C-change in GEES is only one project producing open material on Climate Change.
The OER Commons repository has recently been showcasing some climate-change material about ‘Climate Change and Ice sheets, within their ‘Recommended Resources’.
See them here:
Any thoughts?
C-change in GEES is totally committed to using JorumOPEN for the delivery of all its OER materials and has always considered it to be the primary interface for our community to find and download C-change OER materials.
We therefore have high hopes for how JorumOPEN will work for the Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences community, but feel that there are still some areas where we would like to see some improvements in the user interface and workflow, before we can unreservedly recommend it to our community.
After talking with JorumOPEN, they recommended that we post our experiences and thoughts to their forum on Community Bay.
We have done this and the thread can be found here:
http://community.jorum.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98#p142
We would really appreciate any further thoughts that you had – posted on the thread there or if you prefer do go ahead and leave a comment here.
cheers
eib
It was great to see today that both my messages left on the SCORE (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education) Forum have been answered by Rose Webb of the SCORE team.
I had a question about copyright clearance and about any case studies from the OpenLearn Project.
You can see the threads at: http://labspace.open.ac.uk/mod/forum/view.php?id=386669
In the copyright clearance query, Rose suggests that we could ‘batch-up clearances and ask for a discount’ which worries me a bit as we don’t really have any budget to spend anyway.
She does suggest that Elsevier are starting to engage with the concept of OER and gave this link:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_00891
Do please read the threads on SCORE Forum and comment if you wish.
eib
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.
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
This was a very useful session that gave a good overview of IPR and copyright and I recommend it to anyone who wants to catch up on the basics of the law.
Even better, it is still available from JISC Legal here.
For myself, I now feel like I have a pretty good idea of the basics of IPR law, but still feel there is a need for more research around some of the more practical elements of the task of copyright clearance. In particular the nitty-gritty or actually undertaking the process of copyright clearance.
We are working it out for ourselves…as we go…but it would be nice to hear a bit more from others in the same position.
Mike Sanders and Ed Bremner huddled around a pc for this Elluminate session on IPR for the OER programme given by JISC Legal on the 13th of October as part of the programme’s ‘OER Second Tuesday‘ events.
It was a useful review of IPR in the context of the OER programme and covered some of the ground that had already been done by Naomi Korn in her copyright day for C-Change, but also introduced us to some new ideas and concepts.
The session started with Jackie Milne from JISC Legal who talked about Upstream 3rd party IPR clearance and linked to their page at: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Projects/OpenEducationalResources.aspx
Liam Earney from JISC Collections gave some useful material including links to:
JISC Caspar templates at – http://jisc-casper.org/content/view/templates which holds the basic version of the ‘Rights Management Schema’ that will used as a basis for development for C-Change.
Naomi Korn – IPR consultant then gave us a good explanation of what the Copyright Commons Licenses do and how the OER programme projects might want to use them. Mike and Ed were glad to see that most of the projects agreed with the C-change choice of using the Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales license.
All useful information for Ed to take to the partners.
The GEES Subject Centre is pleased to announce that we have been successful in a bid to received funding of £245,000 from JISC/HEA as part of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Programme. The “C-change” project will explore the open licensing of educational resources in the GEES disciplines through a themed approach focusing on “climate change and sustainability”.
The OER Programme, funded by HEFCE and run by the Academy and JISC, aims to make a wide range of learning resources created by academics freely available, easily discovered and routinely re-used by both educators and learners. OER include course materials such as websites, PowerPoint presentations, reading lists, virtual fieldwork exercises, photos, movies, audio files and assessments.
Following expressions of interest from the GEES community in January 2009 the C-change project consortium was formed made up of 3 professional bodies and 7 partner institutions with the GEES Subject Centre as lead partner.
C-change resources will be developed by our academic partners based at:
The project is further supported by:
During this project it is hoped that we can build capacity for, and engender cultural change towards, OER in the GEES disciplines and at the same time establish a freely available collection of educational resources that focuses on climate change and sustainability: themes that are core to the GEES curricula.
The broad aims of the C-change Project are:
Why focus on climate change and sustainability? In a recent poll (October 2008) carried out by the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) Network it was found that UK STEM professionals think the need to tackle climate change is the biggest single challenge facing the world in the coming decade. In addition to this important driver, the three UK Funding Bodies are keen to establish an element of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) across all disciplines. In proposing “climate change and sustainability”, we intend the project to encompass a broad spectrum of related areas including, earth system science, past-climate and environmental change, geoengineering, energy policy, human-environment interactions and ethics.
In addition to the open licensing of resources the project will develop case studies of practice, example workflows, procedures and policies on the legal and technical aspects of OER to support colleagues in the open release of their own resources in the future.
One of the key mechanisms to capture and facilitate the sharing of practice and outputs from this project will be the establishment of a community of practice exploring the technical and legal issues of open licensing along with the pedagogic and discipline aspects of the resources. It is hoped that this community of practice will encourage additional activity in the C-change project both during and after the life of the funding by engaging with, informing and supporting other GEES colleagues who wish to explore open licensing of their educational materials
For further information on the C-change project and how to get involved please contact Mike Sanders at the GEES Subject Centre (email: masanders@plymouth.ac.uk, phone 01752 584533)