OER@UCT

Open Educational Resources (OER) ARE currently being published and used at the University of Cape Town.  As no formal OER directory has been established as of yet, the resources are found scattered throughout departmental websites or on academic’s personal websites.  The question is, can the resources be found by the world at large or university members not explicitly notified.   

A few weeks back I published our first resource.  I had to locate it on the UCT website and had the following to say about it:

In my hand I hold a copy of a tutoring manual published by the Centre for Higher Education Development.  The material was prepared by Kevin Williams and is presumably made available in print to new tutors in the Humanities and Social Science faculties.  

Searching the UCT website for the title of the resource produces no results.  Searching for the resources author, Kevin Williams, produces a number of results but none linking to the resource he has published.  Searching for “The Humanities Faculty Tutor Working Group”, a task team which I presume this resource was a result of, also produces no relevant results.  

Browsing the UCT site for the resource is incredibly frustrating!  I have checked the Centre for Higher Education Development’s website thoroughly.  I am starting to believe that the resource is not actually online!  

Only with a little help from CHW did I eventually find the resource.  Meaning the resource is so well hidden that only people with the knowledge of its whereabouts or a direct link could possibly find it.  

My journey of links to the resource was as follows: UCT Homepage - CHED - Other Entities in CHED - Higher & Adult Education Studies & Dev. Unit - HAESDU Homepage - Tutor Development - Tutor Development Project Page   Eureka!  We have finally found the resource after 6 clicks from the homepage – only if you know where to look!

Resources such as this should be made available in a more free and transparent manner.  Open resources of high calibre can only improve UCT’s global image and reach.  The goal of the OER project at UCT is to bring these resources out from hiding and to encourage new resources for presentation to the world at large.  

Yesterday we met with a colleague in the Health Sciences department who had knowledge of our project and was interested in sharing some of the material he had generated for a course.  The materials were originally designed as take aways for a post graduate diploma course. 

I was pleasantly surprised to see such rich open/distance materials at a residential university!  For the first time in this project we saw learning material which was orderly presented in modules, including media, and supporting hyperlinks.  The material resembled some of the modules I had seen on large scale OER projects from distance institutions such as Openlearn at the Open University (UK).

We talked at length about the media being used in the course.  Most of the images were taken or generated by our academic, yet some of them were taken from other sources.  We will have to sort out the third party copyright issues on these images.  Perhaps we can apply “Fair Use” to some of the images?  

We were all surprised to see such rich academic resources available to our project.  
Certainly, before now, the only people who would have known about them were the academics involved in the course, or the students in the course.  All we had to do was send out “feelers” to the UCT community.  Luckily our colleague was very interested and saw a genuine need for the material to be freely available.  

Now unlike the first example, I was unable to actually get the resources online.  All I had to do is get in my car, drive to the Medical School, locate the health sciences building, (past the morgue), climb three floors, locate the office and pick up the CD containing the files which could help so many developing institutions improve on their quality of education.

Our project relies heavily on UCT staff and students adopting a Creative Commons (CC) or similar open licensing culture.  Read the “Beauty of Some Right Reserved” by Molly Kleinman for some background on what that may mean for higher education institutions.  

So far we have been able to confirm that a CC license is a simple, yet powerful way to share whilst allowing the creator to maintain rights and gain credit for the content.  Of the two resources we have so far published to the OER Commons, the first was published with a CC license in mind, and the second was happy to adopt.  (Latter is still pendng review) 

I believe the best way to sway people to adopt such a philosophy is to help them see how it can also benefit them and their work.  Today we are going to look at how we can find and use other people’s CC licensed work to our advantage.  

CC licensed material comes in many flavours including text, documents, images, webpages, audio, and video.  We have all been there before; looking for an image to compliment a presentation or text, and not knowing where to start looking or what our rights are.

Familiarizing ourselves a little with CC licenses will help us to know what we can use a particular item for. 

Source: Hodgkinson-Williams, CA, & Gray, E (2008) Degrees of Openness: The Emergence of OER at UCT.  Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town

CC licenses have one thing in common, they all require attribution.  So the owner shall always be credited for the original works.  Thereafter increased degrees of protection can be tacked on limiting others ability to further share the work, change or adapt the content, and use it for commercial purposes. 

We now have Creative Commons search engines which enable us to find content based on license terms.  When you add a CC license to your work, webpage, etc you also stamp it with a machine readable code which search engines can use to identify the license. 

There are a number of independent repositories on the web.  Many of them are specific to the type of media offered, ie. Audio (ccMixter.org), video (lulu.tv)  See here for a comprehensive list. 

One can also use the search engine available on the CC website.  Here the user can specify which engine they want to use to do the search ie. Google, Flickr, Youtube, etc.  I am going to do a search for “Occupational Therapy” as I recently had a colleague in to inquire about OER resources in this field.  We will use the standard google search.  

We are searching for CC content that we can modify, adapt, or build upon. Ideally this would be for use in the classroom.  I just had a thought, would classroom use be considered a commercial venture?  The student is paying for the classroom experience right?  I have to assume this would not be a problem, considering the goals of the OA movement, but maybe someone can clarify this.

There are a number of excellent web resources that come up using the Google search.  Many of them actually linked to Open Educational Resources (OER) that I was unable to find yesterday when searching via the OER Commons, or a basic google search.

I did have some problems using Google Image search.  I found that a number of the images that came up were actually copyright protected.  I found image search much more consistent when using the Flickr tab.  Flickr asks about permissions for each image that is uploaded to the site.  So you can usually be sure things will be quite clearly defined.

Now that we have found some CC licensed journals and images about occupational therapy we can begin integrating them into our own course material.  They may be used to support my own teaching material or offer new perspectives on industry concepts.  

Coming Soon: How to properly cite Creative Commons material.

How Does This Impact  Our OER Project
Not all CC licensed work is necessarily categorized or archived as an OER.  And not all OER material is necessarily coming up in our CC specific searches!!!

Recently video lectures are becoming a popular resource as many large institutions are now filming their best lecturers in the classroom.  Academic Earth launched in beta in January 2009 and has since created quite a buzz in the online world.  Recorded lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale are available to view and in some case download.  Downloadable lectures are compressed in quicktime MP4 format which maintains a very manageable and portable file size, which means the files could even be viewed from mobile devices.   

I downloaded one of the lectures titled, The Origins of the Finanical Mess by Alan Blinder from Princeton university.  The file was 94mb and took about an hour to download.  I did not have a media player that could hande an MP4 file.  I need one so recommend one if you can!  I ended up converting the file to an avi using a video convertor that I had called All Convertor.  This was senseless however as once I had converted the file it ballooned to nearly 4 times its original size. 

Video quality was not too bad, and the audio quality was fair.  The video itself was great.  It cycled from an image of Blinder delivering the talk to his powerpoint slides as they were delivered.  It was an enjoyable experience and I actually learned a little more about the US finicial crisis! 

 

More recently, in March 2009 www.youtube.com launched YouTube EDU which is a directory of video lectures from more than 100 schools.  The big difference here is that the videos can not be downloaded without some sort of third party tool.  The video needs to be streamed requiring an internet connection.  I believe that youtube just created the Edu portal and tagged any video which could be considered educational.  That is why they have so many videos available.  It is a very diverse set of content, from Advanced Finite Elements Analysis to How to Properly Slice Onions!!!

 

 

A creative commons image by Gideon Burton

Yesterday we attended a seminar organized by the Centre for Educational Technology titled "Open Access in a Closed Institution".  The presenter Hussein Suleman is a senior lecturer with the department of Computer Science here at UCT and is an ambassador and expert on the open access movement.  

The Open Access (OA) movement is nothing new; in fact it has been around for the past 50 years or so.  In the middle of the 20th century people were bouncing the idea around of open access to knowledge, yet they clearly faced major challenges as the ability to share documents was not easily available.  The internet explosion in the 1990's meant that open access could truly be realized with the ability to share and distribute documents.  Naturally the movement has its champions and its challengers.

 
Hussein spoke very briefly about the OA movement and some of the rather interesting developments in this area.  Large institutions around the world are pushing for open access and taking measures to ensure that their own research outputs are made available.  MIT (always a leader) has created a repository using the opensource dSpace software platform.  This also includes over 20,000 thesis going back as far as the 1800's!!! 

It makes good academic sense to do this.  For lecturers it creates an opportunity to collaborate and share research.  For students it provides access to high quality research and makes it easy for the growing "just google it" generation to do what they do best. 

Have you ever been searching for an older news clipping, found it on the newspapers website, and then been asked to pay for the article?  I have found this incredibly irritating.  Why should I have to pay for old news?  This is an random rant - but the discussion really led me to think about it. 

Traditionally, a researcher compiled a paper then searched for a publisher, got paid/credited, and published the article.  In the process the original author may have lost some rights to their document and their ability to use it further or republish.  The open access movement is pushing against this tradition and publishers are starting to listen. Hussein showed us a neat little tool that lets researchers check whether a journal allows you to republish an article which has been in their publication.  Check the Romeo website and the screenshot below.  Many journals do allow the author the ability to archive the article and in some cases even republish! 

 

Here at UCT the idea of an open access repository for research has been under discussion for some time.  Certainly our research output is scattered throughout the internet and in journals around the world, but can we account for it and provide details about it?  Can we tell how many times those articles have been cited, or read?  An open access digital archive could answer some of these questions.  

Hussein has developed the UCT CS Research Document Archive for the Department of Computer Science here at UCT simply because he could not wait any longer for a university wide initiative to happen.  They now archive their publications and are able to provide details of how and when articles were accessed. The Law Faculty has also felt the need for a digital archive for their own research and have launched UCT Lawspace which also powers dSpace.  So it is clear that a unified system would be of great benefit if not only for these two faculties.

 
How does this relate to our OER Project?
Naturally the concepts of open access and open educational resources (OER) are directly related.  OER may be considered a child or product of the open access movement.  When I hear Hussein talk about his struggles with getting support for his project I get slightly nervous.  

When I think of OER resources in the context of UCT I think of research output almost immediately.  Research papers, handbooks, conference papers, and articles will make a tremendous addition to our project.  Having them searchable and accessible will be of tremendous benefit in terms of reputation.  

I thought about licensing and how the articles currently offered in our two digital archives are made available.  We should follow up with Hussein about how they deal with this and maybe introduce the creative commons license to him.  Also in terms of our OER repository, will we make available content with difference licenses?   Can we make available content under more restrictive licenses?

I keep thinking about libraries throughout this process and in doing the research for our OER project.  Libraries by definition are "a collection of information, sources, resources, and services, and the structure in which it is housed" .  I really think that the library has some stake in the way we offer up OER resources as well as research output.  I did a quick test to see if I could find an article which had been published and archived in Hussein's repository could be found in our library.  I attempted two cases and could not find the articles listed on the library website.

I am not criticizing our library by any means.  We would just like to see things harmonized in a more efficient manner.  The information age crept up on us really fast and we are typically learning by google's example on how to deal with it all. I really want to read What would Google do?

 

Having read the Yuan, Macneill and Kraan article titled "Open Educational Resources - Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education" this morning I identified the following interesting extracts.

Initially I considered OER resources to only include lecture material such as powerpoint presentations, articles, links, etc.  However the OECD definition includes a much broader range of material and could probably increase even more in scope with time depending on the mode of delivery.

In terms of OER, with regard to this working definition, it is important to note that “resources” are not limited to content but comprise three areas (OECD, 2007):

Learning content: Full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals.

Tools: Software to support the development, use, reuse and delivery of learning content, including searching and organisation of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
 
Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice and localise content. (OECD, 2007)


Some of the strategies proposed by the OECD to increase the effectiveness and reach of OER.  These certainly come with a range of concerns and challenges:

Encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly;

Open educational resources should be freely shared through open licences which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms.

Governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources.

And certainly I foundmost interesting the drivers and inablers, especially in the context of short and long term.  

Drivers vs. Inhibitors

Short-medium term (to 2009)
Drivers/enablers:

• International organisations’ promotion and funding available
• Competition among leading institutions in providing free access to educational resources as a way to attract new students
• Success of open access initiatives and repository projects;
• Rapid development and wide use of Social Software tools and services and emergence of personal learning environment;
• Licensing open content will become easier as plug-ins for widely used authoring software packages become available.

Inhibitors:

• Growing competition for scarce funding resources
• Difficulty in finding a balanced approach to open and commercial educational offerings;
• Copyright issues
• Fears of low recognition for OA publications, particularly among young researchers
• Lack of policies for the development and use of repository at institutional level
• Lack of communication and cooperation between system and tool developers and educators;

Long-term (to 2012)
Drivers/enablers

• Policies emphasise educational innovation and organisational change in educational institutions
• ICT-based lifelong learning and personalised learning needs
• Opportunities for co-operation and collaboration between institutions around the world
• Global competition in Higher Education and decline in student numbers in Europe due to demographic trends;
• Creative Commons licensing is firmly established and is being used increasingly.
• New systems for creating and handling group-based Learning Designs may become more widely used;
• Semantic applications will provide new ways to access knowledge resources.

Inhibitors

• Business models in OER will remain tricky
• Lack of institutional policies and incentives for educators to excel in OER
• Models that build on teachers in the creation and sharing of OER will need to invest considerable effort in training and support;
• Creation of educational metadata will remain costly
• Need more advanced tools and services for educational repository;

Motivations for the use of OER

OECD motivations for institutions in using OER

• The altruistic argument that sharing knowledge is in line with academic traditions and a good thing to do.

• Educational institutions should leverage taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources.
• Quality can be improved and the cost of content development reduced by sharing and reusing.
• It is good for the institution’s public relations to have an OER project as a showcase for attracting new students.
• There is a need to look for new cost recovery models as institutions experience growing competition.
• Open sharing will speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse and help the institution to keep good records of materials and their internal and external use.

OECD motivations for individuals in contributing to OER

• The altruistic motivation of sharing (as for institutions), which again is supported by traditional academic values.
• Personal non-monetary gain, such as publicity, reputation within the open community (egoboost).
• Free sharing can be good for economic or commercial reasons, as a way of getting publicity, reaching the market more quickly, gaining the first-mover advantage, etc.
• Sometimes it is not worth the effort to keep the resource closed. If it can be of value to other people one might just as well share it for free the most commonly reported motive for lecturers was to gain access to the best possible resources and to have more flexible materials

References: Kraan, W, MacNeill, S, Yuan, L (2008) Open Educational Resources - opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education. Educational Cybernetics: Reports University of Bolton 2008

I stumbled upon this article and thought it rather poignant following a recent meeting.  Likely one of the greatest challenges we will face throughtout this project is the issue of licensing.  This article does a nice job of laying down some of the motivations specific to academia.  We will likely be conducing our own seminars on the Creative Commons License in the near future. 


Source: C&RL News, November 2008
Vol. 69, No. 10

by Molly Kleinman

These are difficult times when it comes to copyright on campus. Big music companies are suing fans, publishers are suing librarians, and the principle of “fair use” is under siege everywhere. Litigation-happy content holders have fostered a climate of fear in which every student is a music pirate and every professor a book thief. While I don’t doubt that there is some copyright infringement happening on university campuses, the bigger problem by far is the chilling effect of all these lawsuits and “copyright awareness campaigns.”

Scholars and students are afraid to do the one thing that copyright law has intended from the beginning: “Promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts”1 by creating new works and building on the works of those who came before. Every academic librarian knows at least one sad story about a professor who couldn’t include necessary illustrations in her book because her publisher was worried about a copyright lawsuit, or a digitization project that couldn’t get approved because the copyright status of the materials was uncertain.

Additional problems result from major changes to copyright law over the last 40 years. Until recently, creators had to register their copyrights to receive protection and mark their works with a properly formatted copyright notice or the work entered automatically into the public domain, where anybody was free to reuse it however they wished.

That all changed in 1978, when the United States dropped the registration requirement; since then, copyright automatically occurs the moment a work is “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” Now, every new work is copyrighted—lecture notes, e-mails, snapshots, doodles, presentation slides. And where once copyright lasted for 14 years, with the option to renew for another 14, now copyright lasts for the lifetime of the author, plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death, for an average duration of more than a century. That’s a very long time, and it leaves thousands of works orphaned: under copyright but without a locatable copyright holder. Between the fear and the orphans, life is hard for an ordinary academic who just wants some pictures to liven up her classroom presentations, or the student who would like to add a soundtrack to his final project.

Enter Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that created a set of simple, easy-to-understand copyright licenses. These licenses do two things: They allow creators to share their work easily, and they allow everyone to find work that is free to use without permission. The value of those two things is enormous. Before Creative Commons licenses, there was no easy way a creator could say, “Hey world! Go ahead and use my photographs, as long as you give me attribution.”

Similarly, there was no place for members of the public to go to find new works that they were free to reuse and remix without paying fees. Creative Commons changed all that. As it says on its Web site, “Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright—all rights reserved— and the public domain—no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work—a ‘some rights reserved’ copyright.”2

The licenses come in three languages: Human Readable, which is a very brief and easy-to-understand summary of what is permitted and under what conditions; Lawyer Readable, which is a legally binding three-page deed; and Machine Readable, which is the metadata, a little snippet of code that makes it possible for search engines like Google to search by Creative Commons license, and return only those works that are free to reuse.

There are six major Creative Commons licenses that all include different combinations of four basic requirements:

Attribution: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work—and derivative works based upon it —but only if they give you credit the way you request. This element is a part of all six licenses.

Non-Commercial: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work —and derivative works based upon it—but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivatives: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only exact copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike: You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Founded by a group of intellectual property and technology experts in 2001, Creative Commons has emerged as a major player in the growing movement to provide an alternative to “All Rights Reserved.” Their goal is “to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.”3 They appear to be succeeding. As of this writing, Creative Commons licenses are available in 44 countries, with 9 more on the way. There are more than 60 million photographs available under Creative Commons licenses on the popular photo sharing Web site Flickr (flickr.com); nearly 10,000 sound clips, samples, and remixes on the music site ccMixter (ccmixter.org); and materials from 1,800 undergraduate and graduate level MIT courses in the MIT OpenCourseWare program (ocw.mit.edu).

Benefits of Creative Commons in academic settings
The most immediate benefit of Creative Commons licenses to academia is the wealth of new works that are available for use without permissions or fees. Instructors, librarians, and students no longer have to rely on the public domain for materials that they can repurpose without risk of copyright infringement. In the time it takes to do a Google search, members of our community can find Creative Commons-licensed photographs, illustrations, music, video, and educational resources, and they’re all free.

Creative Commons answers one of the most common copyright questions librarians get: “Is it okay for me to use this photograph/article/figure/etc. in my classroom/article/Web site/etc.?” If the photograph/article/figure is Creative Commons-licensed, the answer is always “Yes.” At the University of Michigan Library, we decided we wanted to get the word out to our faculty and librarians to encourage them to take advantage of the incredible resources available through Creative Commons, and to contribute to those resources by licensing their own work.

Teaching Creative Commons
It may be easy to see the appeal of 60 million free photos, or 10,000 free songs, but it can be hard to understand exactly what Creative Commons is without some context. At the University of Michigan Library, we have included Creative Commons in a larger copyright outreach campaign that began in May 2007. The campaign targets university faculty, researchers, students, staff and librarians, and aims to raise community members’ awareness of their rights as authors and creators, improve their understanding of fair use, and promote a balanced approach to copyright. It has involved the redesign of the university’s copyright Web site, outreach to academic departments through their subject specialists, and a series of copyright workshops offered in the library.

We offered the first Creative Commons workshops in May 2007 to all members of the university community, and followed up with a similar set of workshops designed as staff development training for librarians and library workers in January 2008.

The basic outline of the workshops is as follows:

1) introduction to Creative Commons,
2) a few key facts about copyright,
3) overview of the licenses,
4) how to use Creative Commons-licensed materials, and
5) how and why to Creative Commons license your own work.

We structured the workshops around the assumption that a person has to understand at least a little bit about copyright, and the flaws in the current copyright system, in order to comprehend and appreciate the Creative Commons licensing model. The first half of the workshop is dedicated to laying that foundation, and to explaining what Creative Commons is. We begin with a showing of the video “Get Creative,”4 which uses appealing animation and real world examples to explain why Creative Commons was founded and how it works.

Participants repeatedly mentioned the video as one of their favorite parts of the workshop. We have found that it is a very effective way to communicate the power of Creative Commons and to get the class engaged so that they will listen to the dry, copyright-related parts that come next.

After the video, the presenter explains the key facts about copyright that are integral to the functioning of Creative Commons:

• Copyright happens automatically and lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years.
• Copyright is a bundle of rights; you can sign them away exclusively or grant non-exclusive licenses that give multiple people permission to use a work.
• Most everything is copyrighted, but creators may not want or need all those rights.

This section of the presentation is not intended to be a comprehensive introduction to copyright law. The purpose is to help the class understand why Creative Commons is important and the major ways that Creative Commons licenses differ from regular copyright.

We follow the copyright overview with an examination of the four license elements and a look at all six licenses. We explain what each license permits and doesn’t permit, and emphasize that most academic uses are considered noncommercial. We also show examples of the three different kinds of language that make up a Creative Commons deed (Human Readable, Lawyer Readable, and Machine Readable). The aim here is to help get the class comfortable with the icons and terms used to represent aspects of Creative Commons licenses so that when participants encounter Creative Commons-licensed work in the future, they will be able to identify it and use it appropriately.

The second half of the workshop is comprised mainly of a series of live Web demonstrations that show off the rich deposits of Creative Commons-licensed work available on the Web. The presenter walks the participants through searches on Flickr for photos, ccMixter for music, and MIT OpenCourseWare for class materials. At this point, the class gets really excited. We suggest potential uses for these resources, but participants have no trouble coming up with their own ideas.

One librarian who works with the Communications Studies department regularly fields questions about whether students can use popular music in their multimedia projects, and he couldn’t wait to show them all the music that was available on ccMixter. A professor who likes to include a lot of images in her conference presentations was thrilled to learn about all the photographs that she could use without worrying about copyright when she posts those presentations online. The range and quality of Creative Commons-licensed material is inspiring.

Before opening up the workshop to questions, we always demonstrate how to apply a Creative Commons license to a Web site or photograph. We show them how to choose a license and where to get the code from the Creative Commons Web site. By now the participants have seen what a wonderful resource Creative Commons has provided, and we hope that they will begin using it to license their own work.

Conclusion
In an era of increased licensing restrictions and tightening budgets, Creative Commons is an excellent resource for faculty, staff, students, and librarians looking for free, reusable content. Creative Commons is a gift to the academic community, and librarians are the ideal people to spread the word.

Notes
1. U.S. Const. art. I, �� 8, cl. 7.
2. Creative Commons, “About Creative Commons,” www.creativecommons.org/about/ (accessed May 1, 2008).
3. Creative Commons Wiki, “‘Some Rights Reserved’: Building a Layer of Reasonable Copyright,” retrieved May 1, 2008, from www.wiki.creativecommons.org/History (accessed May 1, 2008).
4. “Get Creative,“ www.mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/ (accessed May 1, 2008).

 Molly Kleinman is copyright specialist at the University of Michigan Library, e-mail: makleinm@umich.edu

�� 2008 Molly Kleinman

A New Culture of Openness

The University of Cape Town has embarked on the journey of creating and nurturing a new culture of openness.  What ever do we mean by openness? 

 In the realm of higher learning we have seen a number of leading universities offering high quality academic materials to the world at large.  Have you heard of MIT's OpenCourseWare or the Open University's Openlearn?  These are websites which are offering these prestigious institution's course material for free.  Thats correct!  You can view them and download them absolutely free.  Academics can use them in their own lesson plans, and students can use them as supplimentary material for their own projects or assigments.  

Why are they doing this?

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is driven by the "...simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use and reuse knowledge." (Bissell, Doyle 2007)  

We are approaching a pinncale time in the information age in relation to higher edcuation as generations of techies are replacing traditional academics in the classroom.  This not only influences teaching styles but also content delivery and networking.   "The entry into the teaching community of ‘digital natives’-used to using, remixing and sharing digital content-will have impacts on education we have not yet begun to grasp."  (Bissell, Doyle 2007) 

Are we talking about a revolution?

Definitly not, but certainly a new culture has emerged which enable us to rip, mix, and share digital content in new ways.  Consider how much Facebook has changed our lives, brought us closer together, and captivated us.  Now consider that people are hard at work doing the same innovative things on the higher education landscape.  

"Open resources are the path to humility. They are an invitation to experimentation and collaboration. The more open the resource, the less one is committed to a single pedagogical path or theory, and the more one can profit from the insights of strangers, or collaborate with people one has never met."  (Bissell, Doyle)

Our Project

In the next few months we will be documenting our progress as we attempt to build a repository of UCT open resources.  We are trying to encourage faculty and students to contribute to our repository buy adopting Creative Commons licences which enables content to be easily shared.  

Certainly a number of concerns have been raised.  In our first stages of exploration the following questions came to my mind when considering this relatively new concept?

What is a Creative Commons Licence and how does it enable us to create and share content?

How can quality and a degree of organization be ensured when resources have no distinct owner?

Doesn’t offering our teaching resources online defeat the purpose of a working university?  

Will registered students decrease when resources are made available for free?

Will qualifications be awarded based on the successful completion of assessments after using an OER resource?

Many universities are following the trend in making an OER site available.  Ususally we find this being offered in their own domain as a branded OER site, for instance MIT OpenCourseWare.  Does this not defeat the purpose of the OER movement?  Should we not be meeting on more of a collaborative plane?  For instance a system such as Wikipedia where multiple experts, or in our environment academics, are contributing towards a single resource of course materials. 

This site is intended to document our work throughout this process and allow others to comment and contribute to our progress. We hope to answer these questions as we go, and we certainly are discovering more as we go along.