All posts by Felix Wilson

As part of the research process for the OEL Project, we have reviewed intellectual property policies of Australian Universities to understand what rights they give to employees over the teaching materials that they  develop during the course of their duties. In general, the intellectual property policies of Australian universities have been much more concerned with the commercial potential of research outcomes, with little attention given to teaching resources.

The majority of universities retain ownership of these resources, some provide rights to staff through a licence, and a few grant copyright to the staff creating the resource. Without copyright ownership, or at least an explicit licence, teachers who would share their resources as open educational resources must either work outside of formal permission or seek permission outside of the intellectual policy framework if they wish to share teaching resources. The responses to the OEL Project survey suggested that at least half of respondents shared resources freely outside their institutions, though it is possible that these individuals are working in institutions which grant them that right.

For institutions who are considering adopting more OER friendly policies, the OER Policy Development Tool, from Lumen Learning allows users to simply check boxes to create a draft policy document.

Click to build a new OER Policy

By selecting and adding components from different sections users create a policy document which which adheres to their vision of what OER should be at their institution. Individual policy components are drawn from existing policy documents and are linked for users who wish to view the component in context.

Perhaps it is unlikely that an Australian University will adopt a policy developed by selecting components, but this tool allows the decision making around policy setting related to OER to be clearly considered and draft policies representing different levels of commitment to open practices to be developed quickly and simply, and to be based on good practice from other institutions.

Our Research page has been updated and now contains more information about recent developments in the OEL project, including about our survey results, toolkit development, and dissemination plans.

Analysis of the survey data and information gained from follow up interviews have now been incorporated into specifications for the OEL Toolkit. The finished toolkit will provide a naviagational structure for accessing information on OER licensing in the Australian higher education sector. By identifying the needs of academic and professional staff working with OER licensing, the toolkit will provide access to valuable, practical advice starting from the five nodes of the OER lifecycle: finding, using, making, sharing, and reviewing.

Staff from the Tasmanian Institute of Learning and Teaching (TILT), at the University of Tasmania, are currently well underway with the technical development of the toolkit. To gather input as the toolkit develops, we are holding a series of stakeholder workshops to demonstrate and seek critical input on the toolkit. The first workshop was held at Curtin university in Perth on 7 July 2016. Feedback from workshop participants will be used to refine the technical and informational aspects of the toolkit. The coming months will see further workshops around Australia, where more developed versions of the toolkit will be demonstrated.

A consortium of investors including the Bill and Melinda gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation have provided $US9.8 million dollars for a major initiative to create a library of open educational resources developed for a grouping of 38 community colleges but available to anybody  to adopt, reuse, and repurpose.

This kind of initiative is exciting because although there are often culturally specific aspects of educational resources which may require further work before they can be adopted internationally, they are freely available and come with permission to do that, or any other kind of repurposing meaning that the impact will be far larger than just the US community colleges who wil benefit most immediately.

The direct benefits for students with limited financial resources are easy to quantify, for every course that is based solely on OER the cost of a text book can be deducted from the budget required to participate fully in that course.

…costs of textbooks are about $1,300 per year for a full-time community college student…

The ongoing and broader benefits of making a high quality and coherent collection of resources available freely are perhaps harder to measure but probably more important. Unlike funding for textbooks these resources will have multiple and can assist in delivering better educational outcomes globally.

David Wiley, whose organisation Lumen Learning is involved with the program has posted the press release and a list of the colleges and organisations supporting this effort: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/4636

If you’ve found yourself confused about what open means in particular contexts, Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek’s essay Fifty shades of Open might be a useful read. It goes into depth about the history and context that have led to the range of usage of the word in a scholarly and readable account.

This snowballing growth of openness is socially beneficial, and, we believe, will make the world a better place. The one downside, however, is this: as openness increasingly comes to be the norm, more phraseological neologisms will be coined using the word “open.” As the word ”open“ is used more, it will inevitably be used in new, and sometimes confusing, ways. Ambiguity leads to misinterpretation. This essay is an attempt to disambiguate the many meanings of the word ”open.“

The essay covers a wide range of activities and warns against increasing use of the term outside its accepted meaning, as discussed by Rolin Moe for example in many of the online courses dubbed MOOCs which required enrollment, sometimes payment to receive certification, and in which access to resources is strictly controlled.

The continuum of openness created by the OEL Project team also offers a way to think about degrees of openness, though it is a tool for considering the spectrum of options available rather than an attempt at definition. The continuum includes legal, technical, and accessibility as aspects of openness, acknowledging that barriers to access are not simply legal.

Both are available under Creative Commons licences.

The development of OER and MOOCs in Australia has been slower than in similar countries, one possible explanation for this is the more restrictive copyright regime. The OEL Project aims to assist Australian Universities to compete internationally by developing a toolkit which will clarify issues around copyright and openness in open online education. Many Australian universities have experimented with offering online courses freely, but the complexities and costs around the licensing of content make this more difficult than in other jurisdictions.

In this context the Austrade plan reported on by the Australian Financial Review (Access may be restricted to subscribers) that includes a ‘target’ of 110 million students enrolled in Australian MOOCs by 2025 seems quite ambitious.

The 110 million student goal, equivalent to 21,900 per cent growth, assumes Australian educators would aggressively market online education – so-called massive open online courses, or MOOCs – worldwide. These short courses are easy to access and are cheap, with prices ranging from several hundred dollars.

International education is currently one of Australia’s top service exports, valued at $19.65 billion in 2015 (including fees and associated expenditure) and supports over 130,000 jobs in cities and regions throughout Australia.

Australia should be pursuing ambitious goals around the provision of online access to high quality educational resources. Clarifying the copyright and licensing issues for universities through an easy to use toolkit will assist in this. The narrow focus of the report on adding revenue ignores the potentials of open licensing to improve access to education for millions of future students and to help lower costs for institutions offering online courses globally from Australia. It also ignores the real barriers for Australian institutions wanting to compete with their international peers under Australia’s current copyright framework.

While looking for potential resources for the toolkit, which will incorporate as much relevant and appropriately licensed content as possible, we came across a useful series of modules for those who are beginning to learn about open educational resources and practices created by the Open Washington network. This video is a fun and brief introduction that incorporates a variety of perspectives on OER:

There are many web sites devoted to explaining open educational resources and practices to novices and we want to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ as much as possible in developing the toolkit. The strength of the open approach to creating teaching resources is that it allows you to adapt the best of what is available and add or adpat it to make what you need. But finding high quality content that is appropriate legally, not too geographically specific, is accurate and suits the tone of the toolkit we want to create can be a challenge, just like identifying appropriate resources for use in a classroom. There are many excellent resources available online for us to find, adapt, and share within the toolkit, but finding them can involve a lot of searching and evaluation to identify the most useful and appropriate content.

Fifteen years ago on 4 April 2001, MIT announced a plan to post its course materials on the Web, freely available to everybody. The NY Times reported on the initial two-year pilot program to put material from 500 existing MIT courses onto the Web.

And 15 years later – look at it now.

MIT Open CourseWare currently makes material from 2260 courses available and receives over 2 million visits each month from all over the world. It also incorporates MITx interactive online courses from the MIT Office of Digital Learning, delivered via the edX platform.

Many of the issues around making course material openly available online that were identified as concerns in the 2001 article, are still being discussed. Will it make students less likely to come to class? Is creating websites a good use of professors’ time? Is the university giving away valuable assets? Even though the discussion is continuing, the online availability of open courseware from universities around the world is now a given, and the only question is how will it be integrated into the future of education delivery.

MIT makes its Open CourseWare material available under a CC BY-NC-SA licence and provides its own interpretation of non-commercial use. Primarily this states that: ‘users may not sell, profit from, or commercialize OCW materials or works derived from them’.

MIT continues to innovate in the area, having just released the report Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reforms (April 2016) that studies the impacts of online learning on the higher education community from a policy perspective  As the authors’ point out:

…the question “Where does online education fit in higher education?” rapidly leads to existential questions about the what and why of higher education itself. [Karen E Willcox, Sanjay Sarma Online Education: A Catalyst for Higher Education Reform April 2016 p.iii]

In Australia, the Department of Communications and the Arts is currently considering a Bill to update copyright law.

The aim is to introduce some minor simplifications and modernisations to the Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) to help the disability, education, libraries and archives sectors operate in the digital environment. For the education sector, the changes would simplify the use of copyright material by removing many of the current complex provisions around the copying and communication of copyright works for educational purposes, replacing them with a simplified test to protect the interests of copyright owners.

The change doesn’t include all the changes suggested by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) in their 2014 report which proposed the introduction of either Fair Use or Fair Dealing for Education. However; this small simplification of the statutory educational licences could be one step towards improved flexibility for educational institutions operating in the online environment.

Australian universities have just been ranked second in the Times Higher Education World’s Most International Universities 2016 so a more flexible copyright law should help Australian institutions as they expand their role in the global market.