to something that is a private gain, for those that graduate – and it’s happening astonishingly rapidly in this country – this move from a, probably, state-funded system, where the assumption is that it is society that benefits from having a well-educated population to one where things are much more individualistic, in terms of how it’s viewed, with students as consumers, et cetera ...

Well, OER is almost a safety valve for that. There’s a level of frustration within universities, with the sort of changes and what they’re bringing – it’s quite palpable. And you can see OER as a sort of – a way to, if you like, subvert the system. And do what really needs to be done anyway. I leave that up to you. And there are many more reasons for it.

End transcript: What's so special about OER?

Download

What's so special about OER?

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Characteristics of a good OER

A good OER is:

findable – it can be in multiple locations
clearly described
clearly licensed (normally through Creative Commons)
from a source you trust
easy to modify
free-standing – it does not assume knowledge of other resources
free of copyright content
being used by/recommended by people like you
imperfect – it just needs to work for you.

3 Finding and evaluating OERs

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

When seeking content for adaptation and re-use in open educational contexts there are several tools available to support discovery. Many of these tools are the result of experimental prototyping and short-term funded projects, however, and therefore carry with them a certain amount of risk. Not all are sustained beyond the life of the funding, but these initiatives have sought to use a variety of search technologies to support the discovery of generic and domain-specific OERs. As we move forward with search technologies based on increased application of semantic approaches to discovery, things should hopefully improve for the end user.

Within this course you will find a list of the current search tools available to find OERs. Many of these tools have been funded as part of the broader UK JISC OER Programme and have been supported with additional funding from the Higher Education Academies in the UK.

3.1 Finding OERs

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Activity 3

Use Google’s Advanced Search to find an OER in an area that interests you. It allows you to restrict your results to Creative Commons licensed material by setting the filter in the ‘usage rights’ field to ‘free to use share or modify’. Now fill in the table supplied, which includes the list of characteristics of a good OER from Section 2, to assess how well the resource you find meets the criteria for a good OER.

Two key resources that have brought together several aspects of working with OERs and contain sections on searching and evaluating have been published by JISC and WikiEducator. While these resources contain links to specific search tools that can be queried, the most effective start to finding discipline-specific OER is to query the specific open content repositories that have been built to support communities committed to working with open content.

The UK national repository for supporting work in this field is the Jorum. The various jointly funded JISC/HEA projects have deposited all their outputs in Jorum and the repository continues to grow in terms of assets created and licensed for re-use for learning, teaching and research. Jorum results are now fully open.

End users searching for very specific requirements tailored to meet national or regional needs for licensed open content are frequently better served visiting and querying national repositories built to serve such needs. Exemplar repositories such as Jorum that operate within the constraints and needs of regional and national boundaries often still make their content globally open for discovery and reuse. The perceived and actual value of this content will of course always by driven by the specific needs of the end user searching for it. Our broader global communities building, managing and repurposing this content will only ever reap the full value through users proactively engaging in feedback, enhancements and re-deposit of alternative versions, flexibly licensed for further reuse. The process of finding and evaluating OER will only ultimately improve through engagement and sharing, the key philosophy behind the movement itself.

Other exemplar repositories and digital libraries that can assist in finding specific domain OER include:

Activity 4

Visit the JISC OER search engines page and select two of the engines displayed to carry out a search on a topic of your own choosing. Compare and contrast the search experience from the viewpoint of usability as well as the quality and relevance of your results.

3.2 Evaluating open learning

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Having experimented with some of the search tools available and got some results, the next step for anyone searching for relevant content is to evaluate these results in a systematic way. If you intend to use OERs for direct teaching and learning purposes, or for some repurposing prior to teaching and learning, there are several attributes that need to be considered first. Important attributes of quality OERs include:

accuracy
reputation of author/institution
standard of technical production
accessibility
fitness for purpose
clear rights declarations, e.g. Creative Commons.

The JISC Open Educational Resources infoKit quality considerations web page contains a range of detailed criteria for consideration. Some key criteria that you might want to adopt when evaluating your results might be grouped into attributes. For example:

Can the content be described as follows?
- Relevant, accurate, appropriate level of detail, objective, current and jargon-free.
- Of good provenance (consider the reputation of the author/institution), with a list of references if appropriate.
- Free of advertising.
Does it fit my chosen pedagogy?
- Learning outcomes are stated and match with learner’s needs.
- Engaging and interactive.
- Set at the appropriate level, with any prerequisite skills/understandings stated.
- The time required to study is stated and equates to the importance of the learning outcomes achieved.
How does it measure up to usability/accessibility standards?
- Easy-to-use and well presented, with clear navigation.
- Accessible for users with disabilities and conforms to accessibility guidance e.g. the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission’s general web accessibility guidance.
How genuinely re-usable is it?
- A standalone resource that can be reused in different contexts.
- Robust and functional, and works on different browsers/platforms.
- Rights are fully documented, e.g. does it carry a clear CreativeCommons or other rights declaration? Is it OK to re-use it? Are there any conditions?

The video below provides a record of a session previously delivered on the topic of finding and evaluating OERs as part of the activities run for SCORE fellows at The Open University. You can see from watching this that there were very diverse experiences encountered by the participants in using the search tools and locating OER that met their expectations or requirements, and that there is still a need to improve the searching experience for learners, teachers and researchers when seeking OER.

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: Finding and evaluating OERs

PROFESSOR:

There’s an awful lot in the news at the moment about copyright, intellectual property, around digital material. And there are some interesting legislative developments happening in Europe as well that we need to keep a close eye on because a lot of industries, particularly the publishing industry, are scared witless about what might happen if they start opening up and releasing some of their materials in this way. So we’re at a very interesting sort of water shed, I think, as to where this will go.

Now, many of us that are supporting students as well try and encourage them to avoid plagiarism by teaching them great information management skills and at least citation, basic citation, about where they found the material that they’re using in their assignments and their work. And what we say to them, look if it hasn’t got a licence on it then don’t touch it, basically. We’re so used to seeing these websites out there. Not many of them, actually, stamp a licence on it, on their content, on their website.

So you take that risk. And most of us, invariably, we use screenshots in our work as well. So we need to be aware of that. That’s not to say, possibly, not do it, but at least acknowledge where it’s come from, and then manage that risk associated with it if it doesn’t declare a licence on it that you can use it in a particular way.

So this morning we’re actually going to look about various ways of finding places you can find relevant, open education resources and some very basic criteria that you can begin to evaluate open education resources. The library staff here at Open University developed an open package of resources for information management skills called Safari. And so what we’ve done is adapted some of the evaluation criteria that we use in that programme to fit with open educational resources.

So this part will be a presentation introducing you to some resources. And the second part we’ll actually then it’ll be over to you so that you can start searching and finding some of these open educational resources on a topic of your own choosing. Choosing two of the specialist engines, search engines, that you’ll see this morning and using the checklist that we encourage people to use when they’re evaluating what they find once they’ve got their results.

And then, we’re finally going to end up, we might cut this short depending on what the time is like, sharing your experiences this morning of using some of these tools. It is still quite crude out there. So just be aware of that. Nobody has found the silver bullet here about searching and finding things quickly that you need. Part of it is because of the sheer volume of information and artefacts that are published out there. The other part is getting back to librarian skills here, is about describing the properties and attributes and structures of these things. So it’s down to that good old ‘m’ word, the metadata word, that people are either very enthusiastic about or glaze over all together.

But without good metadata, this really doesn’t work very effectively. And a lot of the metadata that are in things like the Jorum are very specific fields. It’s a basic standard way of describing learning objects that they’ve used. But of course, it’s just searching those basic fields. What’s coming on behind this is moves more to linking things through the use of semantic tools and technologies. But again, it’s still very, very early days. And what some of the newer technologies have been trying to do is actually match up.

So for example, if you have a researcher that’s published a lot of research work in a repository but also published a data set or whatever in a repository that’s held in the states, they will try to link those things together. So you’re actually getting much more of an association, if you like, of all the materials that that researcher has had anything to do with. It might link you to the research groups, other publications, Amazon, where you can buy the book, all these things. So that is coming. That is the future. But that’s dependent, again, on good metadata beyond just basic text finding. So watch this space. It is not a fine art at the moment. There is no one panacea with this.

OK now, just to give you an example of how you can support back in your institutions. What the library staff here have done is create an area on the intranet particularly targeting module teams here. So module teams are those that have brought together, of course, goes through a very rigorous business appraisal, marketing, all sorts of things. When it finally gets approval, they’re looking at the pedagogy. They’re looking at how the students are going to be learning, what they’re intending to deliver as part of that course. And there’ll be a mix of content and a mix of skill building.

So what we’ve done here is actually give the module team some information and some links to help them when they’re trying to think about how they might use open educational resources in the context of developing, learning packages and materials. And it’s part of a whole range of things that we offer information and advice on. It is much more targeted at the internal audience. This is not available outside. But it’s proved useful. So if people want to use the materials in workshops within the module teams, then they can do. So we found it’s a great way to disseminate information and get the debate being engaged with at least in terms of how they can use open educational resources with the students.

And we have a very specific page here. What are they? Why use them? When can I find them? How do I evaluate them and examples of good practise? And what we look to here is the external environment as much as internal use as well. We’re trying to drive up awareness of how it’s been successful, where we’ve reused and readapted things in our internal practise, as much as of finding out what everybody else has been up to.

This tends to be far more of a trend towards publishing. People create and publish rather than take down and reuse and actually say to people how they’ve reused it. So there still is that missing link, really, between the actual doing of it and reflective practise. Because the value of this is not just simply in the publication of the contents, the finding of the content, it’s about what happens to it then. How did the students engage with it? How did you build value around it? And I think that is coming right back to the heart of behaviour and practise and teaching practise and reflective practise, around how this can change what you’re doing and change the relationships that you’ve got as well with your learners.

And where can I find out more? There’s lots of information available out there on the web. And if you haven’t already seen it, this is a great place to start. So if you go to the JISC info kit it’s got lots of really practical things that you can use. Again, there’s a lot of material that you can use simply marketing back at home, and also you’ve got some myths in here.

And there’s a section on finding OERs because I think a lot of people get frightened off with these open education resources as well. They tend to think that they’re giving away all their intellectual property in their content. And we can see that actually it can work an incredible level if you look at the practise for, say, MIT, mITX. They’ve just published all their teaching content online to the world. That is an amazing step forward because they see that the value is not just simply in the content. It’s about being engaged around the content and the learning and the relationships that you have with those people that are learning with it. So take some time in your session to go and have a look at that.

And there is a particular page in the info kit just on search engines. Now again, a word of caution because you’re going to be going to this page and actually choosing two of those in the activity in a minute. Many of these things have actually been project funded. So you will find that they are in prototype form, if you like. They’ve had the money. They’ve tested the idea. Money’s dried up. That’s it. You see what you get at the end of the project.

And that is another key concern in a risk around all of this is the sustainability of it. But we need to do all of these things, if you like, because it’s about testing with the users at the end of the day and what they feel is of value. You’ve seen the power of Google. I mean, it came from nowhere and it’s in everybody’s language now. It’s in everyone’s internet searching blood.

So the crowd drove that because it answered a need. It was simple, effective or perceived to be simple and effective. So, killer application. So many of these things take it as they are at the moment. Because if the money’s dried up and they haven’t had any more sustained funding after the end of the project, it’s just been left as it is.

They’ve also now got some more information as well on the whole area of repositories. Now, repositories are literally, they are digital libraries. These often contain not just metadata, like the old fashioned library catalogue where you had just the metadata and then links into the assets or whatever, wherever they were, whether they’re available in a licenced third party host space, or whether it’s a physical book on the shelves. So these repositories often hold the artefacts. So you don’t have to go searching after it or redirecting to it. It’s there.

But you need to understand the content types and what licences there are around these. And it can be quite a challenge figuring out what all these Creative Commons licences mean and how you can use it. And I don’t know how many of you heard of the Hargreaves report. Anybody hear about Hargreaves? Well, you’ll know that government wants to sort of open up some areas, particularly to education. And a lot of the people who own the intellectual property that publish the things want to sort of hang on to it because they’re afraid of might happen or open the flood gates. So the parliament is seeking consultation at the moment over this very thing. And The Open University has been quite vocal in feeding back amongst many. And you can see a lot of the responses that are available on the web.

So interoperability and integration, these are key things for us. Anybody who’s been involved in ebooks at the moment and knows what a huge headache they are, because unless people adopt certain standards again, you can’t find them or their interfaces all look different. Some you can download, some you can’t. Only print one page at a time. It’s a nightmare. So unless we really buy into the whole global vision of these things and adopt and use those standards in creating and in describing them, which is fundamental then to people being able to find them, then we’re not going to get very far.

So there’s a huge movement, ongoing again, to adopt these standards. And so people can do, what they say, harvest the metadata. And you can find things like Core which is a repository. A big aggregate of repositories which really target and will research publications. But they are, many of them, are open, fully downloadable for reuse, swap, and exchange that metadata because they’ve bought into a certain standard for these things for describing them. So you need to know more about these repositories, and Jorum is the key one for us in the UK or Great Britain.

The OER Foundation, again, loads of information on things which are developing in the field. Also, trying to push the whole agenda for the sustainability of these because there’s been a lot of money that’s gone into building the repositories, getting academics to publish things in there and share their work, and the momentum needs to carry on.

And it’s at a critical stage now because of the financial situation that everybody is in. And instead of locking down more because of the competition, it’s the very time we all need to be getting behind this and opening it out. Because that’s the only way we’re going to democratise access to education at the moment, is through this movement. So it needs to be viral. It needs to be very proactive. And us librarians have got a great part to play in that to pushing that agenda. Otherwise, none of us will be able to afford to be educated anymore the way that things are carrying on.

Again, WikiEducator, this was, again, in that whole kind of bought into the value of it WikiEducator, sharing things globally, trying to enable best practise to be shared, and there’s a whole section, again, on finding OER and different types of repositories including specific subject focused ones. And some of the higher education academy’s as well, they’ve actually got materials in there. They’ll either publish in the Jorum or they’ll support a repository in their own subject field.

But again, I come back to this. It’s still very difficult to search across these things at the moment. You’re still havng to really go out and find these things rather than being able to use an excellent search engine to reveal some of this stuff with you. Although, some of it’s now becoming more Googleable.

Again, on WikiEducator, a whole range here of search engines that you’ll find. So you can go and use that as well. When you come to your activity you can choose which site to land on, really, and do your investigation from. And on Cloudworks itself – have you heard about Cloudworks yet?

AUDIENCE:

It was mentioned.

PROFESSOR:

It was mentioned. OK, well again, just funded and the whole idea of this cloud was being able to put an excellent tools out there, share good practise. You can see there’s a whole range of different things at the time when I just did the screen capture incorporating competencies in search into OER projects. So if you’re thinking of digital literacy development again, then it’s much easier, in fact, to create those sorts of materials around the free stuff because there’s so many issues around using some of the licenced resources.

And there’s some fabulous collections out there of digitised material. Some of the museums and galleries are actually, now, releasing some of this content and licencing it for use in an educational setting. So Cloudworks is another good place to start. And again, you can see I’ve just done a very simple search on finding OER on it. And there’s all sorts of information you can find on their projects, international projects, as well. So in particular, country settings, trends, a whole range of things to keep up to date with what’s happening in the field.

And you will be going into lab space, I think, this morning as well. I think that’s the next thing on the agenda after this session. So you’ll have an opportunity, as well, to see what’s in there, what we’ve published in there. And again, some of the librarians have been involved in sharing some of the Safari work, actually publishing in that space within the subject areas as well.

We hope to do more in this field as we start moving and broadening out from just simple information literacy into digital literacy. There’s so much information everybody needs to arm themselves with here in terms of managing risk, identity management, privacy, all these key things which now affect all of us, and so that we can become really effective digital citizens.

And here we go. Here’s the Jorum. So this particular day when I did this screen capture, they’d actually published a Harvard referencing tutorial. Now, how many of us create these things? Every single institution has probably got its version of it. So how much effort is going into that? How much better would it be if actually we bought into this one? And if it doesn’t do quite what we want, adapt and republish.

But explain and understand why it’s not doing what you want it to do because at the end of the day everyone’s just after up-skilling the students. And sometimes we become very precious about these things, and if it isn’t invented here or got that stamp on it, then people don’t feel comfortable with it. When it’s, actually, what do we need to create that’s original, and what can we reuse and repurpose which is perfectly adequate and good enough to get the students from a to b? Or in some instances, dare I say, the staff from a to b as well. I mean, we’re all in this together. These are skills everybody needs to sort of get on top of.

And in terms of open tools, as well, around managing information, you have things like Mendeley now. Now, at the moment it’s still free. We don’t know where it might go to. Often these new companies that are starting up, they will give you a free tool like that. But that’s a great tool to use again for searching and finding things and managing the results that come back. And then, you just pay for premium services.

So it might not be necessary anymore to maintain our massive database subscriptions to EndNote and RefWorks, dare I say. So this stuff can really start changing the way that we work and making us share a great practise right across all our communities. Take your time to go and have a look at Jorum.

AUDIENCE:

What’s that name, Mendely?

PROFESSOR:

Mendeley. M-E-N-D-E-L-E-Y, Mendeley. These lads are working very, very hard in the semantic technology field as well. So they’re about associations and linking, linking data, linking metadata. And you’ll hear more and more and more about this linked data, linked and open data. The government, funny enough, are very much behind publishing the data in an open way. And there’s tremendous potential for sharing this data because we can build new services on this data.

You can envision them publishing a data set on declining industry in Newcastle or whatever, understanding where the new money’s coming from, where the regeneration’s coming from and then colleges and universities and schools getting behind that and understanding how they need to change their curriculum and answer their local job market needs. So these things can mobilise change if used effectively.

OER Commons, again, you can see there’s so much out there for you to find information on this. And this was quite popular as well with our students for a long time. The 100 best open educational resources on the web. So again, these have been peer reviewed. Not all of the stuff that you’re going to find in these repositories are subject peer review. But if they have, there’s usually some annotation around them. There’s usually some commentary around them. So a bit like your Amazon. So and so liked this. You liked that. So a bit of caution really. Review. It might not be right for you. But if it’s not right for you, don’t just throw it away. Improve it, and put it back.

OK now, the once – we’re going to move into the activity in a minute, and these are the very, basic criteria that we developed. We didn’t want to go have a Masters or a PhD in finding and evaluating OER. We were about practical. Practical things that people need to apply. So the key thing, around the accuracy. So as I say, not everything is subject to peer review, and it’s important that you know where it’s come from, the authenticity, if you like, of who’s published it so that you feel very confident that you can use it.

The reputation of the offer on the institution, some people are making their reputations, their academic reputations on this. Our own Martin Weller is a prime example. So the new kind of academic reputation is just as much about sharing and publishing out there in a global network as it is about publishing the latest book. And we may well find that things like the ref changes is in order to incorporate some of this stuff. And that, again, will bring a massive challenge to the publishing industry if that was to really blow the lid off of that.

The standard of technical production is becoming increasingly important. We all have a duty to ensure that the materials we create our accessible. So if they’re not accessible again and you have skills, why not make it accessible and republish if it’s not quite as it should be?

And fitness for purpose. This is the biggest one. I think the biggest stumbling block that we find. We can find all sorts of things but when you go in there it isn’t quite at the right level or it’s not quite night for whatever reason. Rather than throw it out, build on it, publish, put it back. Get this whole transactional economy going and to make sure that there are clear rights declarations on it. You’re only safe to reuse and repurpose if it states that. Everything else got a bit of a government health warning on it.

And quality considerations, there’s a whole range of information and things that just have actually published on this. They’ve poured hundreds of thousands of pounds into these initiatives because they’ve bought into the value of them. And they want to see that moving forward and sustaining. It would be a huge shame to see all this as excellent effort actually stall now at the very time where it needed to go forward.

So maybe we can take the next 10 minutes just to share some of the frustrations. So if I could ask some of you to volunteer, OK, to – do you need a mic?

AUDIENCE:

So, rather, not the frustrations just yet. I was really surprised because what I’m looking for is how to use Wikis for assessment, and I actually used the Jorum website. And what was very useful is that it actually came up with quite a lot of case studies, and it was really clear about copyright and how it could be used. The only thing that, again, what I think seems to be the issue in my own research previous to this is it’s not sustainable. Like if you click a link and they’ll say look at this link for the project proposal, the link’s broken. Or it’s behind a login screen. That’s what I found.

Whereas, but I did actually find it was very, very useful, and it’s very user friendly. So it is something I will be using again but I think that is the issue is it’s the sustainability of these resources. And I think while it’s beneficial to do a lot of research, sometimes it’s the issue of well, do I instead just create my own resources instead of having to research because researching sometimes actually takes longer than actually creating your own. So I think that’s what seems to be coming up quite a lot, really.

PROFESSOR:

Well, you imagine everybody’s doing this because of that. And then, so we’re wasting a lot of energy. So the way to try and do this is to drive up the quality of what we’ve got all ready, and adopt good practise ourselves when we’re creating them. And eventually, eventually it will drive up the quality. But it’s a slow process I think. It’s a slow sustained process to do that. And I think because reputations are being made out there in this field right now, so the more that people are adopting these things and adopting good practise and making sure that you think about all those things that we’ve talked about this morning, when you’re creating your own material then you’re helping others find it as well. So eventually, these things will become easier.

So did anybody else use the Jorum? Would you mind sharing what you found on there. Did you find what you were looking for or not?

AUDIENCE:

Yeah, I did. I mean, it’s a little bit easier because I went in just looking for something specific around [INAUDIBLE]. I found a great video from the University of Warwick so yeah, it was really useful. In fact I’ve saved it because I’m going to use it. And just going off the checklist, it’s all there. You’ve got the accuracy, authors, everything. So yeah, I found it very useful. And there’s also comments as well, and the comments are from different universities so the resources are up to date. Two authors actually said well, I’m doing a new one. So very good.

PROFESSOR:

So how did you use the Jorum before this morning?

AUDIENCE:

I’ve dabbled but not really gone into it in any depth. But now, I did like using it. It’s a very nice interface. Obviously, as possibly there’s standard barriers at the moment so you’d expect it to be easy to use. I also used, I forgot what it is now. The glue one for gluing things together. I just signed up for an account. I think that looks really nice and quite intuitive as well. So now, I’m quite impressed.

PROFESSOR:

OK, great. Did anybody us use anything different?

AUDIENCE:

Hi, I stayed away from Jorum because I thought that would be the number one once I tried. The university learning OCU and OER one. And it turned out to be a customised Google search engine. And I’m looking at it and basically just came up with a lot of YouTube videos. So I put one on and it was very good. After the beginning it said who it was and what university they were from and I hadn’t heard of either of them, which meant that I’d have to go and look up this person to see if I actually, what his reputation was. The video looked quite nice, and he was quite interesting because he was filming on the green screens. Every now and again things came up in the background and looked very, very nice. But at the end, he had a list of reference which were all too blurry to read. And he said, I will email you these references at the end. And I said well, that wouldn’t be very useful for me, that being. But the actual explanation of some of the theories that I was looking at looked quite nice. I think it’s something I would use, but it would sort of be like, have a look at that if you’re – but I just didn’t realised that it was doing YouTube videos, which was quite interesting so that was a quite nice thing to see.

PROFESSOR:

Did you come across anything on the licencing side?

AUDIENCE:

There was nothing on licensing. Well that was the thing because it was YouTube. I actually wrote a question. I presume YouTube you can show, but I’m only assuming that because everybody does. There was no, this is licenced to be shown. It was just there. So I kind just assumed that it would be all right to view, to show it to people, just because it was on YouTube. But there’s nothing about what the licence was or whether you could or not.

PROFESSOR:

So you take the risks, actually. I mean, most people who will decide to upload to YouTube are doing that. They’ve made the choice to share it unless they’ve put it in a private area because you can keep things in private accounts as well. So that if they have made it publicly viewable then, as you say, you make an assumption and take the risk that you can do that.

So could you, if it there had been a licence very clearly declared on there that you could have reused and repurposed it, would you be tempted to improve it or not.

AUDIENCE:

Well, I don’t really think it something you can repurpose because it’s literally, it looks like it’s some sort of lecture capture with additional things behind it. So it’s as is, really. You couldn’t, really, do anything with it. You just put it up and say, what’s that? In terms of repurposing, I think there is no repurposing. That’s the resource as is. Maybe, I suppose, you could chop it down. You could take a bit out because it was two linked videos. One was nine minutes, one was seven minutes. So I didn’t watch it all. I fast forwarded it through. But in terms of repurposing there’s not a lot I would do with it, really, apart from as is.

PROFESSOR:

But you found subject content was –

AUDIENCE:

It looked quite interesting and it did it in some interesting ways that wouldn’t have. So I found that quite interesting.

PROFESSOR:

Right. So it’s given you some ideas.

AUDIENCE:

Well, I think technically he has the technologies to do it because it was obviously filmed. He had also sorts of gizmos behind him so that’s quite – I know we don’t have an eye institution so that was quite good.

PROFESSOR:

But I mean, there’s lots of free tools out there as well for video production and you can do some really quite neat things just from some of the stuff you do in iMovie or Garage Band if you’ve got an Apple machine. So there are things you can do.

AUDIENCE:

[INAUDIBLE] underneath, when you click those, like expand, the information says something like standard YouTube licence which means you can’t actually reuse it. You can show it but you can’t reuse it or reedit it. But if it says that there’s another licence there and I think there’s a bit of video editor within YouTube itself that you can then – I think I did it and then repurposed.

AUDIENCE:

There’s also technologies you can just take the Mp3 files from the YouTube videos as well.

AUDIENCE:

Sounds like dangerous territory, though.

AUDIENCE:

That’s a good way of reusing.

AUDIENCE:

You’ve heard that.

PROFESSOR:

So has anybody got anything else that they’d like to share in that exercise.

AUDIENCE:

I used expect. A very challenging search engine. I ended up with hundreds of results. Only the first page and if I’m generous, I would say the second page could be relevant somehow. And I was searching for finding keywords, something finding keywords or finding information for assignments. Initially the search was very well, with some thousands of results. So I restricted it with advanced search and I found just hundreds. But as I said, only the first two pages were worthwhile, worth checking.

So I ended up with Open University material. Obviously, it is high quality. It has learning outcomes in terms of pedagogy. It doesn’t show how much time required. In terms of my situation, my environment, although it’s pretty similar, I would say that it needs prerequisite skills to understand this bit of searching for keywords. It’s not jargon-free so I would need probably a separate glossary of something or I should explain first the terms and then use these materials to expand it. Accessible, obviously, it is which is one of my main considerations always.

So it’s clear navigation, but it’s too wordy. Although it has bullets, it’s too wordy. And people tend to have this fatigue reading or scanning online, just scanning through. So even for me, I’m reading all day through apart from the hours I’m sleeping, very few. Even for me it’s difficult to go through all the content. When I say it, I’m scared. And I say, oh dear, it’s a lot. And I think this would be a burden to adapt it as it is. And it hasn’t any interactivity. So I need to do something to engage people with it to make it more interactive. But other than that, and of course, the good thing, licence, it’s very clear stated, very clearly stated. So that’s a very good thing.

But expert is very challenging, and I assume they have strong metadata behind. Again, I’m a bit obsessive about metadata. Even for small learning objects I’m creating, I apply Metadata. And not on the same learning object but also in a different form in case my colleagues need to make them searchable. And I have applied a scheme Dublin Core with something else. So I assume Expert has metadata as well. Why is it so difficult to – what people are putting in this metadata, how they describe the source, I don’t get it really. Because I’m getting hundreds of results, and none of them are relevant.

PROFESSOR:

Well again, this is tricky, isn’t it? It’s in turn how it’s mining, basically, how it’s actually mining in matching. This is what the difference is with something like the basic Google search which is just mining for free text words or whatever. And some of the more semantic approaches which are targeting very much the link relationships between those fields and what they’re describing. We just haven’t cracked it yet because you can get a great clustering engine, but again, if can go and have a look at those things, they’re still not quite relevant or quite what you want. So the semantic technology can support all that topic clustering but the actual relevance of the results that form in the those clusters, it still might not be what you want. It’s, I suppose, the limitations of the computing against the human brain, and what’s it aspiring to.

I mean, librarians will tell you they’ve been doing reference interviews for donkey’s years. And the amount of where you travel from the beginning of the reference interview from where you actually get to what somebody is actually after because often people don’t know either. Or they have a vague idea about what they’re looking for. So try to support that kind of activity in this is fraught with all sorts of challenges, really. But at least for the basics set of Dublin Core it’s better than nothing at all, so you can still search. I mean, one of the things that the Jorum does as well, it does support browsing. So most of you, I guess today, have taken the keyword search approach. You’ve just typed in words into the search box. But you can do that as well with good repositories that have used a whole range of vocabularies, and that will also help with relevance. So, you can use standard vocabularies to structure those things and thesauri to help with that.

And a lot of the semantic technologies are actually, that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to link the thesauri. So they’re ontologies, what they call ontologies. So that’s why they’re hoping that eventually this will bring more accurate clustering rather than just text mining, free text mining. Anybody got anything else?

AUDIENCE:

I deliberately chose things I haven’t heard about. So I first tried Discover Ed. And I was looking for curriculum redesign in higher education. And all the resources I found where about the use of OERs rather than links to OERs. So I had to give up that search engine. So I then decided to play it safe and go to OER Commons, and I changed to looking for assessment and feedback in higher education. And I have found something gut I just wanted to share the text with you if I can find it again. So I found an item called assessment strategies to provide feedback for post secondary education. I had to learn my term higher education wasn’t relevant. But the tags are blackboard, distance education, faculty development, and online teaching. So and the resource just seemed to be one page describing an exercise with no information about what the exercise was. So although it’s tagged for attribution and no strings attached, I’m not really sure how I can use this. So I have not had a very successful morning.

AUDIENCE:

Hi. I did a similar sort of thing. I thought I try something that I hadn’t used before. So I looked at the OER Commons and I was a little bit confused about what this no strings attached was. Because, obviously, you get very used to seeing the Creative Commons, and then underneath the no strings attached you see the Creative Commons so you’re kind of aware of what that is. But then, the other thing that I was finding on a lot of the different search engines, so I tried OER Glue as well. The same resources come up, and the same resources that don’t quite match my need are coming up time and time again. So I felt a little bit like I was perhaps wasting my time a little bit going through these search engines which is one of my little bug bears.

AUDIENCE:

Is it to take existing OERs and somehow stick them together?

PROFESSOR:

Yes, I think because of this problem of clustering content and being able to find, because things are in different repositories. So it’s trying to, at least, bring them together. So if you’re searching in one topic assessment or peer assessment, and you’ve got things in a whole pile of places, it is trying to link them, cluster them together and bring them to you. I think the ideal, the holy grail, I think, they’re after is a little bit very similar to RSS feeds have done for us. So rather than you going and searching for all the news, you sign up for things, and then it comes to you. And then, you use a news aggregator.

So you go into something like Netvibes and then you’ve got all those channels in one screen, if you like. So rather than you having to rush off trying to find all of these differing things, it’s coming to you.

AUDIENCE:

And you can publish into those channels.

PROFESSOR:

Yes, because RSS is very transmissional one way. They’re not interactive in that way. But it’s so hard to keep on top of this, as well. Because obviously, at the moment you’re searching in a particular time and a place. So it’s bounded by whatever you can find at that time. And the beauty of something like RSS, again, is that if a news item gets published on your topic, you then hear about it. So some of the repositories, I know are looking at doing things like that. So if somebody put something in, you get an alert. So if somebody’s put something, the latest artefact on your topic –

But we have got such a long way to go with this. It’s still very much in its infancy. And I think given the current climate, what I would encourage everybody to do is just to make Jorum as best as it possibly can be. And if you are keen on, which hopefully you are and have bought into the whole values system, really, around creating, publishing, repurposing, sharing, and very open practise, and you don’t have resources back or resources that are getting increasingly tighter backup base, use the Jorum.

It’s there. It’s a structure. It’s an infrastructure. There’s help and support there, and avoid all the costs, if you like, in the overheads of maintaining institutional repositories for these types of artefacts. And let’s just drive up Jorum and make it one of the best in the world. And that’s what I would encourage everybody to do. And to think about the metadata. Metadata, we know, it’s expensive as well in terms of its creation and the time it takes to create the metadata. Particularly, if you’re going to adopt standards, rigorous standards and maybe create a lot of metadata.

So, there’s trade-off there about how much metadata is good enough, and maybe how much standard spill description metadata we need and how much semantic link services we can develop through actually turning with the thesauri, our controlled vocabulary, all these ways we describe things, the ontologies, into machine computable ways of matching things together. So it’s a bit of both, really.

And of course, that helps with searching and discovery. But the other value of the metadata is in the long term maintenance the artefact. So just like everything, we need to clean out the cupboard now and again. It’s not just a case of building and pushing and building and pushing and building and pushing. We do need to review what’s there. We have a responsibility to clean out, decide what we want to keep which is of value longer term, or things which are more ephemeral that could be disposed of and deleted.

So it’s an active process of managing these materials, and that way we’ll avoid profligation as well, of content, which maybe of devious quality and build up more solid repositories. Certainly, core content. Things like we were talking about earlier on with Harvard referencing. We do not need millions of iterations of Harvard referencing. That’s a classic case in point, where one is good enough for everyone to use.

So I think we could be working much more effectively together. And then that releases more time to be more inventive and creative with some of this other stuff that we find and could maybe make it better. Certainly, has everybody heard of Common Craft? That’s a very good site for videos for like instructions and how to do things. Common Croft.

So if you haven’t heard of it, I’m just thinking if you want to do a rapid video or something, and it can show you how to create a video with some really basic tools. So there’s lots and lots and lots of really lovely super stuff out fact there which is still free and reusable both in terms of tools, technology, and then in terms of the content that we’ve been talking about today in these repositories.

End transcript: Finding and evaluating OERs

Finding and evaluating OERs

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Lisbeth Levey highlighted the issues of finding relevant OER in a 2012 report published by the Commonwealth of Learning. Her personal account of trying to locate and use OER suitable for supporting a postgraduate university course in agriculture within an African context demonstrates:

the richness and breadth of material available
the considerable challenges associated with finding relevant material that is openly licensed for re-use
the crucial need to frame searches well in order to retrieve good quality material.

Activity 5

Timing: 0 hours 30 minutes

Join an OpenLearn free course that you are particularly interested in, or which you have already studied, and do the following:.

Investigate the rating system provided. Look at the questions about quality, interest and difficulty.
Look at any constructive comments in the Comments section (if there are any).

What other questions would you wish to ask to obtain feedback on your OER?

Discussion

I would want to obtain specific feedback in addition to the general comments under the rating system. I am interested in how people have engaged with Compendium and FM, and how easy (or rather how difficult!) people find the different ways that free courses can be downloaded.

Activity 6

How do you usually evaluate sources of information for the resources that you create? Do you have to do things differently for OERs? Where can you find an OER for your discipline/subject area? What tools can you use to evaluate their usefulness?

Discussion

Creating an OER isn’t vastly different from creating a normal teaching resource: it’s a way of licensing a resource so that it can be shared with peers and colleagues, and enables them to change and develop it further if necessary to suit their own teaching practises. There is a wide range of repositories – some, such as Humbox for social sciences and LORO for languages, that are subject-specific. Others, such as Jorum, OpenLearn, OpenCourseWare Consortium and MERLOT, hold a wide range of resources on a variety of different subjects. There are also tools such as OpenNottingham’s ‘Xpert’ that will help you to source content from a wide range of repositories without having to interrogate each one individually. Tools for evaluating the usefulness of an OER include:

the credibility of the resource
academic/professional judgement
the licence, and whether it enables adaptation and change as needed
the accessibility of the resource
the platform and software the resource is built in and how easy it is to make the necessary changes (e.g. a PDF document is difficult to adapt, whereas a Word file is simple).

Only you can make the professional judgement as to whether the resource will suit your teaching and learning needs.

Section 3 resource

‘Finding and evaluating open educational resources’ – PowerPoint presentation that featured in the video above

4 Copyright and OER

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I assume that you are reading this course because you would like to create a course similar to the materials that you can find on the OpenLearn website. You therefore have a teaching purpose and are particularly interested in the use of online tuition. Hopefully you are also keen to share your teaching materials with others. But why bother creating a new OER? Surely there is so much material already available for free on the web anyway!

I would answer this in a number of ways. First: quality. You want to know that the materials that you are using yourself, or obtaining for use for others, are of high integrity; accurate and well constructed.

Second: copyright. While the copyright rules for many countries may be similar, any advice or comments given here is derived from and in the context of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (‘the Act’).

You may be exposing yourself or your institution to legal challenge if you use third party copyright material without permission. If you use YouTube for audio or video elements, or Flickr to store, say, a collage of pictures in a Sgt. Pepper-style line-up, they will remove the material from their websites if they receive a complaint.

The use of small extracts or amounts of third party copyright material in your OER is generally acceptable without attracting complaints from copyright holders. In the UK this is usually referred to as ‘insubstantial’. Other countries, such as the USA, may use the term ‘fair use’ and provide a wider use provision within their territories. Those that are not familiar with copyright, or lack experience in working with it, may find it difficult to judge how little to use without permission. Using insubstantial parts of works needs to be decided with both a quantitative and qualitative gauge. The following may help:

Use no more than around 400 words from a large book (quantitative).
Do not take the substance of any work. For example, if you’re taking quotes from a whodunit novel, do not take the part that reveals the culprit – even if only a few words (qualitative).
Poetry is considered very qualitative, so use caution and do not take more than two lines without permission without seeking advice from someone with copyright knowledge and experience in this area.
Music is also considered qualitative, so use caution, particularly with popular or well-known pieces – even if you’re only using a couple of notes. Seek advice if unsure.
Footage (film/moving images) is considered qualitative – so again, use caution. Footage is charged within the industry on a per second basis (frequently with 30-second and one-minute minimums being imposed for charging), so three or four seconds could be seen as a maximum insubstantial part.

Those that are more experienced in dealing with permissions and copyright may be able to apply some flexibility to the guidelines above, depending on each individual piece of content. There are other ‘fair dealing’ provisions in the Act (Sections 29–30) that permits use (as a defence) of copyright works, or parts, without seeking permission.

Activity 7

The following training session video explains the basics of copyright and explores some issues surrounding copyright and Creative Commons licences.

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: Training video

SPEAKER 1:

All right. For this afternoon’s session, just for an hour, we’re going to just do a reflective activity. You’ve been talked at a lot and there’s a lot of projects bombarded at you, so this is an opportunity now to really just have a look at some of those projects. And also look at other projects from your point of view in terms of what you want to do and what you’re doing at your institutions, and what your institutions are doing. So we’ll probably just have a look at some different projects. You’ll just have to search around for yourselves, or within your discipline groups if you want to. I know there’s a lot of librarians as well here. So we can see one distinct group we’ve got here.

But just thinking about some of the things we got on the screen there. I mean there could be an element of sourcing potential resources if that’s part of what you’re thinking of doing. Issues, barriers, motivations, positive outcomes, negative outcomes and also maybe just some projects you’ll find interesting or there may be some on the list that we haven’t shown and that you know about or come across that you like to share with us.

I’ve put – if you follow the link that’s on the screen there, I’ve put a version of this PowerPoint as a Google Doc there. And if we can just go to that. You’ll have a list of a series of websites there that I’ve just quickly put together around – you’ll see the score – the top two score websites. The first one is, basically, a list of different case studies and projects that are going on around, mainly, Europe. The second one down is our fellowship programme. Our Fellows are from English universities. Looking at their research products there. Quite a number of those are finished so you’ll be able to find case studies and publications on those there. And then we have UNESCO, OER Africa, some of the things Andy mentioned, links to the three phases of JISC OER programme as well as the HEA and OER commons.

And on the next page I’ve just put together a list of everything that Andy mentioned. So that’s all the projects that Andy mentioned there. Some of them will be in all the other lists that you’ll see around there, but if there’s something in particular that interested you that Andy was talking about, you should be able to find in that list. So what was the content that you were looking for that you couldn’t find anything?

SPEAKER 2:

Care worker role.

SPEAKER 1:

From care worker role. That’s interesting because that’s probably quite likely that from that point of view I imagine it’s quite –

SPEAKER 2:

There should be heaps of –

SPEAKER 1:

– vulnerable people involved in that stuff.

SPEAKER 2:

There should be heaps of stuff.

SPEAKER 1:

I imagine people probably may be scared about the licencing and opening content up in that sense. Is there stuff on the internet that is available that is not open access around care work?

SPEAKER 2:

There’s the company deductions standards so if you wanted to take up a care workers role then there is stuff around that but that’s obviously from somebody’s published material.

SPEAKER 1:

Yeah. I think that’s quite interesting because that’s from, obviously, the idea [INAUDIBLE] and then how would you increase that work that’s been identified that the arts where not very well funded in terms of the OER area. But I think that some of the projects that we’ve been involved in, particularly some of our fellows, has actually started to change that. And people want to look at them when – or actually it’s sometimes it just needs those people to say please start putting some stuff, and what are the issues around that and how do we address it and how can we actually make sure there is content out there. Interesting.

JONATHAN:

OK. Welcome back everyone. It’s been really very easy going up until now. But now we get to the serious part of today. Come on, admit it. It’s been a dodle, hasn’t it? But, anyway, we now get to the nitty gritty of rights. Everything to do with rights. And no one knows more about that than Bernie Attwell, who you’ll get to hear from shortly. But we have added value in the form of Alma Hayles who’s director of intellectual property. Is that right? Here in the university. So she heads the unit that looks after rights management across the university, across all courses, everything. So, without more ado, over to you.

BERNIE:

OK.

JONATHAN:

Bernie and Alma.

BERNIE:

Hi. Good afternoon. My name is Bernie Attwell. I hope you enjoy this afternoon’s session. I will say the time will just go very quick because copyright is such an interesting subject. And I know we’re going to talk about Creative Commons, and I’ve got a few exercises to get you thinking about CreativeCommons and how you might want to use Creative Commons within your work. However, we’ve got to frame that within copyright. Because Creative Commons is not a religious movement or anything like that. It’s basically a licence. And people get so het up about it. And I think it’s useful for you to learn a wee bit about copyright.

Now, I do assume no knowledge. That’s why I’ve got the low tech board here to sort of engage you. Today you’ll find this session a wee bit rushed. But please ask as many questions as you want. Alma and I do a course within the OU and outside the OU that lasts all day, to do with copyright and rights, the whole spectrum. So we’ve got a very short time to sort of just try and engage you, keep you awake, and get onto the interesting bits.

So while I’m doing that– also can I bring to your attention the– you probably have it on your programme about the reflection tool. And if there’s anything else you need as we go along in order to make this really work for you then please fire questions. As Jonathan said, you’ve got two of us this afternoon, and make the most of it. Because Alma, head of intellectual property, also has a wealth of experience in dealing with rights and copyright for the whole university and with the wee hours.

OK. Here now we’re going to create a birthday card. A birthday card even for those people that do not celebrate birthdays or anything, it’s just for the purposes of introducing copyright. And I need you all, with your most creative minds, to imagine this is our birthday card. And we’ll have to an inside and outside. And this is the front of our birthday card. And then we’ll go inside. But, here, can you just give me some ideas as to what you would like on our birthday card at the front of it.

SPEAKER 3:

Balloons.

BERNIE:

Balloons. OK. Balloons. You can see the artwork isn’t that great. OK. That’s the balloons. Sometimes I have to indicate that it is balloons.

SPEAKER 4:

Footballer.

BERNIE:

A footballer. Do you mean a photograph? An image? Photograph of a footballer, very well known?

SPEAKER 4:

I think an illustration of a footballer who looks like –

BERNIE:

Looks like.

SPEAKER 4:

– a famous one.

BERNIE:

When you say an illustration do you mean a cartoon type character?

SPEAKER 4:

Yeah.

BERNIE:

Yeah?

SPEAKER 4:

Probably, yeah.

BERNIE:

But looking – have characteristics of somebody well known. Like if it was Gazza you’d have them crying. Or somebody –

SPEAKER 4:

Yeah.

BERNIE:

More up –

SPEAKER 4:

Bernie you’d look like [INAUDIBLE].

BERNIE:

Well –

SPEAKER 4:

That’s [INAUDIBLE].

BERNIE:

To be honest they’re all going to look –

SPEAKER 5:

He generally is.

BERNIE:

OK. We’ve got footballer. Let me – but it’s an illustration. We’ll put emphasis on Rooney’s hair. Shall we? Let these be shorts. There’s a ball.

SPEAKER 3:

So for the purposes of the card –

BERNIE:

Yeah?

SPEAKER 3:

Are we saying that that’s been drawn by you or are we saying that you’ve taken that from Flickr?

BERNIE:

We could have taken it from Flickr. Couldn’t we?

SPEAKER 4:

How about if it’s tracing of a photo on Flickr?

ALMA:

Excellent.

SPEAKER 4:

[INAUDIBLE]

ALMA:

[INAUDIBLE]

BERNIE:

OK. We’re starting to sort of get our target audience coming up here. It’s a footballer and balloons probably, maybe more male oriented, is it. I don’t know. OK. Give us something else then.

SPEAKER 6:

Some wording maybe.

BERNIE:

Yeah. On the front. Like –

SPEAKER 6:

Happy birthday.

BERNIE:

– happy birthday.

SPEAKER 4:

And a number.

SPEAKER 6:

And we could –

SPEAKER 4:

You are, number.

BERNIE:

You are here somewhere?

SPEAKER 4:

No, you’re –

SPEAKER 6:

The number.

SPEAKER 4:

– the age.

SPEAKER 7:

You’re number.

BERNIE:

Oh, you want the – OK. What age would we have?

SPEAKER 8:

12.

BERNIE:

OK.

SPEAKER 7:

[INAUDIBLE]

SPEAKER 8:

Even if the footballers on the front.

BERNIE:

12. Depend on them but that could sort of be changeable, can’t it?

SPEAKER 3:

What about a spaceship?

BERNIE:

Spaceship. Yeah.

SPEAKER 3:

Yeah, spaceship.

BERNIE:

Spaceship. Right. One of them NASA images do you think?

SPEAKER 3:

Yeah. Go one and go for it.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

How do we draw a spaceship?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

Well, I can see in me head, but it’s not quite coming out here.

ALMA:

Not a big NASA fan, huh?

BERNIE:

I am actually – moon rocks.

ALMA:

Like moon rocks.

BERNIE:

OK. OK. Maybe that’s enough for inside – or outside rather. The insides the most interesting part isn’t it? You have this to grab somebody but you always go inside to look what’s inside, don’t ya? Before you buy it, don’t ya? Are we happy with this?

SPEAKER 2:

Yes.

BERNIE:

All right. Yeah? Yeah. I think it is. OK. Let’s go inside now. What we can do here is we need a verse, don’t we? Maybe we can sort of collaborate on a verse. Maybe somebody can give me one line and then we can get about four lines between us and that might be useful. So somebody give me one line.

SPEAKER 4:

On this special day.

BERNIE:

Yeah?

SPEAKER 8:

Hope everything is going your way.

BERNIE:

You can tell you work at a university.

BERNIE:

Two more lines, yeah? One more, two more. Doesn’t have to rhyme. We can – we are university people. We can be unrhyming. Anything.

SPEAKER 4:

Just to remind you it’s statistically unlikely that you will become a professional footballer.

BERNIE:

You’re not a school teacher are you?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

That it is very unlikely that you will?

SPEAKER 8:

Become a professional footballer.

SPEAKER 4:

I used to coach football.

BERNIE:

I notice he said used to. OK. We’ve got that. On this special day, hope everything’s going your way. Just to remind you it’s very unlikely that you will become a professional footballer. Maybe we could finish with a one more line that’s a wee bit more uplifting.

SPEAKER 4:

Don’t give up, or something.

SPEAKER 5:

You can reach the stars.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

Shall I put that? There’s always brain surgery. What do you want?

SPEAKER 7:

That you can reach the stars. That we said.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

But you can still play. OK. That’s the verse done with. Now what else do we want in our card?

SPEAKER 8:

Could we have – when you open it play a tune? Play happy birthday when you open it.

BERNIE:

Happy birthday tunes. OK, we’ll do that.

SPEAKER 8:

Little bit much, indeed.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

That’s a good idea. That went – [SINGING MUSIC NOTES] Yeah?

SPEAKER 4:

A Japanese voice singing it.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

Match of the Day tune song. Is it – it’s just a sort of instrumental isn’t it? Yeah? Yeah? Happy with that? You don’t want any words going in there or anything?

SPEAKER 4:

We have ‘We Are The Champions’. [INAUDIBLE]

BERNIE:

Your hoping there’s so much music being played that the poor chap won’t read the verse? Are we happy with [SINGING MUSIC NOTES]? Yeah? Yeah. So what else do we want on our inside page? We’ve got the verse and we’ve got the tune. And –

SPEAKER 4:

We have a badge in there.

BERNIE:

A badge?

SPEAKER 4:

A badge. 12 years old. Now you are 12.

BERNIE:

That’s just a thing that they can take off and –?

SPEAKER 4:

Yes.

SPEAKER 5:

This is a rather expensive card.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 7:

Maybe a few stars.

BERNIE:

Pardon?

SPEAKER 7:

A few stars.

BERNIE:

A star? Stars?

SPEAKER 7:

Yes.

SPEAKER 4:

[INAUDIBLE]

BERNIE:

Stars. Yeah. Stars like that. Any ideas on that? OK. A gold star. Anything else? Are we happy with our card? Yeah? Because we have to get on. OK. As quickly as that we have created a copyright work. We’ve created a copyright work that gets protected on the Copyright Designs and Patent Act UK which is this. Which is my Bible. Right here. Any advice or any copyright questions you ask me today is either comes straight from this or my knowledge of some case law. But this, this is protected under that.

In order to get protected under UK copyright law it needs to be fixed in writing or otherwise. But it needs to original. And by original we mean, basically, the threshold in the UK is so low except to talk about databases, the threshold for copyright and databases is a bit higher. But we’re not talking about databases today. But, generally, the copyright threshold in the UK is so low that when I say it has to be original, basically means we haven’t copied it from anyone else. And indeed we haven’t. You could go into WHSmith and find loads and loads maybe of similar cards, maybe the same, I don’t know. But providing they’ve been created and fit that criteria of original work they will get copyright protection under the UK.

To get copyright protection you don’t even need to put the C in the circle. Under the Berne Convention, which requires no formalities, no formalities mean you do not need to go anywhere and register your copyright work. And you do not need to have the C in the circle. It will get to protected. I say that because sometimes people still get confused about copyright if they don’t see an ownership or copyright circle. They think some how – and there’s a confusion and maybe it’s in the public domain. No. And that’s all under the Berne Convention.

There is another convention that the UK’s a signature to. And that’s the UCC. The UCC does require the C in the circle. Most countries in the world are signed up to the Berne. But we are also– most countries, lots of countries, are also signed up to the UCC. Of course it’s silly not to put the C in the circle. That’s good practise to do that. And it’s good practise to put it against your own work. And it’s good practise to acknowledge others work obviously with a C in the circle.

We’ve created a copyright work. And when I talk about a copyright work I mean the whole work. I’m talking about the work as a whole with our card. And just like any works that we may create at work we put into those works what I might call third party material. That might be material belongs to other people. So when somebody talks about third party material they generally mean material belonging to third parties. Someone else. And this card is no different in that we have put in, perhaps, third party content that we have now decided our card is so marketable that we need to clear that third party content before we can exploit our card in any way we choose. And that’s what we call clearing rights.

We would clear the rights in the third party content so that we can exploit the card. Within WHSmith, which you would call a retail sale. Or you would may be familiar, or your colleagues would be familiar, in clearing rights to exploit maybe course material wider. Even as far as the student would need a copyright clearance if you include third party content to distribute it.

OK. So if our card is probably one of the best we’ve ever done. In our heads. And we’re going to exploit it. What third party material, what material would you think you need to take care or so that we can get this card into WHSmith’s.

SPEAKER 9:

Is the typeface copyrighted?

BERNIE:

The typeface? Yeah. Actually typeface is copyright but, generally, when we use the likes of Word and those things, there’s sort of an enclosed licence that allows you to use the typeface. But you’re absolutely right. There is copyright in the typeface. There is copyright and there’s a design right as well. So we’ll assume we’ve got a licence for the typeface because of the package we’ve bought. OK? Anything else we would need to clear here?

SPEAKER 9:

We stole the NASA image.

BERNIE:

So we’re going to clear the NASA – is anybody familiar with clearing NASA images? Yeah? NASA have themselves put the majority of it – because they’re government funded – in the US they put the majority of their materials in the public domain. And the public domain they have a wider public domain in the US if it’s sort of funded by governments through public money. They tend to shove all that stuff in the public domain. That means making it available to the public. It doesn’t mean it’s any way out of copyright. It could be in copyright.

A lot of the [INAUDIBLE] and stuff you can actually exploit commercially. You actually can. You just need to acknowledge them. But if you get something from NASA, NASA has quite a few sites attached to NASA. You really need to read the licence attached to the NASA images. But I’ve cleared quite a few images with NASA. At times I’ve even been in touch with people who – astronauts and stuff. And they’re actually very nice people to deal with if there’s any confusion. In the licence you can fire off an email and they do come back relatively quickly and they’re quite clear. But, generally, yes. If we’re not sure what the licence says we would go to people who perhaps are familiar with contractor licence and unrated. But, generally, could be on a safe bet with using the NASA image. But you would just check. Anything else?

SPEAKER 9:

What about this photograph that we’ve now traced?

BERNIE:

Yeah. What about that? What do you think? Would we have to clear that? Anybody familiar Flickr? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER 7:

It depends. If the license is not commercial – in any case we need to get back to the creator and ask.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 7:

So it depends what the license says.

BERNIE:

Yes.

SPEAKER 7:

If it says share alike, do what every you want, there’s no problem with that.

BERNIE:

No.

SPEAKER 7:

But I suggest to go back to the creator and say that we want to use it like that.

BERNIE:

Yeah. It depends on the licence. There’s a lot of Creative Commons licences on Flickr. And there’s also a lot not. Lots of images now on Flickr – don’t know if you’ve noticed – but they’ve said if you want to commercial exploit this, please go to like Getty Images. The photographers have assigned there bargaining rights to big agencies now. I think that’s a shame somehow for Flickr. It seems to be more and more photographers in that way. However, there’s still a lot of Creative Commons licences on Flickr. And if – I’m going to ask you why you said tracing.

SPEAKER 4:

Well, it’s just something I’ve come across.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 4:

And I just wondered how far the difference, also. How much the image has to be changed before it needs to have copyright? Before you need to get permission? If you traced it rather roughly, for example, would that be OK?

BERNIE:

No, not really. If it’s a recognisable from their original, irrespective of the licence that you may have, which may not allow you to do what you need to do. But if you’ve got a cartoon, say it’s a Disney cartoon, and you put tracing paper and trace it and change a couple of things, it’s likely to be recognisable back to the original. The rule of thumb is, in order to create a new copyright work, say you’re using an image as inspiration, it has to be basically unrecognisable. So you would need to use it just for inspiration. But if you’re tracing it it’s like a slavish copy.

Because copyright protects a two dimensional and three dimensional representation. So even if you have a– even if you have a recipe and you’ve baked a cake without having a licence, because we assume when we have a recipe book, basically there’s an inherent licence there that allows you to bake the cake and do that. But basically that’s an illustration of what two dimensional into three dimensional. If you take that recipe and bake the cake you’re actually, on the face of it, infringing on copyright. Strangely enough. But, yeah, no –

ALMA:

It’s not what happens when I bake.

BERNIE:

I might add it doesn’t happen when I bake either. I would be very much into the unrecognisable bit. Yeah?

SPEAKER 7:

I’ve been thinking about these in the context of art.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 7:

Somewhere you can go and see an artist’s work and clearly it’s based on someone else’s work. Basically, an artist, at the moment, who is taking a lot of pictures from the internet –

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 7:

– and creating those types of the famous pictures. It could be a picture of a bush with someone. Very famous pictures but are made – each pixel is made of another picture from the work site. All over the place.

BERNIE:

Yes.

SPEAKER 7:

Do you see what I mean?

BERNIE:

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER 7:

So you can really recognise it’s a famous picture once you have seen it in the papers.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 7:

The images come from all around the internet and it’s totally copyright.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 7:

Alongside the Creative Commons. So how does it work? Because this artist is there in the galleries. So how does it work for art? Is it different?

BERNIE:

No. It works the same in that copyrights subsist – and I’ll show you the slides later. We’ll rush through because we’ll get on to the exercises. But copyright subsist in a work or a substantial part thereof. That basically says you can use more parts of any work. However, it’s understanding what an insubstantial part of a work is. And sometimes that gets decided maybe in case law. There’s a few cases to do with that. And unfortunately I don’t have time to go into them all. But sometimes for the like of me and Alma, we’re using our depth of experience, shall I say, and what Alma would gauge what is insubstantial, taking small parts from all around the place that she’d be happy to go on a risk basis on behalf of The Open University. And generally our risk factor in the OU is quite low, isn’t it Alma?

So basically it comes with judgement and experience and how far you would take a work and use it even if you took a work, or quite a few works, or pieces of a works and made a new work, there still could be somebody come after you and say you’ve used a substantial part of my work. And the area that that’s most common in is the music industry. Where they use samples. And they’ve taken samples of music all over the place to create a new musical work. And there’s been quite a few court cases about that.

One in particular which we– a long time ago was Barry White. And it was like two notes. But this song got to number one and that’s why if you could create a work and it might not create any problem whatsoever. But in the like of the music industry they did it, and it went to court, and Barry White had to be awarded substantial royalties because his notes were identifiable in this musical work. So, basically, you need to tread carefully. When you’re taking somebody else’s work, even if you’re adopting it, you need to tread carefully.

SPEAKER 9:

Do works of art and music have the same copyright protection text does?

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 9:

The 100 year rule or –

BERNIE:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s not 100 years but I’ll show you that. How much it is. Some times it comes down to just looking at an original and then looking at what you’ve created. And you’ve had to do that quite a few times haven’t you? Frequently. To decide what would be judged a copy. Because, basically, you shouldn’t make use of someone else’s work to just prevent you creating your own work. So, basically, it just comes from judgement and experience.

If we had something actual to talk about we could dissect it. And we’ve had to do that in work with more or less texts that are being written and things like that. But, generally, the rule of thumb is, am I creating something original here? I’m not just lazy, that I’ve painted the substance of somebody else’s work. And if you think logically, have really taken the substance of somebody else’s work, then I think you’re into clearing.

SPEAKER 8:

I suppose brands do it quite a lot. I mean, Tesco’s Corn Flakes and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, the boxes look –

BERNIE:

Yes, they do it.

SPEAKER 8:

[INAUDIBLE]

BERNIE:

Yes. There has been. There’s been with Coca-Cola and that sort of thing where they and – this being quite when they – and they place them together. Like that. But, generally, other than the few that’s been through the court cases, generally they seem to get away with having similarities in their brands area. The main thing about the brands, ultimately, is they shouldn’t trade in somebody else’s brand. And they should be able to rely on their own brand. And, yeah, a wee bit of competition along the way. Yes. That’s a good point. They do.

OK. We’re just getting food for thought here. Let’s carry on then or we’ll have – OK. We’ve done that. Anything else on here? We’ll move on to the second page because I think the second page is quite interesting. What would we need to clear on this page?

I suppose we’ll agree we need to clear that music. And music actually is quite layered. In terms of music – every layer of music is capable of copyright protection. So we have the lyrics, you have the performer, and you have the composer, and you could have the recording. Now, in this one here, we probably have the recording. We probably have the composer, and we probably have the performers, the musicians playing here. And I will know that Match of the Day actually can prove quite difficult to clear. Strangely enough.

And there’s more than one version. And I remember, in our office – I’m early retired now – but now there’s office we have had a version of Match of the Day in our student material. Which was fine because we had a blanket agreement to do that link to the BBC, but when we went to sell this course we had to get that music taken out and another similar type version put in. And so you need to be – we would need to – because that could be stopping us now exploit our card because we didn’t think of that. We just thought Match of the Day? It’s everywhere. Oh, we’ll have no problem clearing out. Then we find we can’t. We can’t clear it.

So there’s bodies that deal with music clearance. But my advice is you shouldn’t really use commercial music in our everyday OERs and that sort of thing. There’s audio network. There’s loads of what I call library music available on the net. Some of it available for free also. I know somebody told me that. If anybody’s got experience with that. So you really should troll what’s available on the net. Or you can get a royalty free licence for music from somebody like audio networks. And a lot of their music is the same mass commercial music, if not better in some instances. But, for some reason, if you do need commercial music, then you should be in touch with – well MCPS, Mechanical Copyright Protection Society. Look after what they call mechanical rights. That’s actually their right to put music in the product. The PRS and PPL, they look after the various interests of all those layers that I spoke about.

So if you want to know anything about commercial music you could ring up MCPS and they’re very knowledgeable about music. If that’s an area that you think you need some advice on. But other than that go with library music. OK. What else now on here?

SPEAKER 4:

Is the copyright 70 – is it lifetime for 70 years or something?

BERNIE:

Yeah. After the death. I’m going to show you that now. So we’ll quickly get on with the card. The badge. The badge, in a way, is an easy one I think because – I think we would just have that manufactured, wouldn’t we? We’d have that manufactured. And if we commissioned somebody – depending how intricate the badge is and everything, we would do a commission and get copyright assigned to whoever. And go with that. OK.

So we’ve dealt with the rights on there. We’re happy as Larry. We’re going to go with the card. We’re going to get it in WH Smith’s, and whilst I said you don’t need C in the circle on the card, we’re obviously going to put C in the circle. Who owns the card? Who, or how many of us, whatever. Who do you think owns this card? Who’s got the copyright in the card?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

You say the group. Do you think all of us who contributed? The group. Any other ideas?

SPEAKER 4:

You do.

BERNIE:

Me do. Bernie. Why would Bernie own it?

SPEAKER 5:

You translated it.

BERNIE:

You mean I –

SPEAKER 9:

You designed –

SPEAKER 5:

You wrote it all down. You designed it, you put it together.

BERNIE:

I haven’t helpers, eh? Any other ideas?

SPEAKER 4:

Shared copyright? If you clear the copyright with these other things–

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 4:

Your copyright is also their copyright.

BERNIE:

Who’s there? You mean the licence source.

SPEAKER 4:

Yeah.

BERNIE:

OK. We’ll put that. OK. All right. That’s very good. We’ll rush on.

SPEAKER 5:

Sorry. So what did you –

ALMA:

Publisher.

BERNIE:

The publisher. OK. All right. In the first instance, in the absence of any contract, the author is the first owner of copyright. The author is me, as you rightly said. Because there’s no copyright on ideas, you all gave me loads of ideas. We didn’t have a contract. I’ve ripped you off and all those wonderful ideas. And this does happen actually. It happens – I’ve had it in my working career happen quite a lot. Particularly in collaborations where people are so enthusiastic about the collaboration that they actually don’t sit down and talk about copyright and who owns it and get it all – so it’s useful from that point of view to make sure you have those copyright issues sorted at the beginning and then get on with your work and who owns what.

The group is also a good idea, but we didn’t have a contract. Copyright wouldn’t rest in a group per se because copyright has to rest with a legal entity. That means I can be taken to court. But a group – it’s like saying Open University research group wouldn’t necessarily be the legal entity or the owner of copyright. That would belong to The Open University. That’s useful to know as well on your institutions. I know in a few occasions we’ve had to deal with maybe the library putting a C in a circle, the Open University Library, and we’ve had to say diplomatically that the copyright rests with the Open University. Although you would credit the library. You would say developed by the Open University Library for The Open University. And give them as much credit as they need. But that’s C in the circle would be The Open University.

OK. I won’t dwell on that too much. Assume many of the things we can go into to do with copyright and ownership. Employee, employer, and all the rest of it. But we won’t go into that because we want to get on. Now, our poem. I know I own the copyright in the card. Do I also own the copyright in that poem? What?

SPEAKER 4:

[INAUDIBLE]

BERNIE:

You’re welcome to it. What do you think? Do I also own this copyright in the poem because I put it down?

SPEAKER 8:

It’s not some of the ideas.

BERNIE:

Is it?

SPEAKER 8:

You took down our ideas.

BERNIE:

Yeah. It’s good to say that. Because this is not an idea. You actually didn’t give me an idea about the poem. You actually gave me verbatim words. And all I did was record your words on here. So the copyright in this poem doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to everybody who contributed to it. And then in that sort of situation is probably multiple copyright owner. You’re like Barry White. Yeah. I know that is my line of poetry on there and I want my royalties.

It could be that one line wouldn’t be capable of copyright protection on its own, because it would be considered perhaps too small. But altogether, most certainly, it would be copyright protection. So we would have, how many authors? Four authors. On that, that would be a joint copyright situation. So we’d have to agree on that. OK. That’s that.

We’ll leave that for now. That’s just to introduce you to copyright. And we’ll move on to our slides where as – I’ll quickly go through these as well. And then what I want to do is actually give you some exercises where you can – and then we can chat about those after. Because I think they’re most useful. Particularly to do with Creative Commons, if that’s all right. And we can start talking about those issues. Can you see this OK with me sitting here? Yeah?

OK. That’s just what we went over there. No registration system, no quality threshold. It’s owned by me, the author in the first instance, and it represents control over what they call restricted acts. This is all the types of works that’s protected by a copyright and the Copyright Designs and Patents Act. And the UK is actually one of the most comprehensive copyright acts. It actually, when everything went online and digital, the UK Act had already all that covered by the wording. So while some countries weren’t, the UK was. So it covers everything, as you can see, tables, compilations, computer programmes, scripts, mime, everything. Also film, sound recordings, broadcasts, typographical arrangement somebody mentioned, performances, and databases.

Now this is how long copyright work lasts. It lasts 70 years after the death of the author, which I think you were sort of familiar with. At least you knew it was a long time. Broadcast sound recordings and performances are 50 years. However, that’s all going to be changed. That’s also going up to 70 years. There’s just been a directive. But it will probably come into force in the UK in the next two years.

SPEAKER 9:

Is that because of the– is it Cliff Richard that’s being [INAUDIBLE].

BERNIE:

Don’t start out Alma on Cliff Richard. She hates him. But, basically, yes, there’s been a lot of lobbying. And as Alma would say, on the likes of Cliff Richard whose never wrote a song or anything, he’s only got his performances –

ALMA:

I actually said he was talentless.

BERNIE:

Well, I tell you, yesterday I had my Cliff Richard T-shirt on. I’ve been to quite a few of his concerts. I’m not ashamed to say that. OK. Yes, a lot of lobbying going on. Even the Beatles. And that’s why when it gets near the end of the recording, 50 years, that they bring out these recompilations and all of that to churn out more money.

SPEAKER 4:

Why does it need to be after the person’s death? Is it the family?

BERNIE:

This 50 years for the recordings and performances, that isn’t after the person’s dead. That’s from it was first broadcast, recorded and made available to the public. But this after the owners death, 70 years for literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic works is 70 years after the author’s death is because it’s supposed to look after at least another generation in terms of bequeaths and that sort of thing. You know. So that’s the theory behind it.

SPEAKER 7:

So you mentioned the law in the UK but if the law is different in different countries, how does it work?

BERNIE:

Well, this is the law in the UK, but our copyright works are protected worldwide anyway. Through the Berne Convention, through the UCC, through various conventions. That’s how our works get protected worldwide. So if they were infringed in another country, they’re protected under another country copyright law. So they would be infringed in their country. Our works are protected under their laws, under foreign laws, under copyright, and through various agreements and things like that.

SPEAKER 7:

So does it depend on the nationality? Let’s say that Cliff Richard records something in another country. How does it work? Is it under the UK law, under that country’s law?

BERNIE:

Yeah, it’s under that country’s law.

SPEAKER 7:

Right.

BERNIE:

But It would also get – likely, he would come back and release it under this country’s law it gets protected also. So it makes sense that your copyright work is protected worldwide.

SPEAKER 10:

Can I ask something? Is there any country not part of any convention or agreement?

BERNIE:

Well, not that I’m aware. There’s a few countries, I couldn’t even list them, that are – there’s a few countries in the agreements that perhaps don’t abide by them as well as they should. China might be one. But, generally, most of the developed world have a copyright law and they’re all signed up to the Berne/UCC UCC convention. Even America. So, yeah. OK.

This is just letting you know that the authors for film, sometimes, is considered a wee bit different. The director would be considered an author, the author of the screenplay, the author of the dialogue, and the composer of the original soundtrack. Those four authors would be deemed authors of a film. However, if you were clear on footage, to have some clips in whenever you’re producing, in a way you don’t need to worry about that because you’ll go to film company who owns the footage. And you would clear the footage that way. But that’s when it would expire. After those four authors have died.

When it is restricted acts, this is basically letting us know that this is what we can’t do without permission from the copyright owner. You can’t copy, you can’t give issue copies to the public, perform, broadcasting, you can’t adapt. Which we were talking a wee while ago about adapting and all those different guises that we spoke about. And adapting also means putting it, a translation into another language. Also, in computer terms, translating that from one computer language to another. That’s all under adapting. Storing electronic medium and altering, and overriding security systems.

Rental and lending. This is basically to do with piracy and that sort of thing. Except for authorising infringement which could do with the internet and how you put works on the internet and that sort of thing. But we haven’t got time, unfortunately, to go into all the ins and outs of everything here today.

Permitted acts. Insubstantial use is not in the act but we put it there just to remind us to say that you can use small parts without infringing copyright. But you just need to be careful that you don’t use too much. Because insubstantial is qualitative, as well as quantitative. So if you said, Alma Hales did it in the library and she used a knife, that would be considered quite substantial because it could be the whole who done it in a book. So when I said you shouldn’t take a substance of anyone’s work, that’s what I mean as well. You shouldn’t take the substance of anyone’s work, not just the amount, but the actual sort of who done it.

And this is non-commercial researcher or private study. Purposes of criticism review, fair dealing for the purposes of reporting current events, bona fide examinations, and instruction film making. Sometimes we can spend quite a few – a lot of time, Alma and I, going through these. But we don’t have time but, basically, that’s what you can do. If you’ve go any questions or anything later on you can just fire them at me.

This is to do with licenced recording of broadcast, educational establishments, which is the ERA licence and the CLA licence. And you can record at home your favourite programmes and watch them at a time suited to you. But you’re not supposed to collect a library, that sort of thing. Like we don’t.

Decompilation has to do with software. And you do that with caution. And redrawing, you do that with caution, which is what we spoke about. Redrawing a slavish copy and that sort of thing. There’s no copyrighting information so you can look at information, take that information and present it in your own way. That is creating a new copyright work. So you can look at information, say on a table, and then make a pie chart and source that original information because you are creating a new copyright work.

SPEAKER 5:

Or translating.

BERNIE:

Translating you cannot do – when you translate a work basically, you have created a new copyright work. But you can’t do anything with it because you haven’t got the permission to translate. So you could put a lot of effort into translating an original work, but if the copyright holder is still alive and the original work in which you translated, you’d be infringing, distributing it or copying it, but you would have created a new copyright work of which you would be entitled to copyright protection. Strangely enough. In other countries they wouldn’t allow you to copyright protection in a work when you haven’t had permission in the first place to translate it.

This is sort of a thought process, strangely enough, I use when I’m dealing with copyright every day. I just go through my head of a master question on copyright. It just goes through my head, is it a work? Is it protected? Am I performing a restricted act? Is what you want me to do a restricted act? Do you have a defence? And that’s all those defences that I showed you. A criticism or review and that sort of thing. If no, yes, no, yes, will you use it or you clear it. OK.

Creative Commons. I’ll go through this and then I’m going to have you do a wee exercise. Why choose Creative Commons? Well, Creative Commons, as I said, is not a religious movement or anything like that. Creative Commons is a license. It’s a licence that, basically, Creative Commons the organisation got together and created these licences because they recognise first of all, that people get confused reading a lot of legal language and contracts. And they do recognise, also, that there are many rights owners out there do want to make their works available. But they also want to retain copyright. And they want to make them available in a way that, say, suits certain communities. And they’ve got a suite of licences that they can choose which one that they may want to use to put their works in, have available to the public.

Of course, it displays a mark of commitment. And standardised terms, as I just said, so easily understood. If any of you are familiar with Creative Commons licences. So written in just plain English. And they have a legal code that’s written for lawyers and then they have this sort of easy to understand language that says you can do ABC and D. Easy peasy.

And when I say standardised terms easily understood, also the symbols on Creative Commons are internationally understood. So if you were even searching for content under Creative Commons licence, and you found a Creative Commons licence that was written in a foreign language, because the symbols are international you know straight away, if you become familiar with those symbols, what those symbols allow you to do. And even if you don’t, as I’ve done some times, I’ve gone back to my English version of Creative Commons and was able to just say, god, I can do ABC and D. It’s so easily understood, those terms.

Of course, as I said, based on collaboration and interchange which is what open educational resources is all about, and the moral rights are preserved and copyright, of course, is preserved. Creative Commons attribution of authorship is something you have to do in every Creative Commons licence. No matter how restricted or wide the licence is. The most fundamental part of a Creative Commons licence is you must attribute the author whose attached that Creative Commons licence to his or her work.

This is sort of looking at how you would choose perhaps to make your works available under Creative Commons licence. And some considerations you may apply. Whether you want people who use your content to vary it or no variation of content. You can choose an appropriate licence for that. Whether you want them to use it commercially or non-commercially. And whether you would like any future use to be licenced on same terms and what they call a share alike licence. And as I said before, it’s internationally recognised symbols.

SPEAKER 8:

Can you just answer me, who owns Creative Commons? Who’s behind it?

BERNIE:

Well I’m not sure who owns it now, but it’s a whole organisation that started up from academics in Harvard stroke Berkman in Harvard. And they, obviously, got together and wanted everybody to collaborate and share in content. And for years they’ve been lobbying to get people to share content much in the same way that any of you familiar with software, you would have had those software licences that originally were put out under a share type licence so that if there were any bugs in the software that they could be corrected and then put back to be used appropriately. And it sort of spun off that in terms of – but I can’t remember the guy who now – Lawrence Lessig was a big name. And I actually went on some – I did some of my training at Harvard at Berkman under Lawrence Lessig, years ago when the internet was sort of new I went to Harvard for one of them residential courses. That was fantastic. Yeah.

But the Creative Commons hadn’t come in then. But he was espousing about he wanted content. And we used to say, yeah but you write loads of books, Lawrence. You’re not putting any of your content out there for free. It is – I don’t know who runs it now. I know Lawrence Lessig still has a hand in it. And he was sort of – him and others, because they were lawyers, sort of pushed it ahead. And it’s so – I think it’s a wonderful licence. OK.

This is basically just things as well, if you’re dealing with Creative Commons, or you’re dealing with putting your content available wider to the public that, basically, you should be considering. How you deal with ownership of content created in house. Whether it’s sort of falls under terms of employment or not. Moral rights. Dealing with licence and third party content, if that’s an issue. And what sort of business model. What is noncommercial? Obviously, based on collaboration, and creation and publication of content by users. These are just things for consideration. And maybe some of the exercises that I’m going to give you will bring out some more issues.

But, with Creative Commons, copyright is retained. You get a broad licencing of tools and content. You’ve got standardised licencing. And it is, very much, community based. OK. I’ll leave that up there because I really do want to get on to the exercises.

Creative Commons, it is based on copyright, as I said. It does not protect the ideas or facts. It applies to all works. Fair dealing, fair use preserve. Its non-exclusive. It’s non-revocable. And I just say, think about what you are licencing. OK. I’m going to hand out some exercises now.

Right.

SPEAKER 8:

[INAUDIBLE]

BERNIE:

This is not – we’re not going to come up with a sort of a right or a wrong answer. There might be situations where whatever you say is good. It’s just that you’ve considered all the issues to hand. And that’s fine. OK.

You find six images on the web and you use them in your course related DVD. The resolutions are fine. They are available under Creative Commons attribution non-commercial licence. This clearance is fine for your initial use for your staff and students, but you probably eventually hope to sell the course. Should you not bother with those images and reselect? What did our group here think?

SPEAKER 7:

Reselect.

BERNIE:

You would reselect? Would everybody reselect? Why would you reselect?

SPEAKER 8:

Costs.

BERNIE:

Costs.

SPEAKER 8:

Cost implications are going to be – have them change the images for commercial distribution –

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

Well, that’s fine. The reason I put this question is because I deal with this sort of thing all the time. Because I do clear copyright works for open, closed, you name it. I’ve done it. And in my experience, and it’s only my experience, I wouldn’t have reselected. Because you find, and I’ve found from my experience, that when I’ve gone back to the rights owners they have actually, without exception, given me permission. For no charge. So it’s just a consideration.

So whatever business model you’re following it’s just – don’t jump to the next scenario and think, oh, we need commercial. This is a non-commercial licence. Because it’s just the licences the rights owner made available. It’s likely they could be very well into just – because your commercial activity might not be commercial in the true sense. You might be making money, maybe within an educational institution, but it might not amount to a profit that’s going to make – and if there are any profits it might be they’re going to be ploughed back into your educational institutions.

So there’s all those things to consider. And those things that you consider is how you would approach a rights owner then. And say, look, I’ve got permission. And say you’ve got the Creative Commons licence from Flickr. It’s an image. It’s from Flickr. For those of you that are familiar with Flickr, you can email them through the Flickr site. And get them to email you back and I, quite often when I email through Flickr, I give them my institutional email then and I say can you come back to me. Without exception I must add. There hasn’t been loads of cases, but without exception it hasn’t cost me any more money. So it’s just a consideration. I may be– whatever factors come into play– you might think no, we have to ditch those images. But you’ve already got them.

SPEAKER 4:

What’s the worst case scenario there? Either with – if you did take them and there was a particular, nasty owner. And you did make quite a bit of money out of it. Could they come down really hard on you? Could they really sue you?

BERNIE:

No. No, because what I would say is, when you negotiate with a rights owner, obviously, you’re an honest people. You’re not telling them lies. And you could make loads of money but still, if the situation is, the money is going to be ploughed back for the educational purposes of that institution, you explain that. Or you explain something about your institution and how they – The Open University is a very good case. And I always talk about widening participation. That’s why we want to make it available. In this instance is, we’re going to sell it. But any profit going to get ploughed back to the institution.

SPEAKER 4:

You’d always ask them first. To make sure. You’d ask them. Especially if you found those images on the internet. And you couldn’t work out who owned them. Would you just take a chance? Or would you –

BERNIE:

Well, yeah. It depends on – for a start, no institution or any business operates without a risk factor. And you have to have a level of risk. We don’t have any level of risk that’s acceptable to you’re institution you’re not run any business whatsoever. Depending on your business you can’t be too jobs worth. And, particularly when you’re dealing with copyright, obviously I tried to share my experience with you and tried to make you more confident in dealing with copyright in the sessions that Alma and I do, which last a whole day. So we want people to go away and feel more confident in dealing with copyright so they can make a decision and then move on. And to make a decision to say, oh, we’re not using that because we haven’t cleared copyright could be the right one. But you need to make it at the right time so that then you can carry on and get new content in.

So, basically, you got to make a decision. You got to plan for your copyright clearances. You’ve got to plan to allow you to clear it, or get a refusal. Insert your content and decide which content that you would go with if you don’t get a response. And that would be within your risk considerations. There might be some stuff you decide you most definitely not using. Like a Disney cartoon. There might be some high profile stuff that you say we’re most definitely not using that on our risk factor. Not that you might get a refusal, but you also might be too expensive. And those factors come into play when you’re making those sort of decisions.

But on the net, if you come across images, maybe you’re doing an image search, there could be loads of the same age. And perhaps you cannot trace back to who owns it. And depending on the image, that might be a relatively low risk. And you would cover it by saying that you’ve made every effort. That’s not a defence in any means. It’s just shows that you follow good practise. And then, because the rights owner, as I said, is control. The rights owner could say I don’t want you to use it at all. In most instances, and with experience, you realise that’s not the case.

ALMA:

You may be surprised, I’ve had an instance just today whereby a course team have made a selection of audio visual content for Open Learn. So it’s going to be available under a Creative Commons licence and I have to say we will be using chunks of it. Take it out, take it out, take it out.

BERNIE:

Kind of think we’ve got that in one of our questions, that sort of thing.

ALMA:

Yeah, so experienced people and experience producers put this together but they still haven’t thought, gosh, it’s going to be open. And the decisions I might make for a closed area are, to a certain extent, different to the decisions ultimately made, and the risks associated with, an open area. And this video clip included children so it’s doubly careful.

BERNIE:

So we’ll deal with that question I asked about children in terms of, when you’re dealing with copyright as well, it’s not all about, in many instances, what you’ve got the right to do. It’s about doing the right thing. And some things – and ethics does come into play in making content open to everyone. And I’m sure your institutions will have some policy on ethics the sort of gives you guidelines on whether you’ve got a permission or not. We do not do ABC or D, whatever.

So let’s look at that one. We’re promoting a course on the social care and well being of children in the 21st century. You have a cracking photo of a group of children and another of a young child. Both of which you got from Flickr. What’s more, they’re available under a Creative Commons commercial share alike licence. You intend to use these images in your printed material and online marketing for the course. And you want to distribute to all your usual outlets of child and news agencies et cetera. You’ve been asked to ensure you have permission for use of the images before you print them. But if you have a bona fide Creative Commons licence on the Flickr site do you need to consider anything else? What did you decide? What to do you come up with on that one?

SPEAKER 5:

We said UBT considered the – they were actually being photographed. And we’re not sure whether they even gave their permission for their image to be used. So we would suggest not using it.

SPEAKER 11:

I think with the scenario in this. Rather than that one. Number two talked about children.

SPEAKER 5:

But it’s –

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 5:

– the same issues.

SPEAKER 11:

Same kind of issues.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 11:

That one’s actually slightly different than this one. We just said, no.

BERNIE:

Was the one you –

SPEAKER 5:

Even with the Creative Commons licence you’ve got on this, I think you still can’t guarantee that the subjects of the pictures have given their permission.

BERNIE:

I think you saw – what did anyone else think? What did you say there in the box?

SPEAKER 4:

Similar, wasn’t it? We were concerned about whether the participants had given their permission and whether someone uploading and licencing content was enough. Which is –

BERNIE:

Yeah. I think you just have to have your own quality gauge yourself. The images of children could be suitable for online open whatever. They could be so, like a nothing. they could be profiles. They could be the images of the children are fine. But you really need to be careful whether you’ve got a licence or not of full face images. Alma, you had an instance today of children that, in a way, were about children being sexualized.

ALMA:

Yes.

BERNIE:

Weren’t they? That was a new – you rightly, I think, said no way.

ALMA:

The original use was fine.

BERNIE:

The original use was fine. And it’s a subject that needs debated and everything. But the images themselves, if you can imagine, and the pageants and things that take place, Alma thought that no way would you allow them to go on an open website. Although the subject matter could still be debated. But then they could have to be very careful in how they choose the images. Alma was telling me. So just be careful whether you’ve got a licence or not. As I say, just have your own gauge of quality.

SPEAKER 9:

In that instance would you sort of say, well, instead of having actual image within your material, put a link in to say, the sort of image we’re talking about is available here. Or is that still – so you’re not actually having the printed image in with your text.

ALMA:

I wouldn’t even –

SPEAKER 9:

You wouldn’t even do a link?

ALMA:

No, no. That’s just a personal –

BERNIE:

I think you just need to be careful. What we’re talking about here is paedophiles, aren’t we. We don’t want to be a shop for paedophiles. And paedophiles, we don’t know how they operate, and that’s why Alma is ultra careful and I’m ultra careful when I’m dealing with open. Because even a full face image can be taken as sexual. If you can imagine those grownup images of models and things, they focus on the face. So we always advise profiles is fine. If they’re looking in an activity round a desk, sometimes you don’t need more than their hands. If you’re think about the children, and the children’s images, against your brand online, it really lets you focus on actually what do you need. And not just what have you the right to do. Say, well, actually we don’t need that. We could do with this. And it just allows you to focus, I think, so you’ve been very good at that.

So the second one, question on this one, again was a lovely image of while he was on holiday. Did you have a different response to that? The same response? You mentioned that didn’t you?

SPEAKER 11:

[INAUDIBLE]

BERNIE:

Yeah. That was an actual thing actually. That actually happened, didn’t it?

ALMA:

Yeah.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 9:

We had a question about that. We wondered if the children were sort of off-focused in the foreground, you’re actually taking cars in the background. Whether that would be OK. Whether it was because the focus of the image was children, in which case, we weren’t happy.

BERNIE:

Yeah. You might not be happy and if you’ve got a few images you might get one out of it where you are happy with. And this actually happened that an academic did go on holiday. And I says, but how did you get the image of all these children in their school uniforms? Oh, I just gathered them all together. I says, what about the permissions? He said, yeah, they were happy with it. That’s true. I said no, you’re not using that.

SPEAKER 9:

If it’s not just a child can they give permission?

ALMA:

No, they can’t.

SPEAKER 2:

In the scout association, of which I’m a member, if we want to– only on permission slips when they do an activity, every year the parent has to say that they have no objection to photographs being taken. And we have to put on it that the photograph will only be used for scout association purposes and not for any other activity or gain. And if there is going to be any commercial use made of that– because sometimes we have had the scout association promotional people come down to take photos and videos and stuff– they have to get permission particularly from those parents of the children they’re going to use. So it may be that they take the video but then they have to go back to each parent of the children that are there to get permission. If that parent says no they can’t use it.

BERNIE:

Yeah I think it’s one area to do with all our children that we can’t be jobsworth. We can really, we work– Alma, you work quite easily with it. Doesn’t create a problem.

ALMA:

Copyrights never a problem.

BERNIE:

No.

ALMA:

I know that sounds So easy to say, but if it’s set up properly it isn’t problem. And third party content adds a richness to resources unquestionably. So for me it’s not a problem. I don’t like it being used as a barrier.

BERNIE:

Yeah. That’s good. OK. Number three. You find an article by Alma Hayles on the web. This will be brilliant for you learning object intended for open use. You contacted Ms. Hayles twice. You’ve been in touch with the webmaster see if she can help but no response. You’ve amended it because you didn’t agree with some of the points she was making. I don’t either sometimes. And you think you’ve improved the work. You’ve always left her acknowledged as the author. You’ve had no response and you’re just going to use it anyway. And everyone’s always talking about taking a risk, so you’ll take this one. Is that OK? The bottom – our bottom group. What did you think?

SPEAKER 8:

Didn’t think it was academic good practise. Because we were a bit confused over what exactly we’re attributing to one author and what you were attributing to yourself. We felt that it might be appropriate to use it, but you would need to write it not actually just changing the content but showing what the original content was, and then indicating what changes you felt like to be made to it. As you would in any piece of academic work.

BERNIE:

So you would, perhaps, from an academic perspective, you might change it but not really change it substantially. Is that what you mean? Maybe in –

SPEAKER 4:

No, you don’t have to change it. You could actually link out to the original article that’s in it’s location and say, I’d like to draw your attention to the following aspects. Other researchers have indicated that this might not be –

BERNIE:

Yeah. Yeah. OK. That’s seems a good alternative doesn’t it.

SPEAKER 7:

Well, I think a common practise is – as you say, adopted from, and you say where you – because [INAUDIBLE] for the time. And we simplify text, we – so this is the way we present it.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 7:

Adopted from, and you give the original reference.

BERNIE:

Yeah. And you would link – would you also – you would link it.

SPEAKER 7:

No.

BERNIE:

You would use it.

SPEAKER 7:

You would use it, but you’d leave a reference. So people can go and find –

BERNIE:

OK.

ALMA:

[INAUDIBLE]

SPEAKER 7:

Yeah. If you get approval first.

BERNIE:

But would you change it? Would you change the work?

SPEAKER 7:

When you’re that deep you change it. You simplify the language. And you would then change sometimes the structure or you add a picture that wasn’t there. So we do that in our materials.

BERNIE:

That’s interesting, isn’t it.

ALMA:

And you say it’s on the web, but you haven’t said whether or not it’s a wiki. And if it’s a wiki you can edit it any way. Can’t you.

BERNIE:

Yeah. It must be a wiki. You’re editing it.

ALMA:

So, we’ve kind of got this bit of paper, and it’s on the internet, and you add two pictures and a paragraph, and you just take that second paragraph out. You would use that and just say, adapted from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You wouldn’t think, actually Alma might object to me adding to the photograph.

SPEAKER 7:

You have to ask for permission first to –

ALMA:

Ahhhh.

SPEAKER 7:

And if the author doesn’t respond–

ALMA:

Right.

SPEAKER 7:

We always ask for permission.

ALMA:

Right. OK. So you wouldn’t just go ahead and –

SPEAKER 7:

No. You would need the –

ALMA:

But if the author didn’t –

SPEAKER 7:

Respond.

ALMA:

– respond.

SPEAKER 7:

You go ahead and do it.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER 11:

How long can you – how many – you were saying that what if the author went and lived in a cave, right. You couldn’t get ahold of them. Are you – how many times can you ask them before you can just say, oh, I’m going to use it anyway?

BERNIE:

Well, I suppose saying I’m going to use it anyway isn’t the right response but you would have a process where you would seek permission and then you would gauge whether or not, as we spoke before, whether or not you’d be willing to take the risk and use it on the basis that, probably Alma’s on holiday in a cave. The nature of the material is such she’s likely to give us permission if she only knew we wanted it.

Maybe using it is a relatively small risk depending on the content, as we spoke about. Maybe adapting it raises the risk a wee bit. But then you’re going on your experience and what you’ve done. And that is a good gauge as well. All the experience you have and the nature of those adaptations then may hold.

It could be the whole thing comes out to bite you in terms of Mrs. Hayles might not be happy with the adaptation. But maybe that adaptation is just for the purposes of your readers and it’s not taking away the context of Alma’s work. So that might be OK. There’s just various factors to consider. As long as you consider them than that’s fine.

OK. You’re institution has an online open learning resource and it’s based in the UK. You’ve selected an England and Wales UK licence for the use of your content. However, you’ve been asked by a user in China if the CC licence still applied. Does the CC licence refer to where the content is being hosted? Or where it is hosted. I don’t quite get that.

ALMA:

Content is being used.

BERNIE:

Oh, used! Sorry. Used or where it is hosted. OK. Is this one group? Group down here. What did you think?

SPEAKER 3:

We’re the same group.

BERNIE:

Oh, you’re all the same group.

SPEAKER 3:

Yeah. I think this is one we were um-ing and aw-ing about, actually, because whilst the CC licence is international, we’re a bit unsure because the statement that the English and Wales UK license had been actually adopted. So that’s something that we hadn’t really come to a conclusion about. We were on the fence in the sense where we’re saying, on one side, yes. Because it is an internationally known thing. But then the other sides not entirely sure. So this is our –

BERNIE:

I think that’s a good response recognising the CC license is international. What did others think? What did you guys think over here?

SPEAKER 5:

We were a little bit unclear about whether you licensed it under CC in the first place because you specifically said you went to Wales which we thought referred to the Patents and Copyright Act. I’d say well, they’re different.

BERNIE:

Well this is contract. This is like – is contract and UK and Wales is like a jurisdiction. So –

SPEAKER 5:

So I think, in that case, we’d say the licence still applies, we’re at risk. And being used –

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 5:

– puts us in [INAUDIBLE].

BERNIE:

Yeah. It is an international licence, and as we spoke about earlier about recognising those symbols even if it’s written in a foreign language, the principles of Creative Commons applies internationally. However, you do have these different territorial jurisdiction licence. And they’re called ported and unported. A ported licence is where they’ve put the Creative Commons – it’s written to fit a particular territories law and copyright terms. So the UK licence – and Wales – is written to take account of, say, a database right that we have in the UK but they might not have in another country. It’s just a language and nuance thing that may apply in different territories. However, the licence is international. If that licence was breached and needed to go to court the UK would be the jurisdiction. Because that’s what it says. Quite often you see it in software licences, don’t you. Remember we’ve got that free software. They would say this is under California law and that sort of thing.

SPEAKER 4:

Is it a difference between an England and Wales UK licence and one that would include Northern Ireland and Scotland?

BERNIE:

I don’t know. The principles are still the same. In Scotland they have– the licence is basically the same in copyright. But in Scotland they have a different law and particular areas of the law to do the children.

SPEAKER 4:

Yeah, different case law.

BERNIE:

Different case law and that sort of thing. And Northern Ireland they probably have the different nuances as well. But, generally, in terms of Creative Commons it doesn’t present a problem. It’s just what it is. It’s an ownership thing as well. If Scotland want their own licences because Scotland want their own licence – are you with me? Yeah. Alma is Scottish.

ALMA:

I am indeed.

BERNIE:

I’m from Northern Ireland and haven’t put too much thought into it in that respect.

So actually it’s where it’s hosted? Or where it’s created. Or at least being used. It’s being used.

BERNIE:

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER 6:

Where it’s being used.

BERNIE:

Where it’s being used. Yeah. OK. You have some software and you’d like to make this available under a CC licence. Would that be OK?

SPEAKER 4:

We thought it’s not too.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 5:

To give them the licences.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 4:

But you look at the free software violations.

BERNIE:

Yes. Absolutely. That’s really good. For those of you that are interested in software. Because people do get confused about Creative Commons. They think it applies to everything. And, of course, they might apply it to software and that sort of thing, but it’s because of the language and deals in source code and object code. The language isn’t really written in a Creative Commons licence to take care of software. Whereas, as you rightly said, the free foundation and the GNU and whatever is out there looks after software much better. So, that’s right.

ALMA:

Is Creative Commons, as a body, looking into software, Bernie?

BERNIE:

Well I don’t –

ALMA:

I vaguely remember reading that they were looking into –

BERNIE:

Well they might do. And in a way it could be useful if they make it simplified. Because if you ever read those software GNU licences and they are quite complex aren’t they? Yeah? Once I had to get in touch with somebody. I couldn’t understand – I thought some of the clauses – some of them contradicted each other. Because there’s loads of them. So if anybody was simplifying the whole, you may do and not do, and share and not share in a way that Creative Commons is written, I think it would be welcome. Wouldn’t you?

ALMA:

Yeah.

BERNIE:

Yeah? Did you read something about that there?

ALMA:

I thought I did recently but –

BERNIE:

But Creative Commons themselves advise you to look at GPL.

ALMA:

Yes. Yes they do.

BERNIE:

And GNU on their site. So I don’t know. OK. That is good. So you’re institution is making some of it’s content available under a Creative Commons licence. How do you ensure that your trademarks and you’re logos are protected? Let’s see. The bottom.

SPEAKER 4:

Well, it’s – the questions immaterial because your licence is for the content. Not for your trademarks and things like that.

BERNIE:

What did the rest of you think?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER 4:

That was my thought. I don’t know what the rest of you –

SPEAKER 2:

If it’s a trademark is it not automatically protected?

BERNIE:

By Creative Commons or –

SPEAKER 2:

No, no, no. By the trademark?

BERNIE:

Yeah. Yeah. What did you think?

SPEAKER 5:

Do you have to register your trademark?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

Do you know you are the first group to say that which is perfect because it does cause some confusion that the trade – when you put your content up. And, obviously, you have it with logos and your trademarks, people think, oh, they’re going to use our trademarks and logos under Creative Commons licence. No. Creative Commons licence does not protect trademarks and logos. Creative Commons licence protects copyright works. And they have their own protection as you very rightly said. And I’m so pleased.

However, in order to erase that confusion even further, and all your terms and conditions it is useful to reinforce, that your trademarks and logos, et cetera, et cetera, is not made available under the Creative Commons licence. Because lots of people are confused. Even though you aren’t and I’m so pleased about that. I think you have done absolutely brilliant. Yeah. If you’ve got any burning questions before –

SPEAKER 7:

I do have a question about we – I’m in a club where we have a club-related website. And we want to apply a Creative Commons licence on the website so all the things, all the resources or anything that we put up – even the image – are Creative Commons. The people – some have concerns so I don’t know whether – what would be the standard practise. If you are in a project – it’s a JSC project as well. With that you can put your – place the Creative Commons on the website and still be fine.

BERNIE:

It’s a JSC project.

SPEAKER 7:

Yeah.

BERNIE:

And the requirement under JSCs, they’re funding it, is that the content goes up under Creative Commons? Or –

SPEAKER 7:

I’m not sure. To tell you the –

BERNIE:

Well, the first thing is –

SPEAKER 7:

Well, the project is about open education for sure. So the idea is –

BERNIE:

So it’s likely. So on the face of it the Creative Commons licence would best serve that project. Now which Creative Commons licence, I don’t know. As you know there’s six of them. So we need to choose the right licence. Share alike might be a good one for you. So what is the problem in doing that? Are you talking about the content belonging to your institution?

SPEAKER 7:

I do not see any problems but colleagues are very nervous about it. And so we are – do we want to put this up? See what I mean? A lot of uncertainty. What is the usual practise in this kind of project? Would we put that –

BERNIE:

Yes, they do. And those projects quite – they would put them up under a Creative Commons. The most type of licence, like the Open University use, is a non-commercial share alike licence. Now your terms and conditions should allow for exceptions to that. Because there may be some content not suitable for a share alike licence. You may want some content available under a non-derivative licence because it’s really not suitable to be adapted, changed, improved, whatever, depending on what the content is. So any terms and conditions should be flexible to allow you to put it up under the terms and conditions that’s suitable for the content.

If it’s a project where the authors are putting content up then you could ask them to put it up and it’s going to be used under Creative Commons share alike licence. However, I know there’s some projects at The Open University where the authors are allowed to choose which Creative Commons licence. They’re allowed to put the content up. So there’s a flexibility. My job here this afternoon is to make you think widely about Creative Commons. And not just think one size has to fit all. Because you have to choose the licences, or licence, appropriate to your project.

And I know in OpenLearn, that Alma looks after, we have got The Open University’s material under a share alike licence. We’ve got a third party material up there not available under a Creative Commons licence at all. And then within that, we might put some sensitive material up that we do not make available under a Creative Commons licence either. So everything is sort of monitored and it’s put up under appropriate licence. However most of it is put up under share alike licence. Sometimes we’ve put it up under a non-derivative licence. Haven’t we, Alma?

ALMA:

Yeah.

BERNIE:

And we have – when we put the content up we would say to the users, this content is made available under this particular type of licence. And we make sure that people are aware of that.

ALMA:

The license is a consideration. I think it’s unhelpful when you start getting into conversations whereby the contract is king. It’s still all about the content.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

ALMA:

It’s very easy to get into the licencing conversations. And I actually think the content should be king.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

ALMA:

And you do what you can with that. But if you’re starting position is what license should we pick, that’s a shame.

BERNIE:

Yeah. Yeah. You pick appropriately for your users, for your content, and I just advise you to think widely for your project so that you’re not – even if some say this needs to go up under a share alike licence. Maybe it does. But why? And it widens the content. Once you start to widen, maybe the type of licence you can apply, even if it’s kept under Creative Commons, I think Creative Commons is brilliant. It just widens how you’re making this available to your users.

ALMA:

And I think that everybody gets JSC funding these days. To work on a JSC project, the OU is certainly no different. But I never, ever relinquish copyright for existing OU materials to a project.

BERNIE:

No.

ALMA:

Ever.

BERNIE:

And I don’t even think JSC requires you to –

ALMA:

No. No.

BERNIE:

– to do that now. I think year ago, perhaps, that might have been the case. But the fundamental thing about Creative Commons anyway is that Creative Commons is a non-exclusive licence. I think I mentioned that. That means if you’re the rights owner, or your institution’s the rights owner, I’m putting material up under a Creative Commons licence, that’s the licence you’re making it available. You own the material. You can do what you like with it. It doesn’t restrict you to use it under a Creative Commons licence, you’re just allowing others to use it under whatever Creative Commons licence you’ve chosen. But you can do what you like with it.

Creative Commons licences is non-revokable. That means when you put it up under the Creative Commons terms and conditions, then you cannot revoke that licence. You could take your content down. You could stop making it available under a Creative Commons licence. But, what you can’t do, is revoke the licence to those people that you’ve already made it available under. They can continue using it under the terms under the Creative Commons licence.

SPEAKER 6:

Can I ask something? Based on that. Let’s say we are taking a table from Flickr and some photographs. And all of a sudden the creator decides to revoke the licence and makes it, probably, non-derivative. What happens to our content?

BERNIE:

Well, if you’ve already used the content onto your – the first licence, which was share alike, perhaps, I don’t know. Then you can continue using the under a share alike licence. However, I think you must consider when they put the material available under share alike licence, was it really appropriate? Because some people put stuff under share alike licence and Flickr. And it’s not really appropriate for a share alike licence. Perhaps, in their view, it could be artwork, or a photograph. Where photographers are quite keen that the quality and the context of their artwork remains in tact. So it could be he or she’s realised this and then –

SPEAKER 6:

Decides to –

BERNIE:

Put it under –

SPEAKER 6:

Yeah.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 6:

They’re different.

BERNIE:

Under a non-derivative licence. So depending how important that is to your project, then you do have the right to carry on using under your share alike licence. But, I think, then you should consider well, really this image isn’t really appropriate for a share alike licence. And maybe I can also change the licence to a non-derivative licence. Just something to be considered. You still have the right. It’s non-revokable that licence that you’ve had originally.

SPEAKER 3:

So, just to be clear, if you issue something you make under a non-commercial licence, you can still make money off it if you want to.

BERNIE:

You can. Yes, you can. Because –

SPEAKER 11:

Other people can’t.

BERNIE:

Yes, other people can’t. That’s absolutely right. You are the rights owner. You are in control. You have licenced it under a non-commercial term for others so that they can’t make money off it. But as I say, if they came back and say, we now got to exploit this commercially. And you might say yeah, you can give me 50 quid if you want to exploit it commercially. Or you can go off and licence it commercially wider to your publisher or a particular body. So you are in control.

SPEAKER 11:

But wouldn’t I – you just said the license was non-revokable. You say you can license it differently to somebody else. You can have a non-commercial license for educational institutions and a commercial one for a publisher. Of the same content.

BERNIE:

The one thing I’ll make straight about Creative Commons licences, they’re not educational licences. They are licences. So the educational sectors can use them because they’re suitable for them. But anybody can needs Creative Commons non-commercial licence in a non commercial way. But if your the rights owner you have the ability to keep licencing it non-commercially. The licence is nonexclusive. You can licence it any way you like. Because you’re the rights owner. Does that makes sense to people?

SPEAKER 11:

But that would be under a different licence, not Creative Commons.

BERNIE:

That’s right.

SPEAKER 11:

Right.

BERNIE:

Well, it could be another Creative Commons licence if it fulfilled – yeah.

SPEAKER 11:

That makes no sense to me.

BERNIE:

Yeah. If you’ve issued your work under a Creative Commons non-commercial licence, right. You can similarly issue you’re work under a Creative Commons non-derivative, a Creative Commons commercial, whatever.

SPEAKER 11:

But they’d cancel each other out then.

BERNIE:

Well, who cancels what out? Because that gives people –

SPEAKER 11:

Commercial would cancel out non-commercial.

SPEAKER 4:

If it’s the same work.

SPEAKER 11:

If it’s the same work it can cancel each other out.

BERNIE:

Yeah, but if you’re the rights owner you are in control.

SPEAKER 11:

Of cancelling out my own work.

BERNIE:

No. No. No. Of being in control of the work. That control stays with you all the time.

SPEAKER 9:

You wouldn’t have more than one licence simultaneously, though, would you?

BERNIE:

A rights owner can.

SPEAKER 9:

Right.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BERNIE:

A rights owner can. A rights owner can issue their work. The rights are nonexclusive, which means they’re nonexclusive to you. Leaving the rights owner in the exclusive position to licence their work in any way they choose.

SPEAKER 9:

So I could negotiate with Lawrence to have a commercial licence.

BERNIE:

Yes.

SPEAKER 9:

But I can negotiate with you to have a non-commercial licence for my work of art? Is that what you’re saying?

BERNIE:

If I’m at different rights owner then you.

SPEAKER 11:

But if you license to me commercially then it’s valid everywhere, isn’t it? You can’t just do it with me.

SPEAKER 9:

That’s confusing then.

[LAUGHTER]

BERNIE:

Oh, make it available to the public. Yes.

SPEAKER 11:

Because once it’s issued, it’s issued.

BERNIE:

Yes. Of course it is. But what I’m saying is the rights owner is still in control. If you make this Creative Commons licence available non-commercially that’s fine. But you can then do what you like. You could make another work, or the same work, available on commercial terms. That’s fine.

ALMA:

I think sectors do sit nicely, for example, it’s slightly different but anybody knows that copies of programmes put onto YouTube illegally are great creators of business for the rights owners. Now the rights owners could choose themselves to make that content free available and some do. The OU puts a percentage of it’s course materials in OpenLearn. They’re freely available to the user. But it doesn’t mean to say we don’t make that same material as part of our courses. We charge students to study with us. I think what Bernie’s trying to say is the control lays with the –

BERNIE:

The rights owner.

ALMA:

– the rights owner.

BERNIE:

If you make a work available under commercial – Creative Commons commercial licence, the fundamental basis of Creative Commons is you’re getting no payment. Right. So if you licence your work on a commercial licence, you’re not going to get any money for that. But as a rights owner you can do that because you’re in control. But if you want money and you’ve already issued a non-commercial licence and they come back to– you do not have to issue them with a Creative Commons commercial licence. You can give them permission on commercial terms and ask for money. You can create your own licence.

SPEAKER 4:

So you’re not limited –

ALMA:

It makes sense.

SPEAKER 4:

– by the work you’ve done. You’ve put into Creative Commons.

BERNIE:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 4:

It doesn’t limit –

BERNIE:

No.

SPEAKER 4:

What you do with that –

BERNIE:

No. Not at all.

ALMA:

That’s exactly right.

BERNIE:

It doesn’t limit at all. That’s the beauty of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER 11:

If I want to make any money don’t do the commercial content.

BERNIE:

Yes.

SPEAKER 11:

Right.

BERNIE:

Because you do not get payment for once you put it out there under commercial Creative Commons licence.

ALMA:

Come and see me.

BERNIE:

OK. Thank you very much. We could go on and on. At least I could. Yeah. Thank you.

End transcript: Training video

Training video

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

The training video is designed to raise your awareness of copyright and other issues that may impact on your own content, or the content you may be accessing from other sites or areas for use in your OER. It may not provide all the answers you look for, but hopefully it may prompt questions and you may be alerted to raise and seek solutions before you publish your OER. There are also a few exercises in the video that are republished here, with comments that you may find useful.

If you place copyright in your OER plan and tackle all the associated considerations required for your particular content, you will not only manage the risk to your institution at an acceptable level but feel more confident about copyright. You will also feel you have done a good job and be able to move onto your next project without that feeling of unease because copyright had not been tackled as part of the overall project plan.

The video discusses:

Creation of copyright work: How easy it is to create an original copyright work capable of copyright protection under CDPA 1988. (The ‘birthday card’.)
Protection of copyright work: No formalities (registration procedures) are required in order to get copyright works protected under CDPA 1988. Protection is given worldwide under conventions such as Berne and UCC (Universal Copyright Convention).
Identification and clearing of third party rights, using content in a birthday card as an example.
Copyright ownership: Exploring the issues of copyright ownership in the absence of a contract. It also looks at copyright ownership considerations involving collaborations.
Planning, risk and ethics: The discussion in the video emphasises the importance of timely planning to minimise risk to your institution and consider any ethical issues that may arise, for example involving children or other vulnerable groups. Copyright does not operate in isolation. The video raises some ethics awareness for your institution such as it is not always about having the right to do – but doing the right thing!
Licensing Creative Commons: The characteristics of Creative Commons licensing are explained and discussed with some exercises to further illustrate how Creative Commons licences work and to clear up any misunderstanding that may prevail about them. (For example, that Creative Commons is an organisation that has created and made available a suite of CC non-exclusive licences for the licensing of copyright works without payment to the general public. Creative Commons does not give permissions on behalf of rights owners – it provides the licences for rights owners to use.)

4.1 Creative Commons licensing

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

When you view the video you should look at the section on why you should choose Creative Commons, which aims to illustrate the benefits of applying a Creative Commons licence to some of your institution’s works and puts the easy-to-understand terms and symbols in an international context.

Creative Commons is an organisation that has created and made available a suite of CC non-exclusive licences for the licensing of copyright works without payment to the general public.Creative Commons does not give permissions on behalf of rights owners; it provides the licences for rights owners to use.

In order to clear up any misunderstanding about Creative Commons, you should be aware of some fundamentals:

Creative Commons (CC) licences do not replace copyright. They are a suite of (non-exclusive) licences provided by the Creative Commons organisation to facilitate and encourage rights owners (including educators) in the wider dissemination of copyright works for the mutual benefit of all communities. It reduces or eliminates onerous administrative time granting permissions and deciphering complex licences, which takes place in the absence of licences such as CC.
Creative Commons licensing is non-exclusive, which means the licence does not apply to rights owners who have made their works available and they remain in control of their copyright works to licence in other ways (for payment, for example) should they so wish.
You have a choice of licence or licences to suit your project.
Creative Commons licences are not educational licences but available to all rights owners. However, Creative Commons licensing is very popular (and appropriate) within educational communities.
The licences are designed to be easily understood (without lawyers) internationally in both their wording and symbols.
Educators can search and locate resources under Creative Commons licences.
Creative Commons licensing is for works protected by copyright only. However, it is not appropriate for licensing software that is more suitably licensed through other public licences available on the internet, such as from the Free Software Foundation. The wraparound documentation may be licensed through Creative Commons Licensing.
A Creative Commons licence is non-revocable. This basically means that if you change your mind on the type of licence you have put your work out under – that is fine. However, the works already accessed and being used under that licence remain valid. So ensure you consider and are happy with your content being used in this way, even if you change your mind later on.
Fair dealing, fair use and other exceptions to copyright are preserved.
Moral rights are preserved by rights owners.
Please go to the Creative Commons website for further information.

4.2 Exercises from video

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Here are some questions that were explored in the video. You may want to provide your thoughts and considerations before looking at the comments.

Activity 8: exercises from the video

Exercise 1

‘I've found six images on the web for use in my course-related DVD – the resolutions are fine. However they are available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial licence. This clearance is fine for my initial use for staff and students, but we would probably eventually hope to sell the course. Should I not bother with these images and re-select?’

Discussion

Before you decide whether to keep or ditch the images originally chosen, you should consider the following:

You would have to expend (perhaps a lot) more time looking to replace images that already have been deemed suitable.
While the course is being sold, it is still likely not to be considered a wholly commercial, profit-making exploitation if any income is being ploughed back into the educational activities of the institution. Therefore this can be explained to the rights owners. In the majority of cases, this is likely to result in a permission with no further payment – or a lower fee, which may be more time and cost efficient than starting from scratch.
Ensure your records facilitate the reclearing of the images.

In order to facilitate the possibility of priorities changing during development of a course or afterwards, please ensure you keep records of the sources of your images. This will mean you can easily revisit those records to check on rights owners and find email addresses, etc. If you are unable to locate a rights owner after conducting a reasonable search, you may decide to carry on using an image on a risk level acceptable to your institution. If any rights owners get in touch, you can negotiate a suitable fee with all the information to hand (or in a place agreed from beginning). In exceptional circumstances this may result in the removal of an image – but that should only happen in exceptional circumstances, particularly if the images originally chosen are non-contentious.

If after due consideration you decide to reselect the images, then that is fine, providing you have considered all your options in relation to keeping the images or reselecting them.

Exercise 2

‘We are producing a social science unit for our OER area. A colleague from the School of Health and Social Welfare has provided some lovely images of children they took while on holiday. I’m assuming that because the colleague is a University member of staff, these images will be OK to use in our OER area?’

Discussion

This is where you come across copyright issues interacting with ethics. It is likely that your institution has an ethics policy in relation to using children’s images online that may provide some additional guidelines. Some areas of consideration are:

Does copyright in the photo rest with the colleague? It will if the taking of it does not fall within their terms and conditions of employment. If that is the case then it is good practice to get a formal permission agreement for use by your institution. An email with the correct wording may suffice.
Did the colleague obtain permission from the children’s parents or guardians before the photographs were taken? Was it explained to the parents or guardians how the images may be used? If the colleague just took the photographs on holiday without permission, then this process may deem them unusable by your institution.
Are the images of the children suitable? You should have a ‘suitability gauge’ for your project. You should be wary of using full face, close-up images, or images where children are perhaps posing or standing in a way that may be inappropriate to an open or wide audience. Seek advice if you are unsure (although being unsure may be an alert to choose something else).

Exercise 3

‘I’ve found an article on the web that would be brilliant for my learning object, which is intended for open use. I’ve tried to contact the author twice and have been in touch with the webmaster of the site to see if they can help, with no response. I’ve amended it, because I didn’t agree with some of the points that the author was making – I think I’ve improved the work, actually – although obviously I left their name on it. Since I’ve had no response, I’m just going to use it anyway. Everyone’s always talking about risk – so I’ll take one. Is this OK?

Discussion

Every business or institution should operate within an acceptable level of risk. To try to operate within a zero-risk policy is not practical and will make you feel that you are not taking your business forward. However, taking risks must be enshrined within good practice guidelines. If you don’t have good practice and are taking risks, then you and your institution are just being sloppy and unprofessional – and may be exposing the business to potential legal ramifications. Before you use a third party work without formal permission, you should consider the following:

Did you contact the rights owner a few times without response?
Did you check before your second chase-up that you had the right address? Did you try and find a telephone number for the rights owner?
Did you alert the editor/team that if a response is not received, that the work should not be altered beyond some basic editorial changes? Altering an original work beyond this may impact on the integrity of the work and may lead the author to claim that their moral rights (Section 80 of the Act) have been infringed.
If the editor/team did not agree with the author’s comments, have they considered doing their own commentary to the paper, addressing the areas of disagreement? This needs to be done professionally and without malice or any defamatory remarks towards the author. (That may take you into another area of law – defamation!)
Is there any other reason that would prevent you using the work without formal permission?

If after applying those considerations you still have not heard back from the author, you may be comfortable in using the work (with no alterations, other than minor editorial ones) on an ‘await claim’ basis. This may be an acceptable risk for your institution. If your institution does not have a risk policy to use third party works in this way, then you need to build that into your planning to ensure that you alert the team/author in good time so that an alternative can be sourced and cleared. Please ensure you credit all rights owners whether you have had formal permission or not.

Exercise 4

‘My institution has an online open learning resource and is based in the United Kingdom. We have selected an England and Wales UK licence for the use of our content. However, we have been asked by a user in China if the Creative Commons licence still applied? Does the Creative Commons licence refer to where the content is being used or where it is hosted?

Discussion

Creative Commons licences are designed to work internationally. Rights owners may choose a licence that applies to the jurisdiction (territory) where they reside. This makes it easier to apply the licence in the home jurisdiction, although this will not prevent rights owners from seeking remedy (enforcement) abroad should that become a necessity. The CC licence, irrespective of jurisdictional licence chosen, works internationally, and refers to where the content is being used.

Exercise 5

‘My institution is putting some of its course materials online under a Creative Commons Non-commercial Sharealike licence. Do our logos and trademarks also form part of the Creative Commons licence terms?’

Discussion

No. Creative Commons only provides licences for copyright works that are protected under copyright law; logos and trademarks have their own separate protection under trademark law. However, if you are not sure, it is fair to assume that many users may be similarly confused. You should therefore clarify and reinforce this through your site’s terms and conditions, and state quite clearly that your logos and trademarks are not part of the CC licensing. You may want to consider how your trademarks may be used within the licensed content – for example, only in unaltered content?

Exercise 6

‘Do I need to choose only one type of Creative Commons licence or can I choose more than one?’

Discussion

You should consider this when developing the content for your OER or Creative Commons licensing. You are not confined to one type of licence; you can choose whichever is appropriate to your content. For example, while promoting the sharing and developing of content, there may be some content that is not appropriate for a CC sharealike. It may be sensitive (but not restrictive) and contain issues that your institution considers worth sharing. You therefore may be of the view that this content needs to be shared but in context only, and a non-commercial non-derivative licence may be appropriate. The main point is to widen your thought processes in relation to licensing to ensure that your content reaches the intended audiences in ways that retain the integrity of the content and your institution.

4.3 OpenLearn

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The material here on OpenLearn has been cleared for use using the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 2.0 for England and Wales.

In short, this means you are free to:

copy, distribute, display and perform the work
make derivative works

as long as you follow these conditions:

attribution – you must give the original author credit
non-commercial – you may not use this work for commercial purposes
ShareAlike – if you alter, transform or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.

If you want to, look at the Creative Commons Legal Code.

All third party materials in OpenLearn are made available for use in accordance with permissions granted by rights owners and are not subject to Creative Commons licence. All users are required to read terms and conditions, and any restrictions that are placed with acknowledgements. So therefore it is possible to combine Creative Commons licence terms for your own materials and other terms for third party materials to ensure your users derive educational benefit from a variety of sources.

You can find the Plain English version of this licence by clicking on the log at the bottom of this page.

My final point about why you might want to construct your learning as an OER is that in serving the needs of your own learners you will be serving the needs of other learners. It is possible to use copyright material for online use if you point users to where it can be freely accessed, but cannot be copied or altered or if you password protect it so that, in effect, you are using it just for the few learners in your class. Many institutions currently do this using Blackboard or WebCT (now owned by Blackboard and being phased out) – but what a missed opportunity! If you have put in the work to create some online learning, why not let as many learners as possible share the experience?

To summarise, the following advantages and disadvantages need to be considered before you begin to create OERs:

Advantages to OER

Freedom of access, both for yourself and others.
Freedom from proprietary systems and corporations.
Encourages pedagogical innovation.
Lowers costs to students.
Potential publicity.
Contribution to a community.
Method of collaboration.
Helpful to future educators.
Potentially beneficial to developing nations.
Avoids ‘vendor lock-in’ or a situation in which you have to use one company's products.

Disadvantages to OER

Varying degrees of time commitment.
Teachers sometimes not rewarded by the system for their efforts.
Starting large projects can be difficult.
Some projects require startup resources.
Quality varies.
May not meet accessibility requirements for persons with disabilities.
Need to check accuracy before use.
May need a high degree of customisation (called localisation in the OER community).
Technical requirements vary and some require you to use a particular software.
Requires varying degrees of continual financial support.
Licensing and obtaining copyright clearance can be difficult.
Some institutions may be concerned about ‘giving it away’.

(From WikiEducator’s OER handbook for educators.)

Activity 9

What are the key licensing considerations you need to take into account for the resource you’re working on? What is your institution’s policy on Creative Commons licences? What type of Creative Commons licence would you feel most comfortable publishing my work under and why?

Section 4 resources

‘SCORE copyright workshop’ – PowerPoint presentation featured in the video earlier in this section

5 The pedagogy of open learning

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

One of the key differences between open learning, where the ‘student’ is remote from the teacher, and a learner just reading a textbook or looking up information for themselves on the internet, is the need to encourage active learning. Whether the material is text, online quizzes or audio-visual elements, the learner should not be a passive absorber of information but actively interacting with the resources. This is grounded in views of how people learn. But I have made some assumptions here and maybe you disagree with me.

5.1 How do people learn?

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

That seems a straightforward question, but you will already know from your work in producing teaching materials elsewhere that an answer is far from obvious.

Activity 10: take about two coffee breaks

If you work in a teaching context, ask a few colleagues the questions:

How do you think people learn?
What should we do as teachers to help that happen?

If you are not working in such a professional environment, you could ask the same questions of friends and especially parents of young children that you might know.

Discussion

Asking these questions in such a blunt way is likely to have elicited either a flippant response or maybe a cautious one along the lines of ‘Everyone learns in different ways. It depends who they are. I teach depending on the needs of the student.’ And so on. It is almost certain that your straightforward question did not get a straightforward answer!

All teachers, and parents for that matter, have a ‘theory’ of learning. It may link to formal ideas but is more often not something grand or grounded in careful research, but rather is a collection of day-by-day assumptions about what we, as teachers, should do to help those we are teaching to learn. New ideas about learning are developing and we need to test them against our knowledge of learner behaviour and the views we currently hold.

As you will probably know from your questioning of colleagues, the following are some views that people hold about how people learn:

Knowledge and skills can be broken down into component parts and it is the teacher’s job to do this for the learner. The teacher then teaches each element and gives the student sufficient repetition until the learner can give a ‘positive response’ The student will generally receive the same instruction as everyone in the class, but if assessment shows that the student requires further help, then an additional programme with smaller steps over a longer time scale will be provided
A learner constructs meanings by getting to grips with the particular problems in hand. Private problem solving is very important and a teacher should provide the necessary stimulus material and opportunities for the individual student to learn something new. A student will not progress without plenty of practice in the activities that have already been mastered. In particular, a child will only be able to ‘get’ an idea when they have reached a certain stage of maturity; the teacher’s job is to be aware of that and to decide when the learner is ‘ready’ to move on. Some learners are never able to ‘get’ certain ideas.
All learners are educable and are helped in their learning by discussion and other social interaction, including with a more experienced learner or teacher. There is no fundamental difference between the learning of children and that of adults. Rather than waiting for a student to be ‘ready’ to learn, a teacher is finding out what the learner thinks in order to guide and support what the learner is trying to do next. By talking with the teacher, and obtaining other support, a learner is able to grasp ideas and new understandings that they could never arrive at on their own.

These very brief summaries relate to the three main traditions of learning theory: behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism.

5.2 Behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

How do the well-known ideas of behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism relate to what you actually do as a teacher in a face-to-face context? Are you able to ‘sign up’ to any one of the theories wholeheartedly? As you read the descriptions you may have felt that each of them separately described some aspects of your ideas about learning and those of your colleagues, yet none was wholly satisfactory in its own right. For example, in teaching certain practical skills, a regime of practice and reinforcement in the ‘behaviorist’ tradition may be appropriate. An individual project will provide problem-solving opportunities and will be successful if the learner is working largely within his or her capabilities; a Piagetian standpoint. That teaching methods should be selected in terms of ‘fitness for purpose’, rather than adherence to a particular dogma of ‘good practice’, is clear. Teachers tend to have their preferred way of working, which reflects a personal ‘theory’, but nevertheless are not hidebound by particular ideologies and will adopt a different teaching strategy if they think it will be helpful. Sometimes it is called a ‘folk theory’ of learning.

Some people think that good teaching means the same thing as good explaining – keep it clear and simple and all will understand. In fact some teachers get very upset when, despite their greatest efforts, the learners just don't grasp what they have explained. When students just don’t ‘get it’ they take it as a personal failure, or maybe blame the learners themselves.

It is certainly true that a key teaching skill is the ability to explain and describe things clearly. But a belief that transmitting information clearly is all that is required for a ‘good’ teacher is insufficient. However, such a ‘folk’ theory of how minds work is very common, and also explains the position some parents take to learning and teaching. These common beliefs were investigated by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1996), who characterised a folk theory of mind as follows:

knowledge is ‘stuff’
the mind is a container
learning involves putting stuff in the container

This tends to be reinforced by national curricula and examination syllabuses, which emphasise content knowledge. Bereiter and Scardamalia suggest that the corollaries of such a view of the mind is:

pedagogy: a craft for stocking minds
educational testing: a process for inventorying mental contents.

Desforges (2001) indicates that the corresponding ‘folk pedagogy’ to such a view of learning has had some remarkable success in teaching through ‘show and tell’.

But where the ‘stuff’ metaphor breaks down – as it does with wisdom, creativity, knowledge creation, appreciation, a ‘feel’ for a subject, we are left floundering.
(Desforges, 2001, p. 25)

Folk theories are indeed robust, yet the alternative ideas about teaching and learning outlined above have been considered for a least the last 50 years and, in more recent times, linked to a growing understanding about the biology of the brain.

Taking a social constructivist view of learning, the experiences that we should construct is not a ‘lecture’ but rather a one-to-one ‘tutorial’. How would you behave in those different contexts?

Activity 11

Timing: 0 hours 20 minutes

Imagine you have just one learner and you were going to work with them for about three hours to help them learn a key idea in your subject area.

You are planning what to do and it is just you and the learner.

In broad terms – What would you plan to do? How would you characterise the activities and the way you would work?

Discussion

To begin with I expect that you would not be planning to talk at length as, maybe, you would do if it was a big group that were expecting a ‘lecture’. You would make sure that the learner was with you, stopping and asking for feedback or for their own ideas. You might ask for examples from the learner from their experience or you might ask them to use your idea in a new situation or practice what they have learnt in a new situation. You might ask the learner to evaluate an idea or compare one idea with another. In short, you would ask them to be active.

Even when you are writing educational text, write it as though you are writing an interactive tutorial. Build in activities for the learner to do that will help them to learn. Activities such as questions, tasks and exercises are a very important feature of self-instructional material as they challenge the learner to do something they can assess and appreciate for themselves. If we take the view that we construct knowledge, then using the ideas that we are learning is vital. Remember the proverb often ascribed to the Chinese:

I hear, and I forget;
I see, and I remember;
I do, and I understand.

In addition to activities, however, is the style of writing. The one-to-one tutorial will be intimate and conversational and that is the style of writing that engages the learner. You should be able to ‘hear’ the writer talking to you. Of course, ideally it will not only be the writer contributing to the learner's engagement with the materials. As I described earlier, learning can be enhanced if we recognise that it is a social activity, too, involving interactions with other people, family, friends and work colleagues as well as fellow learners.

6 Tools for creating an OER

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In planning your learning resource, you need to keep four questions in mind.

What are you trying to achieve with this teaching course – what are your aims?
What activities do you wish the learners to engage with in order to demonstrate or achieve those aims – what are the learning objectives or outcomes, and how are they to be assessed?
How will you evaluate the effectiveness of what you have produced?
In the light of the evaluation, how will you change 1 and 2 above?

When you meet your learners face-to-face, it is relatively straight forward to answer question 3. Even before an assignment is marked or any informal question is answered, the learner’s body language gives plenty of feedback as to the success of your activities. In producing OERs you don't have such quick feedback, although some research into the The Open University’s OERs has taken place.

Watch the video below for a brief introduction to creating an OER.

Download this video clip.Video player: Creating an OER

Creating an OER

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: Creating an OER

PRESENTER:

Well, hello everyone. As [? Trist ?] was saying, I'm from the University of Nottingham. And I'm one of the SCORE Fellows here, just started actually. So, it's really nice to be here working with you all today. I guess you've had a busy week so far. Today is very much about you working on your own OER projects, and hopefully you got the message, at the beginning of the course, to bring some materials and some ideas for things that you want to work on.

So today, as I say, a lot of it is going to be about you working and I'll give you as much help as I can. I have to say, I don't profess to be an expert in OER, and I don't think there is such a thing as an expert in OER. I remember when I first started working in e-learning, and an e-learning professor said to me, don't let anyone ever tell you they're an expert in e-learning because there's not such a thing.

I think that's very much true of OER. Everyone's finding their way in the field. So, just a little bit about me. I come from the University of Nottingham. I work in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy. So we're quite a large school. We have a very diverse student population, a lot of non-traditional students, I guess, in terms of intake into the School, a lot of mature students, a lot of vocational students.

And, in some ways, the reasons that we've got involved in e-learning and increasing the OER is to meet the needs of those particular students. I'm obviously working with SCORE now. The group ... we are quite fortunate in having quite a large e-learning course in the school, known as HELM – Healthy Learning and Media. So currently, we have about five developers working with us, and we're a team of about nine.

And for the last five years, I've been working on one of the [? Settle ?] projects. I'm not sure if you're aware of the [? Settle ?] projects. These were projects that were funded by HEFCE to the tune of [GBP]340 million – although we didn't have [GBP]340 million – to look at trying to improve the quality of learning and teaching in higher education.

So, I suppose in some ways we were developing – as I'll talk about in a bit – we were developing resources. We didn't call them open educational resources at the time, but that's what they were. And I'll tell you about some of our experiences of using and developing resources to release as OER.

End transcript: Creating an OER

Download

Creating an OER

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

6.1 What are aims and objectives/outcomes?

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

It is best to start to settle on the aims and objectives/outcomes (these terms are variously used around the world but are largely interchangeable) of your free course as soon as possible. You looked at the intended learning outcomes of some courses in Section 1. The difference between aims and objectives is that the aim is the general statement of what you hope the course will achieve, usually expressed in terms of what you will be presenting in the course; the objectives are what you intend the learner to be able to know, understand and do once they have studied the course. For example:

Aim: To explain the concept of energy and the need to conserve heat in houses.

Objectives: On completing the course the learner should be able to:

list different forms of energy
describe how energy may be transformed from one for to another
describe different forms of heat flow
distinguish between energy and power
etc.

Writing learning objectives can be quite demanding, because they have to be set at the right levels of difficulty and detail for the expected learners and be reasonably assessable. Derek Rowntree (1986, p. 45) suggests the words in Table 1 when writing objectives.

Table 1 Words to avoid and use
Avoid words such as:	Use words such as:
know	state
understand	describe
really know	explain
really understand	list
be familiar with	evaluate
become acquainted with	identify
have a good grasp of	distinguish between
appreciate	analyse
be interested in	outline
acquire a feeling for	summarise
be aware of	represent graphically
believe	compare
have information about	apply
realise the significance of	assess
learn the basics of	give examples of
obtain a working knowledge of	suggest reasons why

The list on the left shows unobservable states of mind (i.e. very difficult to assess), whereas the list on the right is more focused on what the learner is able to demonstrate to others.

It is quite unlikely that in creating your OER, you will start with a blank sheet of paper as some of the original authors did on OpenLearn.

For you, the model is likely to be that described by David Wiley. He believes that OER development follows a life cycle like this:

Get: Searching and finding OERs. Getting OERs may include using search engines, repositories and finding individual websites.
Create: Generate the OER, preferably using open source tools.
Localise: Essentially, localising means making a resource more useful to a particular situation. For example, translating instruction from one language to another.
Remix: Remixing is the act of taking two OER materials and merging them to form a new OER. Remixing is probably one of the most enjoyable parts of OER production.
Licensing: License the work using an open content licences such as Creative Commons and GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License).
Use: This covers the actual use of OER for your context.
Redistribute: Publishing an OER once it is finished and making it available for the open education community to begin the life cycle again.

However, before finding and remixing OERs to create just what you want for your learners, you need to be certain you know what it is you want the learners to have learnt. After setting out aims and objectives, one way to help you do this is to draw a diagram.

Activity 12

Timing: 2 hours 0 minutes

Look at the ‘spider diagram’ – sometimes called a spray diagram – that I drew on paper to bring to mind the different science activities that I had engaged in as a student of science from my primary school to higher education. It was for a masters course on Contemporary issues in science education (SEH806), part of which is now available as the OpenLearn course Changes in science education. As well as exemplifying what I wanted the students to do, it helped me collect my thoughts about different phases of science education that I wished to consider.

You might want to draw a similar diagram to set out your ideas for your OER. (If you are unused to using diagrams, try studying either of these OpenLearn courses: Working with diagrams or Systems diagramming.)

For this you could create a knowledge map using Compendium. You can also access a short tutorial on how to use it.

Discussion

The Compendium tool could be used to create an online learning scheme that is more in the control of the learner – a ‘north-east quadrant’ OER perhaps – where the conduct of tasks is up to the learner who can follow the route through the materials that interest them. Another use is to create south-west quadrant ‘teacher determined open-ended strategic learning activities’. Here the learner has control and the learners can work in groups. An example of that would be the ‘Compendium for elearning’.

Sources of material

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

You will probably be making an OER in an area in which you have some expertise so you are likely to already have lesson plans and resources that you use in your face-to-face work that will be invaluable to others.

As well as your own materials, you might like to look at a range of other OER repositories in addition to OpenLearn.

Download this video clip.Video player: Creating OER

Creating OER

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: Creating OER

PRESENTER:

It’s basically about, now, a chance for you to use all the things you’ve been doing all week, hopefully, and think about your project. Now, I’m going to give you a little bit of my own thoughts about creating OER. And we’ve talked about the ideas for your OER projects.

Does everybody want to work individually on projects, or do people want to work together on projects?

SPEAKER 1:

[INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER:

So everyone’s happy to work on their own project. Okay, that’s fine.

So, how do we go about creating? There’s been lots of discussion actually over coffee about – it’s all very well, these tools, and so on, but how do we actually ensure there’s a level of pedagogy, I suppose and really what we want to do. And I’m not going to give you the answers to that really. But this is something that we came up with, which is a little framework called ASPIRE.

Now, ASPIRE those of you that come from Nottingham probably know – is actually a – what do you call it? Structure? What’s the word? I can’t think of the word.

SPEAKER 2:

Framework?

PRESENTER:

No. I’d say ‘monument’, but I don’t mean that. An artwork.

SPEAKER 3:

[INAUDIBLE]?

SPEAKER 4:

[INAUDIBLE]?

SPEAKER 3:

Installation?

PRESENTER:

It’s an installation that was developed – thank you – at the University of Nottingham. And it’s this great, big, tall tower that’s 16 metres high that’s supposed to represent the aspirations of the University and the people of Nottingham. So it towers up into the sky, it branches out at the top.

And so we have developed this little framework based on that, called ASPIRE which basically says, if I want to start creating OER, what should I really start doing? And it’s really sort of straightforward stuff, stuff we doing in our teaching all the time.

The first thing is to think about what are your aims. What do you really want to do? It’s very easy to go out there – as people have said – and start searching around for OER, getting really lost.

And I know that, when we’ve been working with tutors, they’ve said exactly that to us – that there’s just so much stuff out there. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know really what I want to do, and I’ve really lost track of what it was I wanted to do in the first place. So the first thing, I think, is thinking very clearly about what the aims of your project are.

And then storyboarding. I suggest you take some time to think how is this going to look. What are the sections? What types of things do you want to include? What’s the main layout of your OER? And then, on that storyboard, start to identify what you’ve got already that you perhaps want to convert into an OER resource, what you need to go looking for, what you maybe already know about.

So I would think that actually spending some time looking at aims, spending some time looking at storyboarding, is really crucial. And certainly thinking back to the learning objects, we know that if people get these two steps right, the rest of the project flows pretty well. If people don’t, if people have not a very clear idea about where they’re going, that’s when things start to really become time consuming, take a long time, and actually end up probably not being that usable. Because it’s not very clear. There’s not a great alignment between the need – the learning need – and the resource.

So one of the things we’re going to do first of all – I’m going to ask you to just rethink – I know some of you have got some very clear ideas. Think about what your aims are and then possibly just put a little storyboard together for your resource.

Then the next step is the kind of thing that we think of as OER, I suppose – population. Going out and searching for what’s out there with all the problems that that entails.

Production. Perhaps developing little bits of glue or little resources, like the sort of things we were talking about this morning.

And processing. Those things that you’ve got – perhaps lecture notes, PowerPoints, and so on – how can you process those to ensure that they are OER? And that also, they’re going to be usable OER – it’s not just a case of sticking your PowerPoint there with all the copyright issues and possibly not really being very usable.

Then we come to this step of integrating. How are we going to put them all together? What are we going to use to actually stick them together and to give an integrated experience to the student?

How are you going to release them? How are you going to use the resources? And then as I said, evaluation. How are you going to evaluate the effectiveness of the resources, and how are you going to close that feedback loop, really?

So, as I say, it’s not rocket science by any sense of the imagination, but it’s just a simple framework to help us think through the steps. So really, a lot of people jump in at the Production, Population and Processing stage. And that’s really where we can all get lost.

We all do it, let’s face it. I mean, I do it as well. There’s so much stuff out there, you end up off on a tangent. And really, you know, what did I really want to do in first place?

So in terms of aims – this learning package, this OER thing that you want to produce – what is its aim? What are the learning goals that you’re trying to achieve? So what’s the need for it? And what are the learning goals? Who’s it aimed at?

I know we talked about reuse. But, certainly in our experience, reuse works best if you have a core audience that you’re addressing the resource at. So if you do have a set audience, you say this is aimed at my students who are year-two students in health care studying a module, or whatever. Actually, there’s evidence that by aiming the resources, you actually make it more reusable in the long term.

What’s the level of the students? Are you interested in reuse? You know, you might be or you might not be.

And how do you think your OER would be delivered and used? Is it going to be delivered online? I guess most of it will be. How’s it going to be used?

So, I’d like you to take a few minutes just thinking about that. And we’ll share some of these thoughts about the sort of OER you’re thinking of developing. How can you answer these questions?

And then, possibly, I’ve given you a little storyboard sheet on the next page as well, where you might want to sketch out what are going to be the main sections about your OER product. So, for example, I was developing something. I had to give a new session that I’ve never done before on sepsis. Nice subject, but ...

And I thought, where am I going to start? Well, I wanted some basic stuff on immunology. And I’ve got some basic notes on immunology, so I could convert those. And then I needed some stuff on systemic shock. So I went out and started searching for OER on systemic shock. So then my next section was about that.

And then I wanted to test the students to see where they were at. I wanted something to help them apply that to practice. So I could start storyboarding my product.

The website, which I think you’re going to look at this afternoon. I’m not sure you’ve seen the OER module yet, have you? On OpenLearn? I’m not sure if that’s what you’re going to see this afternoon.

But there’s a really, really good module that deals with a lot of the pedagogical issues in relation to OER that’s found on that link at the bottom there. But it’s on OpenLearn if you want to have a look. But it’s a 15-hour module, but it really is very, very good. If you haven’t seen it yet, I really do recommend you have a look.

So, just for a few minutes – and I don’t want to spend too long on this – perhaps you could just take a step back and have a think about these questions that are on your sheet. What’s the aim of your learning package? What are your learning goals? Who are you aiming it at? What’s the level, and so on.

And then you might want to just sketch. Nobody’s going to look at these in too much detail. What is the main kind of look do you think your OER’s going to have?

This is obviously an iterative process. It’s not that you design it and then nothing changes as you go through the process. But I think it helps to have those things in place.

This little diagram here that helps to explain the different types of resources that you might use and what you’ve got to do with each one, or the things to consider with each one. So I’ve given you a copy of this. So here are the different types of materials you might develop into your OER, you might integrate into your OER project.

They’re your own stuff – your lecture notes, your handouts, possibly PowerPoints, and so on. There’s all the released OER that’s out there. There’s other things that you might know about, but you’re not really sure whether they’re OER or not. And then there are things that you might want to create, like some of the things we were talking about this morning.

And each of those really presents you with a number of questions if you want to use them in an OER project. So if it’s your own material, one of the questions you need to ask is, do you have permission to release that as OER? Does your institution allow you to actually take that whole module and just release it? So you need to be sure about the fact that you can actually do that. Excuse me.

Obviously, copyright – particularly third-party materials, which I’m sure you spent a lot of time looking at. And it’s the biggest barrier, really, to people releasing their own resources is those hidden, third-party materials – obviously images, text, and whatever else it might be. And you’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about copyright this week, haven’t you? But you need to go through and almost audit the resources that you’re going to release for the type of copyright and third-party materials.

Quality. We’ve talked a bit about quality. But here I mean, is the quality sufficient? Are you happy to release that resource? You know, it’s going to be out there, potentially with your name on it. Are you happy that the quality of the resource is something that you want to be released?

And also, your institution. And institutions are starting to develop policies. And certainly in Nottingham if we want to put stuff into the open repository, you can’t just release anything. It has to go through an institutional quality check.

Context – this is another big issue. If you’re going to take handouts, timetables, how much context do you leave in and how much do you take out? If it’s a handbook, do you leave all the dates, do you leave all the room numbers in? There are lots of different schools of thought.

Some people would say you take it all out and make it more reusable by actually taking all that stuff out. And there are other schools of thought that say – and certainly I know that Nottingham working with OER Africa, for example. People at OER Africa are saying, no, we don’t want you to take all that context out. We don’t want you to take out the timetables, and the room numbers, and so on. Because, actually, that helps us to look at the materials when we reuse them, when we redevelop them, to see what the context of use was.

So there’s not an answer to that. It’s just a question that you might want to think about. What are all those contextual elements?

And then the portability – we talked a bit about this this morning, particularly things like PowerPoints. If you take a PowerPoint, it might make perfect sense within a lecture environment. But when you take it out and you deliver it, you release it as a standalone resource, is it really going to make sense? Is there anything you need to do to try and make your material work within the new format that you’re developing?

And in terms of how we released OER, big questions about what do you want, what types of things, what level of materials, and so on. And then obviously, the big one is searching. How are you going to search, how are you going to find what you’re going to look for?

Again, something else we talked about is how you’re going to judge the quality of the materials that you’ve looked at. I think you’ve talked a little bit about quality earlier in the week. There are two things that I’ve got here that I’ll give you.

One is some things that we’ve developed. One is a little quality checklist. It doesn’t give you the answer, but it helps you to think through some of the quality issues that might come up.

And another is a little search strategy that we’ve developed to work with our tutors. Because our tutors are saying exactly the same things – there’s so much stuff out there. How do I know what I’m looking for? Where do I go?

So this is almost like a little formatted search to help people think through what they’re searching for, what they’re looking for, and what they’re going to take from that. So again, I’ll give you a copy of that that you can have a look at.

And then this question, do you want to use all of it? Do you want to use part of it? Do you want to change it, and does the licence allow you to do that?

I’m not going to go through all this. I’ve given you the back of this little thing. You’ve probably got lots of these this week. But here’s a list of OER sources – and you’ve probably come across some of them before – that you might find useful as you’re searching through, from repositories to institutional subject based, and then different types – slides, and audio, music, and various bits and pieces.

So I won’t go through all those because I’ve given you all of that for you to play with.

One thing I will mention – I’m not sure if you’ve seen this – is this thing called Xpert. Because one of the issues, if you find an image – oh, dear. I’m probably going to be logged out again. It’s probably not going to let me show you that, I don’t think.

Sorry. If you look at Xpert rather than me spending time logging in – Xpert is a little media search that was developed, again, to go along with the Xerte toolkit. If you click on the Media Search on Xpert – so if you go to Nottingham.ac.uk, I think it’s forward slash Xpert – it only searches for images that have genuine Creative Commons licences. So it’s a little bit limited from that perspective, but you know that anything you get is genuinely Creative Commons.

And it will also give you the attribution on it. So the image comes to you with the appropriate attribution. They’ve done quite a lot of work with just legal to look at the appropriate ways of attributing images. So it’s quite a safe way of looking for images. Although, as I say, it’s a little bit limited.

Because the problem with even things like Google – if you use an advanced search on Google, you can select only Creative Commons images. I’m not sure if you’ve looked at that this week. The problem is, it’s not 100 per cent foolproof.

Because what Google Creative Commons search will do is it will go to a web page. And if there’s any image on that web page that has a Creative Commons licence, it basically assumes that everything else on that web page has a Creative Commons licence, as well. So you can still come a little bit unstuck.

I’ll pull this up again to have a look at it in a minute. I’ll see if we can get logged back in.

So search strategy, as I say, I’ll give you a copy of a search strategy you might have a look at, asking these sort of things. If you’re producing things – we’ve been talking about this a bit this morning –

Sorry. Materials you know about – the first question you need to ask is, is it OER and what’s the copyright? Do you want to use all or part of it, and again, is it going to work inside your resource?

And finally then, in terms of materials that you create – we’ve already said that they can be quite time consuming, quite expensive. So you need to think carefully about what’s the purpose? Are there any alternatives? What tools and formats are you going to use – and we’ve had a bit of this discussion this morning – about the time and cost, and about reuseability.

So, I think, really, what the rest of the time that I’ve got with you today is about is taking your OER designs and trying to populate them with some of the OER – either your own, or found resources. And that’s really what we’ve got for the rest of the time today.

End transcript: Creating OER

Download

Creating OER

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Activity 13: what is available already for me to use?

Timing: 1 hour 0 minutes

Look at the following OER repositories where there are often not whole units but rather useful ‘bits and pieces’ that could be mixed (but also be careful to look at the licence used in each case). This activity should take about an hour to scan what is available. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but serves as a useful starting point for creating your own reference list:

Music

ccMixter

Multimedia resources across a range of topics

MERLOT

Xpert

Images

Flickr – this is not a specific OER repository but some of the content is available for you to use freely under a Creative Commons licence. Be sure to use the advanced search to select Creative Commons licensed content.

Video

YouTube – this is not a specific OER repository but some of the content is available for you to use freely under a Creative Commons licence. Be sure to use the advanced search to select Creative Commons licensed content.

General repositories

UNESCO OERs

Jorum – a sharing site for Higher Education in the UK

OER Commons – this site has a range of open resources

Let us now explore the different types of content resources.

Content

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

If we look specifically at OpenLearn free courses, the content comprises both the course (structured self-study resources) as well as the individual assets that make up a course.

The assets of a course are the materials such as text, images, animations, audio clips, etc., which are likely to be in different digital formats. In some cases a course will consist of just one asset, but most contain a variety.

As the number of OpenLearn free courses grows, so does the variety available. However, the main types of courses that you will encounter are:

Segments of current and discontinued OU courses or support materials: These comprise an XML-based front page providing a short description of the course, its learning outcomes, hyperlinks to the sections of the course and the course’s assets (text, audio, images, etc.). In these courses the majority of the original third-party material has been cleared and retained.
Bespoke materials: These are courses that have been specially written that may not be associated with an OU course. These comprise an XML-based front page providing a short description of the course, its learning outcomes, hyperlinks to the sections of the course and the courses assets (text, audio, images, etc.). In these courses third-party material has been cleared for use on OpenLearn.

Formats

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Later in 2013, OpenLearn free courses will be available to be downloaded or taken away in several formats:

print format
course content XML
course content RSS
OU XML package
IMS Content Package
IMS Common Cartridge
plain zip
Moodle back-up.

At the asset level, the major formats you will find are:

text in XML or PDF
animations in Flash
images such as GIF or JPEG
audio files such as MP3 and video files such as MP4.

To help you to rework OpenLearn free course material, the OUXML structured authoring schema is provided as part of the downloaded course – although you do need to know about authoring in XML.

Tools

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

There are many tools for creating OER that at a basic level can be split into those with open licensing and ease of remixing built in those that don’t. You may already be using the latter to create content.

By far the most commonly used tools for creating educational resources and therefore OERs is Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. To make these resources open you will need to apply an appropriate licence where – as with tools such as LabSpace from The Open University and Xpert from the University of Nottingham – the licensing is built in and the tools you use to create and therefore remix the content is free and open so you can make this easily available to others.

There are more specialist proprietary tools such as Photoshop and Flash from Adobe, where the content you produce at the end of the process can be made open but the user would need to buy the software to easily remix it.

There is an ever-increasing list of tools available for you to create content in multiple formats; a simple Google search will return many results. When choosing a tool, you will need to think about how you want the final output to be used. If want your content to be changed, it will require specialist software to produce the results you require.

Download this video clip.Video player: Choosing tools

Choosing tools

Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: Choosing tools

PRESENTER:

So, the big question then is, how do you go about developing these things if you want to include them in OER? And obviously, if you have Flash-based development skills, or a friendly Flash-based developer whose time you can call on, then that’s great. If not, there are some approaches that you can take. And some of these things people might have come across, so I would be interested to know whether you have.

Some of the tools – there’s a tool that’s developed by the University of Nottingham called Xerte. Has anyone come across Xerte? Yeah, a couple of people. So, this is one thing you might have a look at. And in fact, there’s different ways into it. There’s a sandbox for Xerte on the TechDis site that you can use, and actually have a play with Xerte.

You can actually, if you wanted to take it on, you can take it down as an institutional download, but you can also get Xerte on a stick, running on a little XAMPP stick. And I’ve got some sticks here. So what I’m hoping we’ll do is have a chance to have a look at some of these things, and perhaps have a go at creating something very, very basic in a little time. So I’ve got some sticks that you can borrow and run Xerte.

I’m not going to spend hours and hours going through all these things, but ... I’m hoping that ... This laptop’s very slow.

So who has seen Xerte before? Have you actually used it?

SPEAKER 1:

Yeah, I’ve actually got it downloaded before. Because I’ve got Version 3 downloaded.

PRESENTER:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 1:

[INAUDIBLE] ... work on Mac. A lot of versions are PC versions. I’ve got a colleague, Professor Chris [INAUDIBLE], is doing an OER project to learn [INAUDIBLE] conclusively. And she’s employed a student for a year or two years for the project to use Xerte, but he’s really good at Flash as well. And, bless him, he tried to give us a training session on Xerte, and he went about – I’m quite familiar with computers, and I know a bit about Flash and a bit of coding, and that went right over my head.

PRESENTER:

Okay, I should say about Xerte, there are two levels to it. There is what I would call Xerte heavy, which I would not recommend unless you’re a developer to go anywhere near, and I certainly would never go anywhere near it. But there’s also a thing called Xerte Toolkits, which are a series of templates. So they’re templated activities, and they’re the sort of things that somebody like me with no technical ability really can do, because they’ll sort of say, stick an image in here, add some text in here, put an audio in here, or here’s a little template to create a little MCQ.

So this is the Xerte home page – as I say – and I’ll give you a Xerte on a stick to have a look at in a minute, if you’ve not used it before. It’s simply a case of creating a project. You get this kind of, perhaps a little bit scary-looking, page. It’s not particularly user-friendly in that sense.

But basically, you just go through and insert pages, and it gives you these – in Xerte Toolkits this is, it gives you these lists of pages for things like images and graphics, and it gives you a description of what you might get down the bottom here. So there’s things for adding Flash animations, there’s things for adding YouTube pages, and so on, as well now.

I would say with all these tools, they all have their benefits, and they all have their drawbacks as well. None of them work, perhaps, a hundred per cent smoothly. So, in that case, when I said I wanted to add some images and some text, I’ve got this page here. So it’s a form-based thing, really, rather than a more WYSIWYG thing.

I’ve added my text in here. I’ve gone off to look for an image, and it can be an image that’s on my machine. I’ve added my image, and this is a spire that I’ll talk a little bit more about later on. And there’s a preview button at the bottom there, just for me to have a look at what I’ve done. And then there’s lots of interactivity, diagrams, timelines, MCQ. So, as I say, if people aren’t technical, you can pull these templates down and actually create something.

And people use this in different ways. I mean, you can actually use it to aggregate some of your OER stuff together. It’s not designed as an aggregator, but you could use in that way, or you could use it to provide those little bits of glue in between your OER resources. If you’re pulling out lots of OER resources that you’ve found, you might think, well that’s great, but actually, I need to add a little bit of context here about my own local circumstances, or I might want to do a little bit of assessment. And you could use something like this just to put those little sort of glue elements to add the context into your OER.

So that’s just a little timeline thing that you could create. And then you can export the package as a zip file, or as a SCORM package. And basically, it sits, then, outside of Xerte, and you can upload it into your VLE, or wherever you want to, into your repository.

So I’ll show you this little example here. This is something – if it’s going to work – that somebody created, and again, this is someone who is a colleague of mine who created this, and he isn’t a technical person at all. There’s no audio on this one. The template – they’ve done a lot of work with TechDis to develop the template. I must admit, I was showing this to my 12-year-old son yesterday, and he said, "Looks a bit old, doesn’t it?" So, a bit old-fashioned looking. But it, as I say, it has at least got that kind of TechDis ...

So you can see that they’ve created a little slideshow in here. That’s nice, isn’t it? Sorry.

I’ll leave you to have a look through these kind of templates that you can use. So a lot of it is images and text-based stuff. Good old Florence.

SPEAKER 2:

Can you embed video?

PRESENTER:

You can embed video. Yeah, I think one of the templates there is video. As I say, I’ll give you a copy of Xerte on a stick to have a look at. The only thing about Xerte on a stick – this downloaded version – is I don’t think it has all of the templates on there.

SPEAKER 2:

I’ve downloaded the toolkit.

PRESENTER:

Yeah.

SPEAKER 2:

It’s lost me already.

PRESENTER:

Okay. When you have a chance to play at it, I’ll help you. I mean, I don’t profess to be an expert in any of it. I have used most of these things, but I don’t profess to be an expert in any of them, so, but ...

Okay, so that’s a quick look at toolkits. Another little tool that you might like to look at, which is probably – it’s more limited in terms of what it will do – is Glomaker. I don’t know if anyone’s looked at Glomaker. This is something, actually, we developed in the Settle. It’s more limited than Xerte, definitely, but it’s perhaps slightly easier to use. So that can be found at Glomaker.org.

And it’s a similar kind of thing, really. It’s a free download, so this is a completely free tool. And once you’ve downloaded it, you basically create a project. And the thing about Glomaker is it has the kind of pedagogical patterns design at the front of it, so you can actually choose which pattern you want. I mean, I tend to go for the freestyle pattern that basically lets you do what you like. I suppose I don’t like being told what to do. But there are patterns in there that you can choose.

And you get this little pedagogical tool here where you basically say, I want to introduce my session, I want to do some learning, and I want to assess and do reflection. And you basically create a little design, join the nodes together, you can move nodes about. So you get this sort of design element, first of all, and then you get into the actual layout and stuff. Has anyone ever seen Glomaker, by the way? No?

And so Glomaker works in a similar way. You call up layouts at the bottom there, and it says, do you want a page that looks like this, or an MCQ page, or just a blank page? So you build up the page type that you want, it gives you a little template, and then you build in components. So it’s got things like Flash Player, and MP3 Player, image loaders, image magnifiers. So again, there are all these kind of templated activities that are there to use.

So, I won’t go through this, but I’ve added an image in here, and then I’ve added some text, and you’ve got all the kind of usual things for changing the size of the text and all the rest of it. And then again, you can package the resources as a zip package. There’s lots of examples on the gallery, which is on a little wiki there that’s on – I’ve given you this on your handout, actually. If this is going to work, I’ll show you this is something that I created. [PAUSE] You can have a look at that. Sorry, I can’t get that to load, but you can have a look at that for yourself.

And this is just a little pattern. This is actually one of the built patterns where it’s a pattern called multiple interpretations, where you can actually ask different people questions about a subject. So in this case, this is very interestingly about carbohydrates and proteins. And you can ask a nutritionist, a physiologist or a biochemist about the make-up of carbohydrates, where they’re found in the diet, and that kind of thing. So that’s something else you might want to have a little try at.

Another package that is eXe. Has anyone looked at eXe? Yeah I mean, you probably know more about eXe than I do because I’ve not really used eXe, but again, eXe is something – it’s a little more like a sort of HTML-based tool for creating objects.

Again, it’s free to download, and you can create nice things. And actually, I think eXe is very useful, again, as an OER aggregator. There aren’t any really good OER aggregators about at the moment. So eXe is sometimes quite useful in that respect.

So again, you get the kind of standard page, you create pages, and then you sort of add components, again, in the same way, and the components are slightly templated for you. So, for someone like me, who would probably approach something like Dreamweaver with quite a bit of trepidation, this gives me fairly straightforward boxes, and I can do the things I want to do. I can add images, I can add text.

The nice thing is, it gives you a very easy way of linking to other documents, and you’ll be able to package with all your other documents in there, whether they’re Word documents, whatever else. So actually, in terms of aggregating OER together, it’s quite useful, I think. So again, just choosing activities, adding them, adding links to files, and then eventually, again, packaging that up so that you can take it away.

And again, I’m not sure if this is going to work. There’s some examples of things developed in eXe. Not sure whether I’m ... So this is something developed in eXe, looking at moving and handling in emergency situations. And it’s actually using – if it’s going to play – it’s using videos from Leeds, I think.

[STARTS VIDEO PLAYBACK]

PRESENTER:

The nice thing about eXe is it gives you lots of easy ways to bring in the sort of content you might want to bring in, such as Word documents, HTML pages, actually linking to web pages, bringing in RSS feeds, and things like that. So it’s quite nice from that perspective, really.

SPEAKER 3:

[INAUDIBLE]

SPEAKER 1:

Yes, there are. I mean, again, there are templated multiple choice in here. But the other thing is, obviously there’s lots of things out there for creating interactivity – crossword makers, multiple-choice makers, and so on – that you can access. And the nice thing about eXe is that you can pull all those in, so the learner doesn’t necessarily need to know that they’re moving somewhere – a different resource. It’s all part of the same thing.

SPEAKER 3:

[INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER:

Basically, yeah, it is. And then the last thing I was going to talk to you about is some of the PowerPoint conversion tools. I don’t know, again, if anyone’s used any of these tools for converting PowerPoint into Flash.

SPEAKER 4:

[INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER:

Yeah. Okay. I mean, probably, for me, personally, it’s the one I use the most because I just know PowerPoint. So, again, there are a couple of things that you might look at. Now, these aren’t free. Well, Articulate certainly is not free – it’s quite expensive. It’s probably about 800 pounds for a version of the software. iSpring is ... you can download a free version of iSpring. But these allow you to work in PowerPoint really to create learning object type resources.

And really, you go through these steps of taking a PowerPoint, saying, okay, here’s my PowerPoint. And again, if you look at OER, there’s a lot of PowerPoints out there. People tend to stick PowerPoints up into things like slide share and sort of say, oh, there’s OER. And you look at it and think, well, it might have been usable in its original context, but maybe it’s not quite so usable in another context. And this is perhaps a way of allowing you to look at your PowerPoint and make it slightly more reusable.

So you basically sort of go through, amend the presentation – you can add narrations, and you can add interactivity in different ways. So, just as a very quick example, this was a midwife who came to me and said, I’ve got this PowerPoint on food hygiene, and I want to develop it as a little resource to give to my students so they can work on it at home. I normally give it as a lecture. It doesn’t work very well as a lecture, and I want to use it as something they can use at home.

So this was the PowerPoint that she came to me with. Quite a bit of text there, really. And so we said, okay, let’s look at this and see how we can actually look at converting this into a little learning object type resource that people can use.

So the first thing we said was – and with any resource, you probably have to put a little bit of context in there. To make it stand alone, to make it portable, you might need a bit of an introduction, you might need to think about how it’s going to navigate, some bits you might want to expand, and some bits you probably want to cut out. And, certainly if you’ve got an hour-long lecture, you probably want to think about breaking it down into sections.

Then we thought about the design. This was a design we came up with. There’s a bit of a green theme going on here, but this was the design we came up with for it. So this is all done in PowerPoint – there’s nothing very complex about this really at all. Sort of this nice picture of some lettuce, and so on – nice and healthy.

And then we developed this little wheel – button wheel. And the buttons just work by hyperlinks in PowerPoint. If you click on that bun, it says go to slide 52 or whatever. And likewise, there’s a menu here that just works by hyperlinking slides together. So it’s all really done in PowerPoint.

Then, writing the narration. And we spend quite a bit of time working with people about writing narration. How is it going to sound if it’s narrated? It’s not the same as a written document. And in Articulate, certainly, what we suggest to people is that you put the narration actually in the slide notes. And Articulate, if you’re using the template, will actually pick up the slide notes and display them for you if you so wish.

And then, looking at the slide design – so here’s one with causes of food poisoning – and there’s lots of bullet points – and we converted that into something, using OER, images, and so on, that is a bit more visual, with mouldy bread, and so on. And then adding interactivity. You can add interactivity actually quite simply, either by hyperlinking slides together, you can create little things – even little sort of quizzes – by hyperlinking to different slides. If you hit on this, go to that slide there, and so on.

You can use custom animation type settings in PowerPoint, and then there are interactive tools within things like Articulate and iSpring. They come with little interactive tools, quiz makers, and so on. Or again, can you can pull in web interactions. And the thing I like about Articulate is it will run web pages actually inside the framework, so again, the student doesn’t feel that they’re leaving. Or you can actually import Flash-based resources as well.

It’s only at this point really, you need to go into Articulate – I was just showing about hyperlinks and animations. And in Articulate, as I say, you have these sort of quiz makers, and so on that you can use if you so wish, or there are lots of free quiz makers out there that you can pull in.

Recording the narration – you can do that, actually, within Articulate, or you can record it separately and pull the files in. Just a case of sort of setting up the template you want to use. Looking at how the slides are going to move one to another. And then that’s it, really. So maybe I’ll show you, if this is going to work – so this is the resource that we’ve developed from that PowerPoint that ... For some reason it’s not ...

[STARTS VIDEO PLAYBACK]

NARRATOR:

As a midwife or health care professional, you will be involved in the preparation and delivery of food to your client room. A knowledge of food hygiene is essential in order to protect and promote the health of those you’re caring for. This is at the heart of your professional responsibility. Take a look at the NMC code that guides the professional conduct of midwives and nurses. Drag the correct words onto the blank spaces to complete the statement.

PRESENTER:

... not going to go through all that. Actually, this is a slight cheat, because this is the little Flash animation that we pulled in.

NARRATOR:

Now take a look at the health care professions [INAUDIBLE]. Legislation aims to protect consumers from illness, death or injury, and to ensure that food is nutritious and safe to eat. Employers must ensure that anyone who deals with food as part of their work is given training appropriate to the work they do. This applies to health trusts and care environments. But remember, you are personally accountable for your actions and omissions in practice.

Some of the legislation that you need to be aware of includes Regulation EC number 852 (2004) on the hygiene of foodstuffs, and the food hygiene regulations for England (2005), and the equivalent in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

PRESENTER:

I won’t go into ...

NARRATOR:

... Safer Foods for Better Business website, food hygiene is more than just ...

[ENDS VIDEO PLAYBACK]

PRESENTER:

Okay, I won’t go all the way through it, but you can have a look at some of these. So, what I suppose I’m saying is, these things are out there to use and, if I can use them, really anyone can, because I’m not at all technical, as you probably witnessed with my use of the computer. And they’re there. You can use them either to create OER – to create these bits to glue OER together, or sometimes even to aggregate OER together.

So what I’d like us to do is maybe have half an hour before coffee for you to have a look at some of these tools. They’re all available. As I say, Glomaker you can download as a free download. eXe you can. Xerte, I can give you a copy on a stick to have a look at. Articulate you can’t, because it’s a commercial product, but you can actually download a free 30-day trial, if you wanted to have a look at that.

And I think it’s just overdue to have a bit of a play with some of them.

And as I say, I’m not an expert in any of them, but I’ll try and help you actually go through. Okay?

SPEAKER 5:

Can I ask you how long it took to change that pamphlet?

PRESENTER:

That’s a good question. It does take a little bit of time. The good thing is, I think, in terms of expense, I didn’t have to involve one of our media developers, because I could just do that myself. Yeah, I mean, it would have taken a reasonable amount of time to do that. I don’t know off the top of my head how long it took me to do, but a few days of work to convert that and go through. But some of that you see was working with a tutor, going back and saying, what do you think of this? That kind of thing.

But, I think once you get into the flow of it, it’s fairly straightforward. And I have actually done things that perhaps aren’t as complex as this, where I’ve taken some of my lectures and just converted them, and been perhaps a little bit less rigorous in how I’ve gone about it, I suppose. So to get something that’s a bit more quick and dirty, really.

SPEAKER 5:

And how do you use those lectures again? [INAUDIBLE] Let’s take your best lecture and see if we can develop this as OER. And it would be something, I’d like to sell it to them as something that you can use again for the next five years, and it will save you time. Because that’s the only way I’m going to get them to invest their own time up front. So I just wondered how you’d actually use this.

PRESENTER:

In different ways. I mean, if it’s a lecture I’m giving, sometimes I would develop the Articulate and put some notes and so on, and give it to my students to use either before or after. Or if they prefer, instead of a lecture, although most of them don’t prefer to do that. Or sometimes, it is actually to replace a lecture.

So for this example here, the food hygiene, this was actually to replace a lecture that was given in this area, and the students can do it in their own time, and undertake an assessment, and so on, just to show that they’ve achieved the outcome. So there’s various ways. So yeah, I mean, and hopefully, this will be there for years to come now, and we can talk about in terms of saving time in that way, it will certainly allow the lecturer to use that time more efficiently, I would say. Perhaps rather than having to spend hours saying, food poisoning is caused by this, this and this, actually to sit down with the students, probably, and say, well, you’ve looked at that.

How do we address that in the health care environment? How do we start looking at hand hygiene and all those kinds of things? So I think it is – I mean, once they’re developed, they’re there. And it’s just a case of how you want to use them.

SPEAKER 6:

If OER is available for anybody to use, surely those people also need to have the same background programs to be able to alter it and adapt it?

PRESENTER:

No, no. To alter it and adapt it – yeah, if they wanted to alter it, they would, but you could make the PowerPoint available and, as I say, most of the work is in the PowerPoint, in terms of creating the links, and the design, and it’s only really – we tend to use Articulate to basically just zip it up, convert it into Flash, and compress it down. So you could certainly make the PowerPoint ... so you can make the end product available as an OER, and you can make the PowerPoint available as an OER.

And if somebody has Articulate or wants to download the free version, they can then modify it if they wish. Or they could put it into another PowerPoint converter. And as I say, there are some free converters, like iSpring has a free version that you could use. So, yeah, I think it still works in the realm of OER in that way. Or people might just take the PowerPoint and take bits out of the PowerPoint and make their own.

But the other tool – so all of the things I’ve shown you run independently of the tools. You don’t have to have the tool in order to run it. You just basically need Flash Player in order to run most of them. But you can, for most of them, download the tools free as well.

End transcript: Choosing tools

Download

Choosing tools

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

7 Making the case for OER

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

To some, the case for open educational resources is taken as self-evident. The internet is a great platform for sharing information at no apparent cost, so why not use it as a great platform for learning? This surface argument should not be dismissed – and indeed a ‘just get on and do it’ attitude has led to many people joining in. However, if you need to make a case for OERs, then it is useful to be able identify the benefits for each of those involved in using OERs – the learner, the organisation and the educator. OERs offer very apparent opportunities to those who receive content without charge; on the other hand, producing or teaching with OERs involves time and effort, and so the benefit to the provider or educator can be less obvious.

In this short section you will look at some benefits that do come to those who take part in providing and using OER. The particular case that is used to provide examples is the OpenLearn initiative at The Open University, although there are many other OER actions that could also be used to show benefits. OpenLearn has an advantage that when it launched in 2006, it was designed to be an experiment to see what impact offering open resources would have on the users of the site and on the University itself. The project was careful to gather information that would help see that impact and so can provide pointers to illustrations over a range of issues.

7.1 How does learning take place in the open?

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Activity 14: become a learner

Timing: Time: from 20 minutes to a lifetime

Using OpenLearn or any other source of OERs, find a topic that interests you. Now become a learner! Sign up and register or commit to starting working through the resource. This differs from asking you to review material and you may well find that you start to think about the presentation and design of material in different ways. Reflect on what you are looking for and what is keeping you going.

Does access to content bring benefits to users?

The primary aim of OpenLearn was to provide resources that were available as far as possible without any barrier to use and reuse. This meant providing free content that was accessible without any registration and with an explicit licence that allowed reuse. In OpenLearn we know that there were many people who made use of the site, with access of the resources reaching up to 11 million unique visitors per year. A majority of these visitors only access the site for a short time, but others engage more closely with the materials.

Surveys and study of the way the site is access revealed some interesting approaches and motivations in the way that people use the site. Using OpenLearn is seen both as a leisure activity that is fun in itself and also as a step towards more formal courses. The appeal of different aspects of the site clustered in the data around those who identified more social connections as the attraction (‘social leaners’) and those who were more interested in the structured learning material itself (‘volunteer students’). Social learners use the content as a way to connect with other people who shared the same interests and appear less interested in working through content. Volunteer students include those who want to learn but use the open resources for reasons of time, cost and opportunity.

Activity 15: what sort of learner?

Which are you – a social learner or a volunteer student? If you were looking for content to work through, do you want structure, pace and visible goals, or freer options with no need to assess yourself and links to other people interested in the same area? Of course, these are not exclusive motivations, but they do lead in different directions. Courses that are free but based strongly on formal structures with start dates and assessment show that there are significant numbers of users that are interested in being ‘volunteer students’.

7.2 Organisational benefits

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

For The Open University as an organisation, OpenLearn has brought a range of further benefits. There has been a steady flow of students recruited whose first exposure to OU content has been through OpenLearn. It is estimated that several thousand students have now registered with the OU through OpenLearn, generating real value in fees. In addition, inquirers who first use OpenLearn turn out to be more likely to become a student than if they came through other routes such a press campaign, or following on from a co-produced television programme.

Other benefits can be harder to measure in financial terms

Identified within OpenLearn study, other benefits of OER have helped experimenting with technology, improved routes for collaboration, allowed testing of new elements of the curriculum, and led to further funded research or development projects.

OpenLearn benefits

The benefits of OpenLearn to the OU include:

developing and extending the reputation of the University
deepening and broadening the community
contributing to the University’s information, advice, guidance, outreach and widening participation activities
lessons and benefits gained from exposing and describing the OU’s content through OpenLearn
the benefits of testing and experimenting with new technologies
creating and nurturing strategic partnerships
exploring, examining and improving organisational structures and processes
enhancing and building upon research strengths.

(A more complete list of OpenLearn’s benefits to the OU can be found in the OpenLearn Research Report.)

The benefits described above are partly attributable to the OU being a distance learning organisation, so allowing it to attract new students directly. However, survey work carried out by MIT on its OpenCourseWare project has also demonstrated the potential for similar benefits, with a growing proportion of its users being motivated learners who use open content as a way to explore their options for further study.

Activity 16: what benefits for organisations?

The OpenLearn study shows the advantages of looking for all aspects of information from an OER programme. Planning an evaluation and looking for expected gains has so far been revealing. If you are considering an OER intervention, then spend some time to think of what aspects you might review in order to learn from the experience of offering OER. Itemise the factors and then compare them to the list in the discussion below.

Discussion

Benefits that have the potential to be measured include:

student recruitment and retention
new partnerships/collaboration
activities or projects supported through OER.

More often benefits are less tangible but clearly exist:

opportunities to experiment
development of staff
low-level collaborations
enhanced reputation.

Involvement in open education can also give a good feeling of being part of an international community.

7.3 Benefits for you

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In many ways the biggest challenge is whether getting involved in using open education is something that you want to do. As with any activity, it takes time and energy. If you are involved in teaching, does the range of resources give you a better starting position than other approaches? Do the resources and approaches to pedagogy that are supported by OER suit your students and learning? If you are trying to persuade other people, are there benefits that will help the organisation to change?

Activity 17: retaking the quiz

Now that you’ve come to the end of this free course, you may want to retake the quiz to see how far you’ve come. We hope that you found the course useful and informative, and that as you go forward you will consider embedding open educational resources and practises into your own teaching and learning practice.

Final thoughts

OERs have the potential to spark radical change; they also offer ways to bring in new learners and find new ways of working. Review the reasons that fit with what you need to do and plan what you need to do to do more – if necessary, revisit the sections about identifying, finding and learning with OERs. Good luck.

Conclusion

The Open University — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This free course provided an introduction to studying education. It took you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and helped to improve your confidence as an independent learner.

RSS feed for Creating open educational resources

Quiz

Round 1: Images

Identify the Creative Commons licences

Question 1

Answer

Question 2

Answer

Question 3

Answer

Name the significant locations

Question 4

Answer

Question 5

Answer

Question 6

Answer

Define the symbols

Question 7

Answer

Question 8

Answer

Question 9

Answer

Question 10

Answer

Round 2: Acronyms

Define the acronyms

Question 1

Answer

Question 2

Answer

Question 3

Answer

Question 4

Answer

Question 5

Answer

Question 6

Answer

Question 7

Answer

Question 8

Answer

Round 3: Facts and figures

Answer these questions

Question 1

Answer

Question 2

Answer

Question 3

Answer

Question 4

Answer

Question 5

Answer

Question 6

Answer

Round 4: Proprietary or open source?

Define the applications

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

Question 8

Question 9

Question 10

Question 11

Question 12

Question 13

Question 14

Question 15

Round 5: Odd one out

Wikis

Wikis

Answer

Broadcasters