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!!!