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“Together We Can Move Mountains” by Steve McCarthy for Fine Acts x OBI is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
CC lauds all of the open education community efforts, and we look forward to sharing additional highlights at the end of this year. The CC Open Education Platform funded projects include:
V Simpósio de RPG, Larp e Educação. The project will organize a symposium about tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and live action roleplaying (LARPs) on Human Rights Education, to be held remotely in Brazil in June 2024. The event will happen during 8 days with lectures, workshops and talks. Participants will be able to interact live with the speakers as the lectures are streamed, and all the recordings are going to be openly available after the event. The lecturers are also being invited to produce and send hands-on written digital materials detailing the instructions of the activity presented, and those are going to be compiled on an openly available digital book. Some of the lectures will approach how TTRPGs and LARPs can be used as tools to facilitate the inclusion and discussion of human rights in educational activities. After the event all of the produced material (videos and written content) will be openly available under CC-BY licenses.
Country: Brazil
Project Lead: Marcos Vinícius Carneiro Vital
An Open Education Club and OER for Climate Education in High Schools. The project will create awareness of OER in 20 High schools, introduce High School Students to the wide array of opportunities in OER and then use it as a tool for climate and environmental education. The project will organize special sessions on Open Education, form an Open Education club and then train club members on how to use OER for climate education and to build capacity for climate action (SDG 13).
Country: Ghana
Project Lead: Otuo-Akyampong Boakye
Empowering Librarians: Enhancing OER Awareness in Ghana’s Tertiary Schools. This project will raise awareness and utilization of Open Educational Resources (OER) among librarians, faculty, and students. The project will offer training on open licensing, co-creating curated collections of OER materials, as well as building partnership and advocacy, in order to empower librarians to effectively integrate OER into their institutions.
Country: Ghana
Project Lead: Stephen Dakyi
Open Education Initiative in Nepal. This project will establish an Open Education Initiative to enhance access to quality educational resources for all learners in Nepal, regardless of their location or socioeconomic background. The key components include using a centralized online platform, training educators on OER, promoting community outreach, investing in digital infrastructure, and advocating for policies promoting open education practices. The implementation plan includes a pilot phase, scaling up, and integration and sustainability. CC Nepal and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Government of Nepal) will collaborate together on this project.
Country: Nepal
Project Lead: Roshan Kumar Karn
Open Educational Resources for Yoruba Culture. This project will create a set of OER centered on the rich and diverse culture of the Yoruba people — one of Africa’s major ethnic groups, predominantly found in Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Through a series of video episodes, learners will be able to explore elements of Yoruba culture such as the language, food, music, festivals and names, and more.
Country: Nigeria
Project Lead: Isaac Oloruntimilehin
Supporting the UNESCO OER Recommendation
In addition to the five winning projects, CC and community members will continue to work closely with UNESCO on refining media “explainers,” about open licenses and their importance for global open education. Once video editing, graphics and translations are complete, we look forward to publishing them.
If you would like to get involved in CC’s open education community and activities, join us! Contact jennryn [at] creativecommons.org for more details.
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]]>The post Creative Commons and University of Nebraska at Omaha Partner on a Microcredential Course appeared first on Creative Commons.
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Creative Commons is proud to announce the launch of “Introduction to Open Educational Resources,” our first professional development microcredential course and partnership with the University of Nebraska at Omaha, commencing on 31 May.
This microcredential pilot started with one CC Certificate alumnus’s enthusiasm for open education. Craig Finlay, OER and STEM Librarian at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Libraries, took the CC Certificate course for Academic Librarians in September, 2021. Since then, he’s advocated for open education in a variety of capacities: managing UNO’s biannual campus Affordable Content Grants, which largely fund converting courses from using all traditional textbooks to using at least one open educational resource; hosting regular CC workshops for faculty on campus; and co-authoring a white paper exploring OER’s positive impact on student success. Co-creating the microcredential course offered the next step in applying his CC Certificate expertise and passion for open education. Craig was intent on bringing CC licensing expertise to more learners, seeking professional development, and UNO granted a pathway for this.
Over the course of the last several months, CC and UNO have developed the “Introduction to Open Educational Resources.” The course remixes Certificate lessons in open licensing, copyright, open education, fair use and the public domain. Content targets the ecosystem of scholarly and academic publishing and explores growing and managing open education efforts in these domains. Learners enrolling in this 9-week course will engage asynchronously, but should expect to work five hours per week to complete course work; successful completion will result in a microcredential for non-credit and professional education.
Beyond the course announcement, we wanted to share a few crucial elements that made this partnership successful:
- A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which outlined the goal, key roles, responsibilities and timeline for our work.
- A mutually viable financial model, which ensures this work can be sustainable for both institutions.
- Adaptability. Because this project involved multiple stakeholders, we needed to remain flexible to meet differing needs.
- Trust. Working together has been easy because of our basis in trust.
We share these key ingredients to this microcredential pilot because we expect the partnership can be replicated for a number of new communities. If you work at an institution and are interested in partnering with CC on a microcredential course related to CC Certificate course content, please contact certificates [at] creativecommons.org.
Note: The CC Certificate program was created as an investment in our open advocates around the world. CC built the training to strengthen the global communities’ work engaging in open movements in education, access and more recently, cultural heritage.
CC Certificate courses develop peoples’ practical expertise in open licensing, copyright, and ways to engage in open knowledge and culture movements. The program has certified over 1700 people in 65 countries with open licensing expertise. Through open licensing course content, CC supports communities making derivatives of the course, from Masters level courses, faculty workshops, an audio recording, to nine language translations, and more.
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]]>The post More California Community Colleges Get CC Certified! appeared first on Creative Commons.
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This December, Creative Commons led a CC Certificate Bootcamp, or condensed Certificate training, for faculty and staff from 16 different California Community Colleges implementing Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) degree programs. This marked the second CC Bootcamp for California Community Colleges after the California legislature invested $115 million to expand ZTC degrees and the use of open educational resources (OER) within the statewide California community college system. ZTC degrees and increased use of OER reduce the overall cost of education and shorten the time to degree completion for students. With the average cost of course textbooks estimated at $100/student/course, ZTC degrees are crucial for students’ higher education. Further, students’ grades achieved in ZTC programs are higher than in traditional courses.
The CC Certificate program provides training and tools for ZTC program faculty and staff to legally and effectively implement the open licensing requirements of California’s historic investment in education. After learning about copyright basics, fair use, the public domain, and CC licensing, participants brainstormed and initiated some great ways to support ZTC program faculty and student needs. Examples of participant work include using generative AI to create “Creative Commons Bots,” tools to help others learn about licensing, and test their own knowledge with quiz questions; creating a grants guide for OER funding; drafting a potential strategic plan for OER/ ZTC work (work in progress), and remixing previous courses or resources to address ZTC communications and learning needs for localized audiences (works in progress). See what participants are saying below.
“This is one of the best professional development experiences I’ve had in years”
“Thank you so much for sharing wonderful resources and CC practices. I will share this knowledge with my colleagues”
“You’ve nailed the condensed week workshop. So much fun, and creating work groups was really beneficial”
We are proud to support California Community Colleges’ collaboration as they strengthen their foundations for open education. CC is grateful to the Michelson 20MM Foundation for generously funding this bootcamp at San Bernardino Valley College. Special thanks also go to the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges for their liaison work, expertise and support, to San Bernardino Valley College for hosting the event, and to Fresno Pacific University for providing professional development credits to faculty.
If you’re interested in advancing open education efforts in your own institution, Creative Commons offers an array of learning, training, and consulting opportunities to support our global community in developing open licensing expertise and a deeper understanding of recommended practices for better sharing. Visit the CC Training & Consulting page to learn more about our training services, workshops, lectures, and CC Certificate courses. Register for our next CC Certificate online courses, starting 29 January.
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]]>The post CC Partners with SPARC and EIFL to Launch a 4-Year Open Climate Campaign appeared first on Creative Commons.
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To make open sharing of research outputs the norm in climate science, Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL are proud to launch a 4-year Open Climate Campaign with funding from Arcadia, which builds on planning funds from the Open Society Foundations. Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. While the existence of climate change and the resulting loss of biodiversity is certain, knowledge and data about these global challenges and the possible solutions, mitigations and actions to tackle them are too often not publicly accessible.
Many researchers, governments, and global environmental organizations recognize the importance of sharing research openly to accelerate progress, but lack cohesive strategies and mechanisms to facilitate effective knowledge sharing and collaboration across disciplinary and geographic borders.
During the COVID-19 crisis, the power of open access to democratize knowledge sharing, accelerate discovery, promote research collaboration, and bring together the efforts of global stakeholders to tackle the pandemic took center stage, as scientists embraced the immediate, open sharing of preprints, research articles, data and code. This adoption of openness contributed to the rapid sequencing and sharing of the virus’s genome, the quick development of therapeutics, and the fastest development of effective vaccines in human history. The lessons learned during the pandemic can and should be applied to accelerate progress on other urgent problems facing our society.
We now have the opportunity to take open access lessons learned from the COVID-19 experience, and intentionally craft a coordinated campaign to apply it to an equally essential challenge — climate change.
When knowledge about climate change and biodiversity is not freely and openly available to all, only part of humanity is able to help build on that knowledge. When only some people are able to contribute to that knowledge, new insights and possible solutions are missing. When the data that supports research is inaccessible, scientists cannot fully assess or replicate results. Addressing a challenge as dramatic as the climate crisis and its effects on global biodiversity will require that everything we know is available to everyone to understand and augment. The Campaign will go beyond just sharing climate and biodiversity knowledge, to expand the inclusive, just and equitable knowledge policies and practices that enable better sharing.
This global Open Climate Campaign will:
- Bring attention to the issue of access to knowledge on climate change particularly to researchers who are producing the knowledge and informing them of tools that can open their research outputs.
- Work directly with national governments, funders and environmental organizations to identify legal and policy barriers; help governments create, adopt, implement equitable open access policies to overcome them; and make it easier to open and share their climate change research, data and educational resources.
- Identify, engage, and contribute to draft international frameworks to include funder open access policy recommendations, and promote the public benefits of open access knowledge.
- Identify important existing climate and biodiversity research publications not already open access, and unbind those seminal publications to make them open access.
- We will also explore tactics to facilitate changes in publisher actions to ensure future climate and biodiversity research is open access.
- Engage with researchers, universities and policy makers from traditionally excluded groups and geographical regions to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.
We look forward to mobilizing researchers, national governments, funders and environmental organizations by providing them with direct, hands-on support to open access to knowledge about climate change and biodiversity preservation.
CC, SPARC and EIFL are already succeeding at helping national governments adopt open access policies to share knowledge with the public. On 26 August, the U.S. Government published new guidance for all federal agencies to make all publicly funded research and related data fully open immediately upon publication (read posts about the US announcement from CC and SPARC). The Open Climate Campaign will support more policy work like this, with more national governments, funders and environmental organizations, to foster the knowledge sharing policies and practices we need to empower everyone to learn about and contribute to climate change and biodiversity solutions.
To learn more about the Open Climate Campaign or to connect, please visit the Open Climate Campaign website.
Read the press release of the Campaign’s launch.
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]]>The post An Open Letter to President-elect Biden appeared first on Creative Commons.
]]>First, I’d like to offer my sincere congratulations to you and to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. This has been such a difficult year for so many around the world, and in this time of extreme polarization it is encouraging to hear you both talk about bringing people together to meet our common challenges. For many years I was a Member of the European Parliament, and I know how incredibly important it is to build bridges and work collaboratively with people we don’t always agree with.
I’m writing today as the leader of Creative Commons, a global nonprofit organization focused in part on making valuable scientific research and educational resources freely and openly available to the public. We work with universities, companies, governments, and institutions around the world to develop solutions for providing unencumbered access to knowledge.
In your 2016 speech to the American Association for Cancer Research, you quoted an article written by our then-CEO, Ryan Merkley, about the unnecessary barriers to publicly funded research. You noted that “taxpayers fund $5 billion in cancer research every year, but once it’s published, nearly all of [it] sits behind walls.” You correctly suggested that better treatments might be developed more quickly if cancer researchers, as well as the general public, had access to the rich trove of publicly funded research and data that is locked up behind prohibitive paywalls.
The COVID-19 health crisis has underscored the urgent need for scientific research and data to be shared freely and openly with others. Several of the most significant funders of scientific research, including the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust have long-standing open access policies. But many others do not, and as a result, many of the diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics, medical equipment, and software solutions currently being developed in the fight against the pandemic will not reach and benefit as many people as quickly and effectively as they should.
Additionally, as you are very well aware, the pandemic has massively disrupted the lives of over a billion students around the world. For many, access to educational materials is a daily struggle even in normal times. Because of a myriad of barriers, such as the prohibitive cost of learning resources, or the legal maze of convoluted copyright rules and exceptions, many students are denied their fundamental human right to education.
This year’s shift to online learning has introduced many new complexities for both students and educators. While some educators can post their existing learning materials online for their students, for others, the move to online requires access to, and the legal rights to perpetually use and adapt materials developed by others. This has brought into focus the essential need for both broad access to Open Educational Resources (OER) and broad copyright limitations and exceptions (L&E) for educators and students to freely and legally use copyright works so all students everywhere can learn.
At Creative Commons, we believe that open access to knowledge is critical—especially during times of crisis. For nearly 20 years, we have collaborated closely with entities including the US government to make the world more equitable by overcoming obstacles to the sharing of knowledge. In these unprecedented times, our mission is more important than ever, and I look forward to working with you and your administration in developing solutions that unlock knowledge and make it possible for anyone, anywhere to access and build upon it.
Sincerely,
Catherine Stihler
CEO, Creative Commons
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]]>The post Our Book, “Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians,” Is Now Available appeared first on Creative Commons.
]]>The book, Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians, is now published under CC BY and offers an additional way to access the openly licensed CC Certificate content. It’s available in print at the ALA store, or it can be downloaded from our website!
Whether you’re a volunteer, professor, instructional designer, researcher, administrator or technologist—or simply looking for a great holiday gift—this book offers a background on copyright law, as well as a clear guide to open licensing and open advocacy. You can read this book on its own or while taking the CC Certificate course.
The ALA is the oldest and largest library association in the world, “providing leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.”
After initial collaboration with the ALA on “Copytalk” webinars, we were delighted to partner with them for this project under the shared goal of increasing equitable access to information.
Download or buy a hardcopy of Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians today!
Interested in taking the CC Certificate? Check out our website to learn more. For additional information about this collaboration with the ALA, read our previous post, “Book Preview: “Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians.”
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]]>The post NGO Network to Support Implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation appeared first on Creative Commons.
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New UNESCO House in Paris. United Nations. 1958-September-01 / CC BY-NC-ND
The UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation was unanimously adopted on November 25 by 193 UNESCO member states at the 40th UNESCO General Conference. This milestone offers a unique opportunity to advance open education around the world.
Why does it matter? This Recommendation is an official UNESCO instrument that gives national governments a specific list of recommendations to support open education in their countries and to collaborate with other nations.
Creative Commons is thrilled with this important milestone! We’ve been working on open education with UNESCO, the Commonwealth of Learning, and multiple national government and institutional partners for over 15 years. CC was on the drafting committee for both the 2012 UNESCO OER Declaration and the 2019 UNESCO OER Recommendation. In 2015, CC worked with UNESCO on its Open Access Repository. CC also attended and keynoted the 2017 UNESCO OER Global Congress.
Recognizing the importance of the UNESCO OER Recommendation, a coalition of organizations active in advancing open education globally has joined forces to support its implementation. Coalition partners, in alphabetical order, are:
- Commonwealth of Learning
- Creative Commons
- International Council for Open and Distance Education
- Jožef Stefan Institute
- Knowledge 4 All
- Open Education Global
- Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO
- SPARC Europe
- SPARC North America
- CC thanks our colleagues at Open Ed Global for coordinating the network meetings.
The coalition will collectively leverage these organizations’ strengths and expertise, combining and coordinating efforts to create and deliver comprehensive resources and services in support of implementing the Recommendation across all UNESCO member states. The coalition will meet in early 2020 to develop a list of services, materials, activities, and communication plans that we will use to support national governments. Implementation support will be focused on providing assistance for the Recommendation:
Five areas of action:
- Building capacity of stakeholders to create, access, use, adapt and redistribute OER
- Developing supportive policy
- Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER
- Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER
- Facilitating international cooperation
Monitoring and reporting:
- Deploying appropriate research programmes, tools and indicators to measure effectiveness
- Collecting, presenting, and disseminating progress, good practices innovations and research reports
- Strategies for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness and long-term financial efficiency of OER
For more information contact:
Dr. Cable Green
Interim CEO & Director of Open Education
Creative Commons
cable@ creativecommons dot org
Jennryn Wetzler
Assistant Director of Open Education
Creative Commons
jennryn@ creativecommons dot org
The coalition also welcomes questions, requests, and suggestions using this form.
CC is excited to work together with stakeholders around the world in building open education capacity and effectiveness. Together we can fulfill the aims and objectives of the UNESCO OER Recommendation and make significant progress in achieving access to quality education for all. Let’s get to work.
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]]>The post We Support the UNESCO Recommendation on OER appeared first on Creative Commons.
]]>The UNESCO Recommendation on OER* sets out a transformative vision of open education, contributing to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
Below are the five objectives from the draft Recommendation. You can also view the entire document here.
1. Capacity building: developing the capacity of all key education stakeholders to create, access, use, adapt, and redistribute OER, as well as to use and apply open licenses in a manner consistent with national copyright legislation and international obligations;
2. Developing supportive policy: encouraging governments, and education authorities and institutions to adopt regulatory frameworks to support open licensing of publicly funded educational materials, develop strategies to enable use and adaptation of OER in support of high quality, inclusive education and lifelong learning for all, and adopt integrated mechanisms to recognize the learning outcomes of OER-based programmes of study;
3. Effective inclusive and equitable access to quality OER: supporting the adoption of strategies and programmes, including through relevant technology solutions that ensure OER in any medium are shared in open formats and standards to maximize equitable access, co-creation, curation, and search ability, including for those from vulnerable groups and persons with disabilities;
4. Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER: supporting and encouraging the creation of sustainability models for OER at national and institutional levels, and the planning and pilot test of new sustainable forms of education and learning;
5. Facilitating international cooperation: supporting international cooperation between stakeholders to minimize unnecessary duplication in OER development investments and to develop a global pool of culturally diverse, locally relevant, gender-sensitive, accessible, educational materials in multiple languages.
Here’s a brief timeline of the efforts leading up to the UNESCO Recommendation on OER and CC’s continued engagement:
- 2019: Member states and observer organizations, including Creative Commons, provided multiple edits to the Recommendation draft including an improved open license definition; calling on member states to support the linguistic translation of open licenses; adopting high standards for privacy in OER, platforms, and services; and a call to facilitate open procurement.
- 2017: The 2nd World Congress unanimously adopted the 2017 Ljubljana OER Action Plan. The Congress hosted 30 ministers of education and participants from over 100 countries, with the goal of mainstreaming open education to meet the education targets in the United Nations SDG4.
- 2015: UNESCO announced a new Open Access Repository making more than 300 digital reports, books, and articles available to the world under CC licenses, in line with the 2013 UNESCO Open Access Policy.
- 2012: The groundwork for the current OER Recommendation was laid in the 2012 Paris OER Declaration.
In partnership with our open education colleagues, CC will provide a suite of professional development, policy, networking, and consulting services to national governments as they engage in national and regional efforts to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendation in 2020. Stay tuned!
*Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, adaptation, and redistribution by others.
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]]>The post Meet Our First CC Certificate Scholarship Recipients! appeared first on Creative Commons.
]]>Today, we are proud to highlight our first 10 CC Certificate Scholarship recipients. The CC Certificate provides an-in depth study of Creative Commons licenses and open practices, uniquely developing participants’ open licensing proficiency and understanding of the broader context for open advocacy.
From CC Brazil: photo of Juliana Monteiro, Museóloga freelancer and Profa. no Curso Técnico de Museologia, by Sebastiaan ter Burg, licensed CC BY 4.0
After launching the official CC Certificate courses in July of 2018, we offered 18 scholarships a year later. We’re thrilled to enroll our first scholarship recipients in the September 2019 and January 2020 classes! They join the ranks of 507 other participants from 42 countries or territories who have enrolled in CC Certificate courses. These initial scholarships are just the start. We aim to increase the number of scholarships we offer by 50% next year, and further increase the number in subsequent years.
Although we share more about our scholarship recipients on the CC Certificate website, we are delighted to name them here:
September 2019 courses:
Alice Joseph Mihayo
Brian Ssennoga
Fitriayu Penyalai
Margaret Lopez
January 2020 courses:
Juliana Monteiro
Margorie Merel
Jorge Gemetto
Nurunnaby Chowdhury
Raphel Berchie
Roshan Kumar Karn
How does the scholarship program work?
It’s simple. Creative Commons offers as many scholarship tickets as we can to CC Network Chapters. As leaders in the field with regular connection to local community members, Chapter leads and representatives determine the recommended scholarship recipients. They send scholarship recommendations and contact information to CC, and we help recipients register in the Librarian or Educator Certificate courses.
The Scholarship program covers 80% of the recipient’s ticket, requiring scholarship recipients to contribute the remaining US $100.
From CC Nepal: Photo by Roshan Kumar Karn, Director of Open Access Nepal, licensed CC BY 4.0
In this initial round, we’ve prioritized scholarships for CC network members in Global South countries who want to use Certificate knowledge to fuel their own community efforts and “pay it forward” to their communities. Once we are able to offer all interested CC Country Chapters in the Global South at least one scholarship, we will provide scholarships to other CC Country Teams until, one day, we’ll have at least one community member trained in every interested CC Network country.
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]]>The post Mainstreaming OER in Latin America and The Caribbean appeared first on Creative Commons.
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Participants at the Latin America and Caribbean Regional Consultation on Open Educational Resources. Photo by the Commonwealth of Learning, CC BY 4.0
The fifth Regional OER Consultation for the Latin America and Caribbean region was held in Sao Paulo, Brazil on 3rd-4th April. The event was in preparation for the 2nd OER World Congress that will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in September of this year. The meeting was organized by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), alongside partners UNESCO, University of Campinas, the Government of Slovenia, and made possible by the generous support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The event brought together 31 government officials and key education stakeholders from 18 countries to discuss concerns and issues for mainstreaming OER to support inclusive and equitable quality education.
The opening session was launched by President and CEO of COL, Prof. Asha Kanwar, and Joe Hironaka, OER Programme Specialist from UNESCO Paris. There were also remarks made by Brazilian officers demonstrating why Brazil is the most vanguard country on OER policy in the region. The Brazilian Ministry of Education announced that it will soon discuss a federal bill where all educational resources would be made available under open licenses. Meanwhile, the Secretary of Education of the São Paulo local government talked about the 2012 state bill that required all educational resources funded by the public to be openly licensed and outlined the challenges to promote innovation and a new education culture of sharing and knowledge building.
The technical sessions began with the presentation of Prof. Kanwar, who emphasized that COL believes that learning must lead to sustainable development as outlined in Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). It was argued that early reports revealed that many countries would fall behind the 2030 target to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. As such, innovative approaches are instrumental to achieve both speed and scale. In addition, she stated that OER has a tremendous potential for increasing access and mitigating the cost of quality education.
Prof. Kanwar presented an overview of the surveys to governments and educational stakeholders currently in progress to provide a context for detailed deliberation. These surveys show a significant interest for developing national OER policies throughout publicly-funded programmes and projects that promote flexible learning that increases access, efficiency, and quality of educational resources. Alongside the potential benefits, the barriers to mainstreaming OER relate to insufficient access to quality content, lack of users’ capacity, lack of appropriate policies, changing business models, and language and cultural barriers.
OER UNESCO Chair and local host from the University of Campinas, Tel Amiel, followed with remarks that Latin America and the Caribbean is at an early stage regarding the adoption of OER. Although many of the countries in the region do show high use and practices of digital resources like remixing and open licensing, he pointed to two main reasons why there is delayed uptake: lack of visibility, and a lack of mobilization/articulation. There is a challenge to expose more and better OER initiatives within the region like the higher education open textbook initiative LATin, funded by the European Commission that gathered 12 countries, 9 from Latin America, or TEMOA, a knowledge hub and multilingual catalog of OER for Mobile Learning. EducAR, the national repositories of digital resources for K-12 education in Argentina, is the first repository to include an institutional OER policy (adopting the CC BY-NC-SA license) for most of the resources. This should be an example for other Latin American countries, specially being a member of Latin American Network of Educational Portals RELPE and the Iberoamerican Network for Educational Repository Usability RIURE.
Regarding mobilization/articulation, the OER initiatives of the region need to be better identified, for example through a project that maps OER activities as the OER Worldmap, where only two countries (Chile and Brazil) have “champions” to upload OER data. Again, Brazil leads the way with the recently launched Iniciativa Educaçao Aberta, kickstarted by the UNESCO Chair at UNICAMP, and the Educadigital Institute, which brings together productions, academic research, publications, repositories, distance-learning, and other projects in Brazil.
The OER UNESCO/ICDE/COL Chair, Rory McGreal, highlighted one of the biggest educational challenges for all countries: by 2025 there will be an increased demand for learning from 98 million new students. To meet this demand there would be a need to establish 4 traditional universities per week, an impossible task, so it’s urgent to develop and deploy new forms of teaching and learning to meet this tremendous future demand.
Even as we begin to address this incredible challenge, we face tremendous opposition from the traditional copyright industries. Mr. McGreal gave a brief history that copyright (or similar notions of it) going as far back as the 6th Century have attempted to restrict access to information and knowledge. But he advocated that copyright should be a tool to build the right balance between the “encouragement of learning” to society and the rights of authors and creators. OER, understood as technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users, clashes against the currently-unbalanced copyright rules. Copyright law frustrates potential new educational uses of copyrighted works, such as remixing to create a new resources, adaptation to varied learning contexts, extraction to remove assets, localization and translation to other languages or reuse/repurpose of the resources. Copyright is an obstacle to assemble or “deboning” OER in courses, especially for e-learning settings, further complicated by digital rights management (DRM) and restrictive digital licenses.
I work at the Library of National Congress of Chile, and followed with the challenges related to designing and implementing an OER policy. Presenting two real cases from Chile, a frustrated experience with personalized web-based platforms and the corrupted/poor quality public textbook market, I highlighted the first challenge for OER policy is to approach today’s educational challenges with specific, pragmatic, sustainable solutions at different levels guided by the OER principles and open practices. The necessary condition to shape OER as a response to educational challenges is OER capacity building for all education stakeholders.
Regarding capacity building, a major initial task is to advocate for the benefits and potential—and also address risks and barriers—of openness in educational processes for teaching and learning. This focus on the outcomes of the educational process is part of a maturity of the process of how openness impacts education, where as 5 or 10 years ago the focus was on infrastructure, licensing, and creating a volume of resources. There is a growing body called “Open Educational Practices” and “Open Pedagogies” emerging through the use of digital technology, a true reflection on how openness catalyses innovation. As we advocate for the massive potential of OER, we also have the opportunity to correct partial or misleading notions about “openness”, as there is still much confusion related on what openness is and how it relates to education.
Another issue around capacity building for stakeholders is to support them with resources and tools for OER Policies, such as COL’s Guidelines for Open Educational Resources for Higher Education, the Institutional OER Policy Template, the OER Policy Development Tool, the OER Policy Registry, and other excellent resources for college and university governance officials. UNESCO’s OER Country Policy Template is a tool that articulates the goals of the policy, outlines the purpose and rationale of the policy, and provides information on why the policy is necessary and what it will accomplish. Another venue for information sharing and action is the Open Policy Network (OPN), whose mission is to foster the creation, adoption and implementation of open policies and practices by supporting advocates, organizations and policy makers. The OPN is responsible for the Global Open Policy report that tracks the spread of open policies around the world with a systematic overview of open policy development, as well as the Institute for Open Leadership that trains new leaders on the values and implementation of openness in licensing, policies, and practices.
Research is also today an important asset for OER advocacy and policy-making. There is a growing body of evidence and recommendations on the process of adoption and impact of the use of OER in educational settings, with initiatives like the PhD student GOGN network, the OER Research Hub from the UK Open University, the Open Education Group in the U.S. Increasingly pertinent to developing and emerging countries is the Research on Open Educational Resources for Development ROER4D, a evidence-based research project from 26 countries in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle Asia and Southeast Asia, with the objective to improve educational policy, practice, and research in developing countries by better understanding the use and impact of OER.
The final issue around capacity building for all education stakeholders is the need to build a compelling and encouraging narrative about the benefits and potential of OER. A good example is the Open Washington OER Network that features videos of grassroots reports from the field, end-user practices in the use and impact of OER, and policy videos with interviews with experts in various areas of OER. These are woven into a series of multimedia presentations on Open Education policy strategy, implementation, and vision.
I closed by exploring the Open Government Partnership as a platform to advocate for OER policy, especially as countries begin to include education in their action plans. I highlighted initiatives from Chile and Brazil working to do this.
These presentation were followed by exciting and thoughtful group discussions with all the participants to focus on concrete action, such as strategies for mainstreaming OER and exploring national OER practices to tackle SDG4. Also drafted was a list of commitments that will to added to and synthesized for the global report leading up to the World OER Congress.
Read the full report from COL here.
View video presentations here.
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