We are getting to a point where most of our partners have got a large amount of their OER resources ready and we have to make a decision on just how we ‘wrap’ our OER before uploading.

We have already decided not to use a common ‘design’ or ‘look’ to the resources across all the materials as our partners want to retain their institutes logos and corporate design on their own material.  There is also a very wide range of material, that will be delivered in wide range of ways including: JorumOPEN, Institute Repositories, YouTube & Flickr.

But all the same it would be good if we could agree across the partners on some basic metadata and wordings that could be used within all of the c-change OER materials.

Currently we are thinking that this should include:

Front Page:

• Title of Work
• Author and Institute
• Date of creation or last updated

Credits, Terms & Conditions:

• Details of CC license with link to Creative Commons Website
• Details of any other 3rd party licenses are within the work
• Acknowledgements to the programme, project and funders

Should it include a ‘Take Down Policy’?  We are discussing this, but are tending towards the view that only the repository can provide that and not the item itself.

Then there is the question of how this information is best kept with the item.  Certainly it can be put into a page and held within the resource, but I would really like to consider also putting this data into the file-tags so that it is also held within the file itself.

Any thoughts?

The GEES Subject Centre is delighted to announce that:
‘C-Change in GEES – Open Education Resources (OERs) for climate change and sustainability – practicalities & pedagogy’ is to be held on Thursday the 29th of April 2010 at the Macdonald Hotel Manchester from 9.30am to 4pm.

This event will mark the launch of the C-Change in GEES project and has two main aims:

1. To disseminate the resources and learning outcomes from the GEES Subject Centre project ‘C-change in GEES: Open licensing of climate change and sustainability resources in the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
2. To promote the ‘Pedagogy of Climate Change’ book, published by the GEES Subject Centre and edited by Simon Haslett, Derek France and Sharon Gedye. Due to be launched at the event.

This event provides an excellent opportunity to both learn more about the production and use of OER materials for the GEES and also to further explore the pedagogy’s of climate change, identify the areas for development in our knowledge and understanding and look forward to what can be achieved in the future.

For further details of the event please visit:
http://gees.ac.uk/events/2010/geesoer/geesoer.htm

for any more information please do get back to anyone in the C-change team.

I have to admit it was with slight relief that I saw that some other OER projects are also having problems with clearing 3rd party works with publishers.

See BERLiN posting:   http://webapps.nottingham.ac.uk/elgg/berlin/weblog/2510.html

For some of our partners, this approach is our only option for a large proportion of the content and as it suggests in the last sentence, we suspect that this problem will be best approached at a higher level in order to get a ‘shift in publisher mindset’.

Just saw this on the BERLiN Blogsite and was very impressed:

http://webapps.nottingham.ac.uk/elgg/cczss1/files/-1/825/OER+Terms+of+Use.doc

We will need to develop something very similar shortly and I think this would make a very good starting place.

eib

Very useful online session today with Simon Ball from TechDis.  Full of useful and sensible material for our partners about making our OER resources as universally open to everyone as possible.

The six videos used in the presentation are openly available from the following URLs

1. Introduction: Inclusive Learning 09:34  http://www.InstantPresenter.com/techdisonline/EC53DD8184
2. Reasonable Adjustment 08:14  http://www.InstantPresenter.com/techdisonline/EC53DD8388
3. Organisational Added Value 10:08 http://www.InstantPresenter.com/techdisonline/EC53DD8080
4. Standards, Guidelines and User Testing 10:26  http://www.InstantPresenter.com/techdisonline/EC53DD8086
5. Communicating with users 04:32  http://www.InstantPresenter.com/techdisonline/EC53DD8089
6. Sources of Support and Guidance 20:07  http://www.InstantPresenter.com/techdisonline/EC53DD8382

Happy viewing!

Ed Bremner popped over to University of Wales – Newport on the 22nd of December for a meeting with Prof  Simon Haslett and Jonathan Wallen, who has joined the team at Newport to work on the re-purposing and copyright clearance of their resources.

The meeting started with Ed giving a review of progress and the learnings made by the other partners on which it is hoped that Newport will be able to build.  Then some time was spent reviewing the proposed materials earmarked for release. On the whole, it was good too see that Newport’s content does not rely so heavily on Published Diagrams or other 3rd party copyright as does other partners materials and therefore will hopefully be a bit easier to copyright clear.

Much of Newport’s material is in the form of either videos or images and they intend to store this material on either YouTube or Flickr and use JorumOpen as a sign-post towards these resources.

This should be a very interesting approach and seems to sit very well within the intentions of the OER project.  It is bound to bring up other elements to research; for instance, how do we tag the resources in such a way that their metadata can stay with them after they are downloaded from their repository.

With Images, this could easily be done using internal file-tagging systems such as XMP, EXIF & IPTC. Further discussion around image tagging considered how we might be able to insert geo-tags on the images to extend their usefulness.  This may also be a useful way to explore the pedagogy of using geo-tags as a whole.

So a very interesting meeting and a great way to round up work on the Climate Change Project for the year.

eib

The latest version of the C-change Rights Managment Workflow is now available on the Documents pages of this website.

It is available in two forms, both as an interactive mindmap in PDF and as a simple image of the mindmap.

c-change_rights_management_workflow_player 3b

c-change_rights_management_workflow_3b

To fully view the interactive version of the mindmap, you will need to click on the (+) on each arm to open it up. To view the text within the arm, simply hover your mouse over the text icon on the arm you wish to read.  Do be aware that there is another part of the mindmap working its way up from the bottom, which you also need to open to have the full map.

It is still in a pretty draft form, but getting better – any thoughts would be appreciated.

eib

Mark Treagust and Ed Bremner went down to Southampton for this one-day event on IPR for the OER, organised by the HumBox Project http://humbox.eprints.org/

It was a good oportunity to hear about how things are going at Southampton and the LLAS Subject Centre, with details from Alison Dickens about the HumBox project and from Erika Corradini about the ongoing practical issues of IPR in their OER project.  This was followed by a lively key-note address from Hugh Davis (despite having a broken leg and dislocated shoulder) giving us a better understanding of Southampton’s EdShare project.

In the afternoon Diana Galpin from the Research and Innovation Services at Southampton gave us an overview of the IPR law that effects us in the OER projects and wisely warned against taking a too ‘easy-going’ approach to our clearance, especially of any high-risk items belonging to commercial organisations.  They are out there….and watching the OER closely. If a project steps too far out of line, there is always the chance that somebody will become the basis of a test-case.

Before the day finished with a panel session there was time to hear from IT third year student Will Fyson, who for his major project  is in the process of developing a tool that takes a Powerpoint file and strips out the images and allows you to either copyright clear them or find alternatives (with a search in Flickr Commons).  When you are finished the cleared or new images are put back into the Powerpoint file.  Very clever and slick.  I look forwards to hearing more about this project.  I would like to see it be able to read and write the XMP/IPTC image-file tagging/metadata  so you could see other copyright owners and mark images as CC (if they are!).

Their were a couple of off-key chords in the day…

I was a bit worried in the panel discussion, when:

We were discussing how much easier it would be if the copyright clearance was done at the time of creating the resources, but pity this was outside remit of current OER Programme.

When someone from the OU, said that wouldn’t really work as in their experience it  took 6 months to get the clearance (I think OPENLearn can do it in less) anyway.  I am not sure I would disagree with this…..but on the other hand, we just don’t have 6 months.

Also when discussing the problems with asking publishers for open release of their diagrams and other copyrighted material, someone from JISC Legal suggested we (the OER program) were just 3 years too early …..again I think that may well be right, but we just don’t have 3 years to wait.

On the whole I am still surprised that others don’t seem to find this as worrying as I do!

eib

C-change partner – Professor Simon Haslett from University of Wales – Newport has just launched the Google Earth Climate Change Education online resource last week. Here at the GEES Subject Centre, we are delighted to see the results of this project that we funded. As a result of this Simon will be writing a paper for Teaching Earth Sciences, present an exhibit at Techniquest in Cardiff, and he gave an interview on Radio Wale’s Science Cafe programme that was broadcast last Sunday.

The press release  can be seen at:  http://www3.newport.ac.uk/news/displayStory.aspx?story_id=438

The online resource is available at: http://idl.newport.ac.uk/celt/sandsoftime/

You can list to the radio interview, until next Sunday, at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p4ymq/Science_Cafe_06_12_2009/

Simon’s  bit is just after 22 minutes into the programme.

There is also a brief description on the BBC website at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/sciencecafe/updates/20091206.shtml

I hope we will be able to persuade Simon to come onto the Climate Change Forum to tell us a little more about the pedagogy behind the project in the near future.

eib

Partners, especially Southampton and Keele are right in the middle of the copyright clearance process at the moment and to be honest, the news is ‘mixed’ at best.

On one hand we have been told by SCORE and others that Elsevier is freeing up its approach to allowing its material to be used in OER…..but then we find that our attempts to ask for clearance are being channelled through their web-based ‘Rights-Link’ software, which asks us for a payment of £106.00 for the 8 figures required.

The big challenge here is getting through to the right person.  It may well be that ‘Elsevier’ and other publishers would be happy to release some of their copyrighted material on CC license, but we don’t seem to be able to get past the ‘Rights-Link’ software to find anybody to actually ask.  Attempts to get in touch are simply diverted to ‘Rights-Link’, which is obviously not able to provide the clearance, so diverting us back to contacting by email which is then often simply ignored or receives the following:

Elsevier will only reply to reuse request emails if the work you wish to use content from is not available online. No response will be made to messages involving publications available online.

Again, we hear that the  British Geological Society is working towards freeing up their material:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8398451.stm

They have made their data and resources open access – free to use for non-commercial educational purposes. The description is here:

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/about/copyright/non_commercial_use.html

But again we will have to see how this works out in practice. Really, unless the permission allows use, automatically, without contact, we are unlikely to of really moved forwards far.

Meanwhile, although we have had some successes in clearance, it would seem that we have also had a larger number of failures than we had hoped, including:  Palgrave MacMillan and Blackwells.

Sooner or later, we are really going to have to think about how best to take this forwards and whether we may have to accept that putting in links to the resources may be the only viable way forwards.

eib