OER has received a bit of newspaper coverage recently. I thought it worthwhile linking to these newspaper articles and picking out what I thought were the most interesting points.

‘Self-learners’ creating university of online’. Richard Woods, The Sunday Times, October 11, 2009. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6869552.ece

Students who are using materials for pleasure are being motivated to sign up for courses.

OER is reinvigorating lifelong learning – especially now there is no longer a subsidy for educational courses for people who already have qualifications (unless the course carries a higher qualification than they already have).

iTunes U and YouTube EDU are attracting materials from some of the world’s most prestigious universities. For example, Oxford University has had over 1 million downloads on iTunes U.

The article demonstrates how popular some items on these sites can be. For example:

• Marianne Talbot of Oxford University gave a lecture called ‘A romp through the history of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the present day’. It has topped the list of most-downloaded items on iTunes U. “It was a perfectly ordinary lecture I gave to an audience, but the university asked me if I’d mind if they recorded it and made a podcast. The next thing I knew it had hit No 1.”
• At MIT the Open CourseWare site is attracting 1.2m visits a month — many from students at other universities looking for additional resources, but many also what MIT calls “self-learners”, often working professionals who want to further their education.

Universities who are using these various open forums see them as a tool for self-promotion. All the big players dabbling in this market make materials available but you cannot get a qualification from them without enrolling on a course.

‘Any student, any subject, anywhere’. Harriet Swain, The Guardian, Tuesday 10 November 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/10/web-technology-degree-future-online

David Wiley, of Brigham Young University in Utah, a leading commentator on the open learning movement, predicts HE splitting apart. “I don’t know whether in future the people who answer questions, provide content and provide the degree will be in the same institution. It’s likely that institutions will specialise in just one of those areas and then form partnerships with other institutions that play other roles.” This has already happened in Utah, where Western Governors University does not require students to take a specific course or attend a certain number of classes, but concentrates on measuring competency.

Students can draw on knowledge of a subject picked up through work or courses taken elsewhere to pass a degree more quickly and flexibly. Alison Littlejohn, chair of learning technology at Glasgow Caledonian University, says some UK universities are already testing business models that involve students learning flexibly, or joining a course for free and paying only if they want to be assessed.

Gilly Salmon, professor of e-learning and learning technologies at the University of Leicester, is keen for academics to focus on being with the students physically or virtually, rather than spending all their time writing material.

OER is great in principle but the business model has to be right. MIT started putting course material on the web to showcase the brilliance of MIT academics to those unable to afford the annual fees of $36,000+. But it costs between $10,000 and $15,000 to put the material from each course online (licensing and formatting). As a result, the university has to appeal for donations and corporate sponsors. Utah State University, one of the most prolific publishers of online course material after MIT, recently put its Opencourseware project on ice after failing to raise the extra $120,000 a year the project needed to survive.

Comments from the publion these articles include:

Ex-students saying how useful podcasts of their lectures would have been

Problem down-the-line of academics losing the skills and capacity “to create their own content and tell their own stories”

“Well intentioned but entirely misplaced colonialism”

The latest copyright clearance query I have had is about ‘screen-grabs’ from browsers and software programs.

Do they need to be cleared?

Here are three examples:

Showing a Powerpoint Slide with AnalySeries Software

Showing a Powerpoint Slide with AnalySeries Software

Screen Grab from Browser showing data from ODP site

The first thing to realise is that the ‘method’ used to publish these originals does not make any difference to their ownership.  The fact that the data is published on a ‘web-site’ doesn’t give any further rights to use them.

So there being ‘screen-grabs’ is neither here nor there.

Therefore the quick answer must be ‘yes’ they do need to be cleared, however in this case there may be other reasons why you can go ahead and use them without clearance:

Graphs & Tables of Data:

First, the graphs have all come from American state-funded organisations and we know that their material has all been released into the ‘public domain’ in the US,  so we can use those anyway… If the original data had belonged to the OS or BGS, then it most probably would of been protected by ‘database rights’ in the UK, so we would have had to ask the owner for permission.

Software Screen-grabs:

Although in strict legal terms, there could be some copyright held within the program design, in reality they can be considered very low-risk.  It is normal for any product from software to be the copyright of the user of the software, not the software-maker (if you make an image in Photoshop, it is your copyright – not Adobes).  So you would not need to contact the software producer, just the user who made the screengrab which is normally much easier.

Basically:

Diagrams and Graphs do need to be cleared, even if taken from a screen-grab, although there may be some ways around this, such as re-presenting the data in another form.  Screen-grabs of software are the copyright of the user who made the screen grab not the software producer.

A while ago I was talking with Tim Denning at Keele University about the lack of clarity in the approach many Universities have to IPR in the widest context.  Tim is working on MedDev, another project in the OER Programme and they intend to grab this bull by the horns and undertake a survey of their partners to try and find out a bit more about university institutional IPR policy.

It would be great to extend this survey as wide as possible so I would encourage all of you to get in touch with Tim or Adrian on oer@keele.ac.uk and I am sure they will be delighted to send you the details of how to fill out the survey.

These surveys always take a little time to fill out, but it should be worth the effort as they promise to share the results with all those who have filled it out and I think it will make very interesting reading.

Yesterday Mike Sanders and Ed Bremner went up to the Open University in Milton Keynes to meet with Rose Webb and Andy Lane from the OU about the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE) and Dr Martin Reynolds from the OU – one of the C-change partners.

SCORE is built on the OpenLearn project which has already reached its target of providing 5,400 learning hours of content in the LearningSpace and 8100 hours in the LabSpace, covering a full range of Open University subject areas from introductory to postgraduate level.  SCORE now aims to extend the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to help support similar activities in the rest of the Higher Educational sector.

It was a very interesting trip, although in some ways a little daunting to see how large and well organised the OpenLearn project is.

The good news is of course that SCORE intends to share its knowledge about OER and help the rest of us get the very best from our projects.

SCORE is intending on launching a new website shortly, but for the moment you can find out more about the project by visiting their pages on OpenLearn LapSpace at:  http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=5129

If you have any questions, you can always register (for free) and post them to the forum or you can download details of their last OER Workshop on Copyright Commons.

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In our research on the clearance of  copyright on maps and map-data, we were advised to talk to Dr Mike Smith at Kingston who knows a lot more on the subject than I do!  See his bio-page at:  http://www.kingston.ac.uk/gge/staff/smith.htm

I explained how we might want to use some maps and our possible need to re-purpose some maps and map-data.

This was his answer:

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Maps are a difficult area at the moment and doubly-so in the UK. The GRADE project that Edina completed reported upon many of these issues within the UK context http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitalrepositories2005/grade.aspx

its worth reading at least the executive summary. Some further thoughts for you:

-the GRADE report argues that (“paper”) maps are “drawings” and so copyright, but raw digital data (not including scans) are “data” so come under database right. Its an opinion that has not been challenged in court!

-different countries have different regulations. Ireland, Canada and the US, for example, are very open about distribution. Indeed federal data in the US is in the public domain

-not so in the UK. Please read some posts I have written on JISC licensing (distributed via EDINA) of OS data:

http://journalofmaps.com/about.php?helpfile=smartyOS.html

http://www.journalofmaps.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/GIS/os_he_license.html

-in short, you will almost certainly NOT be allowed to publish/distribute anything that in any remote way contains OS data *unless* the recipient has licensed OS data. This was the rationale behind setting up the GRADE repository (now Share-Geo) as it includes controls on access

-the BIG sticking point is the area of derived data. Anything that incorporates OS data in any form, no matter how minor, potentially is copyright to them, although their Research and Innovation department can clarify on a case by case basis. However the recommendation would be NOT to use OS data.

-all in all its not really good news. I would be wary about redrafting anything unless you can be positively sure copyright has been covered.

Feel free to get back in touch if you have any further queries.

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Well, I have to admit this is not a very rosy picture and we need to do some more thinking and I suspect a lot of talking to try and get to a point where we can use this material in our OER.

Thoughts – please – either here or on the Forum:

Ed and I had a teleconference with Nick Groome and Charlotte Phillips at the OS to open a discussion on OS materials in relation to Open Educational Resources (OER). We gave a brief overview of the c-change project and the way in which resources are likely to be released i.e. very open, under CC and in perpetuity. With this in mind Nick and Charlotte are going approach colleagues in the OS to investigate this further. In the meantime Ed has approached our institutional partners to ask if they can send us any resources containing OS materials so we can then send the OS some examples. In keeping with the pilot nature of the project we can work on some examples and see where it takes us. Hopefully later down the line we can put together guidance that will be useful to individual, institutional, subject based projects and the wider community covering the use of OS materials in relation to OERs.

Following a discussion on the bus home last night, the following points were noted down:

1. If materials central to a learning resource are removed (e.g. a graph) because clearance simply can not be obtained then there is a possibility that the pedagogical quality of the resource could be adversely affected – that is, the learning resource will no longer have the same pedagogic value to the learners.

2. As academic level of a learning resource increases, (e.g. to Level 3), then it is more likely to link directly to academic research (especially if academic producing the resource links their teaching to their research). Therefore, as level increases, do we get into the area of diminishing returns – that is, any copyright issues become harder to clear (linked to research journals etc.) and the content becomes relevant to fewer people / less reusable?

I have just uploaded a new version of the C-change Copyright Clearance Schema, with a new worksheet which provides a working method to collate the copyright clearance for each item of OER in preparation.

This new worksheet was developed by University of Southampton with a little more attention from myself.  It might not be quite there yet, but it is certainly a useful addition to our toolbox.

You can download it from the ‘Documents’ section or directly from:  c-change_copyright_clearance_schema_2a

With information now coming in from the C-change partners it has been possible to update the draft list of GEES Teaching Resources.  It is hoped that as this list grows we will be able to get some insight into where most of the items are coming from that need to be cleared and also what kind of reaction we are getting from the publishers and holders of other material that we wish to use.

The new updated list is on the documents page and available here: gees_teaching_resources_2c

We know that one of the biggest challenges that faces our partners is the amount of diagrams and figures that are used in our teaching materials. In many cases these diagrams have been copied out of research papers and journal articles that of course belong to the Publishing House.  This means that we are going to have to contact the Publisher and ask them for permission to use the materials  in the C-change OER with a CC license.

The first problem can be simply finding out how to contact the publisher….but fear not – there is an easy way.
Simply visit the SHERPA website at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ where the RoMEO project has recorded almost all publishers in an online database.  The database also gives a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.

All in all a very useful resource.