Preparing Your Educational Resources for DiscoverEd is second in the CC Learn Step by Step Guides series, which is part of our larger Productions schema. It is a basic guide for those interested in preparing their resources for inclusion into search engines like DiscoverEd that utilize structured data. It is targeted at people or institutions interested in making their digitally published educational resources more discoverable. Though the document contains technical language and sample XHTML and RDFa, it’s really not all too complicated. Basically, you just need one of the right feeds to start, which you can then copy and paste the link of into ODEPO (the Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations). ODEPO is hosted on OpenED, the community site for open education. It’s a wiki, so anyone can create an account and add their project or organization to the database.

But the guide explains all that, (as does the DiscoverEd FAQ) and the alternatives–which include contacting us directly. DiscoverEd already pulls from a number of institutions and repositories, and as it expands we hope to improve its search capabilities. Any feedback is welcome.

This week, we would like to highlight OpenEd in Spanish, aka the OpenEd ES Community. I’ve mentioned before that OpenEd is a community site for anyone interested in open education or OER, especially for those who want to develop their own mini-communities on the site. CC Latam and ccLearn have collaborated to localize OpenED for the ES Community, including translating and adapting the events, resources, and ODEPO pages. Our hope is that the Spanish speaking community around OER, including Latam, will grow and thrive within its native language. OpenEd ES is part of a greater effort to make visible all of the interesting work that is being done in various languages around the world. We hope other linguistic communities will see fit to build a home on OpenEd as well.

So I urge you to check it out and contribute. If you speak another language, consider localizing OpenEd for your own community or project. OpenEd is a wiki and anyone can create an account. Also, feel free to give us feedback.

Thanks to Carolina Botero for the Spanish announcement:

Para impulsar el movimiento en nuestra región hace falta generar puentes que  sirvan para conectar los fabulosos proyectos que están teniendo lugar en la comunidad de habla hispana en América Latina y en la península Ibérica. Tenemos la obligación y a la vez la oportunidad de hacer visible y promover lo que sucede en nuestro propio entorno y además podemos apoyarnos unos a otros para generar una cultura  participativa y activa en pro de la educación abierta. Este es el espacio  que la Comunidad OpenEd Hispanoparlante –OpenEd en Español http://opened.creativecommons.org/Es, busca ocupar, desarrollar e impactar con la ayuda de todos.

¿Qué es OpenEd?

OpenEd http://opened.creativecommons.org/ es la comunidad de educación abierta en Internet. OpenEd es el nuevo portal desarrollado y sostenido por el Proyecto ccLearn http://learn.creativecommons.org/ de Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ los invitamos a conocerlo y a ¡participar del sitio para hispanoparlantes: OpenEd-ES!

OpenEd es un wiki y por tanto, es una invitación para que colabores y aportes tu propia visión de la comunidad, para que ¡crezcamos juntos!

¿Cómo participar?

Para  dar un primer paso hemos creado unos espacios que buscan dar inicio y bases a esta comunidad. Te invitamos a conocer el sitio y a colaborar, hay muchas formas de hacerlo escoge la tuya y encontrémonos en OpenEd

¿Tienes un proyecto de educación abierta o de recursos educativos abiertos?

Revisa si los datos están acá http://opened.creativecommons.org/Es/Proyectos o ajusta e ingresa los datos correspondientes

¿Vas a hospedar o conoces un evento en el que el tema de educación abierta sea eje central?

Revisa si los datos están acá http://opened.creativecommons.org/Es/eventos o ajusta e ingresa los datos correspondientes

¿Eres un novato en esto?, ¿ya sabes algo y quieres contribuir con recursos para informar y explicar a otros sobre educación abierta, recursos educativos abiertos, Creative Commons, etc.?, ¿quieres ayudarnos a traducir?

Puedes ayudarnos contribuyendo con material, podemos traducir lo que valga la pena y de esa forma comunicar a los demás de qué se trata. Si te interesa éste es el sitio que debes visitar http://opened.creativecommons.org/Es/SobreAbierto

¿Quieres participar activamente y formar parte del grupo que arranque y dinamice esta comunidad?

¡Inscríbete en la lista de discusión!

http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/OpenEd-es

Estamos presenciando el nacimiento de una comunidad que necesita nuestra región, ¡gracias por participar, divulgar y apoyar esta iniciativa!

Importancia de OpenEd en Español para la Educación:

Pensar en educación abierta es hablar del creciente y fantástico movimiento que ha surgido en torno a la apertura de los recursos educativos que pretende que cualquiera, en cualquier lugar, pueda acceder, usar y reutilizar materiales educativos ya existentes en formas nuevas y creativas o simplemente permitir que los adapten para satisfacer sus necesidades propias y sus contextos locales o culturales. Internet ha servido de plataforma tecnológica para potenciar y favorecer este tipo de proyectos sin embargo, reconocemos que el material y los recursos más visibles son aquellos del mundo angloparlante, ayudemos a dar visibilidad y fuerza al mundo hispanoparlante.

¡Repite este mensaje a quienes creas que pueda interesar!

From the announcement by Bjoern Hassler,

“The first proposal is about “Introducing digital Open Educational
Resources into Zambian primary schools through school-based
professional development”. Through this project we seek to overcome
access barriers, and engage with OER for Zambian primary/secondary
school mathematics teaching. The barriers are manifold, including
infrastructural, awareness, appropriateness of materials, etc, but we
hope that we’ll be able to draw on the various experiences and
solutions to make this successful… Further information is available here
http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/centres/cce/projects/ictzambia/index.html

The second outcome is continued engagement through the UK National
Commission for UNESCO. Within the Information Society Working Group,
OER has been a long-standing theme. However, based on the experience
of the discussion, we are now focussing on issues around OER access
and collaboration. The aims for this are concrete: We are running a
series of meetings to further focus on feasible projects in this area.
The first meeting will take place on 25th/26th in conjunction with the
Nottingham Open Learning Conference (
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/olc/ ) and in conjunction with OER Africa
( http://www.oerafrica.org ).”

The report, as all content on the UNESCO OER wiki, is available via CC BY-SA.

“Contestants will be asked to remix facts or data from one of over 300 openly licensed research
reports on IssueLab into a video or animation under three minutes in length. Winners will be selected
after the December 31, 2009 deadline, and nonprofits will be able to use all submitted videos freely to
support their causes.

The launch of “Research Remix” coincides with Open Access Week, an international movement that
pushes for broad and free access to research findings and publicly funded studies. IssueLab’s official
participation is marked by its continued commitment to bringing open access and licensing to the
social and policy research fields. “It is especially important that nonprofits consider openly licensing
their research and resources. By giving people the ability to re-use, remix, and share research on
social issues we can much better inform and engage public debate and public policy.”

We encourage you to remix and submit your videos by the year’s end, especially because all finalists receive a free CC t-shirt and buttons (not to mention first prize is a netbook). I’m also one of the judges, so I look forward to your submissions!

Article CC BY-NC by Sydney Rock and Rachel Harrus

Remember back in April when I first mentioned Student Journalism 2.0, ccLearn’s pilot project to bring Creative Commons and the power of new media into high school journalism classes? Well since then ccLearn and two SF Bay Area high school journalism classes have been busy getting the ball rolling.

Yesterday, The Paly Voice, the student-run newspaper at Palo Alto High School, announced the integration of CC licenses, allowing its writers to choose to share their articles and op-ed pieces with the world. Already, Sydney Rock and Rachel Harrus’s article announcing the collaboration has gone viral via the CC BY-NC license, as the CC Google Alert picked it up and placed it squarely inside my morning radar. From the article,

“Starting today, readers of The Paly Voice may notice a new graphic — a Creative Commons licensing logo — tagged at the bottom of some stories.

The addition is due to a new collaboration with Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation that allows published work to be available to the public for fair and legal sharing.

As a part of the Student Journalism 2.0 Project, The Paly Voice, along with the staff of El Estoque, the student news publication of Monta Vista High School, and the staff of The Broadview at Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, is the first high school in the nation to use Creative Commons licensing, which could potentially revolutionize the way creative works are available online.
…
Campanile adviser Esther Wojcicki, who is the chair of the board of directors for Creative Commons, believes that the collaboration will positively influence student journalism at Paly.

“It gives people the legal right to share their story,” Wojcicki said. “It’s like your own PR firm.”

Click to read the full article. For more about Student Journalism 2.0, visit our website, fan our Facebook page, or follow our Twitter.

“15 October 2009 — Today the UNESCO OER Toolkit (with support from the UNESCO Communications and Information Sector) was released as a resource for academics and institutions — with a special focus on developing countries — who are interested in participating in open education projects.

OVERVIEW — Most of the Toolkit is designed for academics who are interested in finding and using OER in the courses they teach, or who wish to publish OER that they have developed. Some sections are aimed at institutional decision-makers and academics that [are] interested in setting up a more formal OER project. These projects may start with just a few interested academics but, as they grow, institutional policies, funding and legal constraints become more relevant. Individuals who are not aiming to set up a institutional project may nonetheless be interested to read the whole document. Likewise, institutional planners, IT staff or librarians who are interested in setting up an OER project would benefit from understanding the academic’s perspective.”

The toolkit, like the all content on the UNESCO OER Community site, is available via CC BY-SA.

“OpenCourseWare, the Web-based publication of academic course content launched in 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been lauded for making college-level courses available to anyone anywhere in the world for free. The movement has expanded to include offerings from some of the nation’s most selective universities including the University of Notre Dame and Yale University…

Now, educational organizations have a guide that simplifies the legalities of using copyrighted materials in open courseware—The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare. The code was developed by experts in media and fair use at American University and a committee of practitioners of open courseware from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, MIT, Tufts University, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, and Yale University…

The code aims to help OCW designers at U.S. educational organizations recognize situations to which fair use applies and situations that require they get permission from third-party rights holders.”

The complete code is available via CC BY.

CC BY by the Digital Open

I blogged about the Digital Open in April, a new online community and competition that was accepting free and open technology projects from anyone 17 or younger through August. The competition was aimed at fostering an online and open community of youth by encouraging them to see the benefits of open source and open licensing.

Since then the jury has come in to announce eight grand prize winners. The first video profile is the Centralized Student Website from Fremont, California, by Raymond Zhong and Aatash Parikh. They’ve gone ahead and built a student portal for their high school, where virtually any school activity, especially student clubs, are accessed. Other winners include a Casa Ecologica in Spain and a Hybrid Airship. Be sure to check back for more videos.

Except where otherwise noted, all content on the Digital Open is available via CC BY. The Digital Open is the result of a joint partnership between the Institute for the Future, BoingBoing, and Sun Microsystems.

CC BY-NC by Stephen Downes

So I caught up with him via Skype; and though different operating systems and timezones may have jumbled some of our conversation, I was still able to catch most of his words, if not the heart of his views. Below is our chat transcribed, in more or less the same fashion as it progressed.

If you could just briefly introduce yourself and explain your position at the National Research Council of Canada?

I’m Stephen Downes. I work for the National Research Council of Canada based near New Brunswick, Canada, and my position here is officially titled Senior Research Officer. So I’m a researcher–that’s kind of like being a professor, except without students, although I do teach a course with George Siemens online, so that’s sort of like having students, too. My work involves research… I do some project development, project management, I do some writing. I do some public speaking and talking in areas like this. I do a daily newsletter; it goes out to several thousand people around the world, and [I do] basic, various other activities that are relevant.

So how does this position facilitate your mission related to OER or Open Education?

Well, for me it’s how does OER facilitate my mission. My mission is to make it so that every person around the world has full access to educational opportunities and equal opportunity to make the most of their lives. Open educational resources are an important part of that because, of course, access to open materials enables all of that. So what I do works hand in hand with open educational resources in the sense that a lot of what I’m up to is building and recommending networks and structures to facilitate the easy creation, easy reuse and redistribution of resources, and ideally, these are free in every sense of the word resources.

So that kind of gets a little bit at what access means. What constitutes the ideal level of access for you? Is it just having free access online to view [the resources]?

That’s sort of a funny question. Because now there’s a lot of other discussion that’s sort of sitting there. Because of course access isn’t just viewing stuff free online. But then, what does it mean? Does it mean having a copy locally on your computer? Does it mean being able to incorporate it particularly into your own work? Yeah, I think it does. It’s similar to Stallman’s four freedoms. Which are, roughly adapted to the OER space, the freedom to access, the freedom to adapt, the freedom to redistribute, the freedom to remix. So you know, it involves not just seeing it, but seeing how it was created. To be able to take it and rework and harvest it. I think all of those are important. I might add that learning itself is not a passive activity. In order to learn, we have to be active. You have to do things; we have to create things. So learning, whether it occurs in the classroom, in a formal situation or informal situation, it involves not only accessing, but remaking, remixing, repurposing, and rewriting learning resources; the creation of learning resources; the redistribution of them.

Assuming that everyone has achieved this initial access to open educational resources, and to education in general, would the open education movement have achieved its end goal? Or do you think there’s something more that has to be done?

No, that’d probably do it. (Laughs) I’m sure the people involved would find something else…

Well, if we assume for a moment that we have a deep and diverse quality-tested and wide open corpus of open educational resources, what additional barriers would remain for more positive and transformative impacts that we are hoping for in education?

Other than the educational system itself? George Siemens and I had this in our course and we talked about three dimensions of open education. The first dimension is access of resources themselves–the reading, tests, whatever. The second dimension is harboring [leveraging] that corpus, and that’s access to learning deliberately… offering more instructional delivery openly. So we’re offering not only the resources, like MIT does, but we’re going a step further to actually offering the instruction itself online.

So [George and I] get these additional enrollments. Last year the course had 2200…this year it’s not nearly as popular as it only has about 700 people. Anybody can access any part of it.  And then there’s a third dimension of openness that we’ve talked about and that we are adding to our corpus. And that’s open assessment, which offers a way outside the system.  Or how in order to get a degree you must go to a college first, and this offers some other way of doing it. This is open access to evaluation to assessment… So we talked about opening that social source community or open assessment and various levels of that.

I read in your recent post on copyright, the one on Half an Hour, and you mentioned that while you were a self learner, going to night school classes in Ottawa, and at the University of Calgary obtaining your first degree, you found that the biggest barrier for a self learner in wanting an affordable education was copyright. And in that sense, Creative Commons licenses have offered an alternative to “all rights reserved” copyright, allowing the creator of the open educational resource to choose how open their resource is.

I recently read a post by David Wiley talking about how openness is not a binary factor; he used the analogy how a door that is open at 2cm is still partially open, but you know… the door is obviously not open enough for a person to walk through that door. So in light of your statement about access to education and everything that comes with it, how open is open enough for OER for you? In terms of the particular license you would choose for OER or anything else?

Well for me the big barrier as always is a financial barrier. So what I mean is–a system of information distribution that existed at the time was based on information sale–the sale of books for example, the sale as default. And so for me, fundamental open access is free access. You know to me it’s a contradiction to say that we have open access but you have to pay for it… So as I mentioned earlier, free access is not simply to look at it. Learning involves more than just looking at things and displaying content; to learn is essentially to work with material. To conceptualize the material, to remix material for open access of a form that enables resubmission of the work… The educational system doesn’t have that open access that’s something like the four freedoms… so I would say it’s the freedom simply to read, [and then] to take the material and repurpose it for your own uses.

In that vein, what CC license do you prefer for OER? Obviously, the Noncommercial-No derivatives license (CC BY-NC-ND) doesn’t fit that ideal because it doesn’t allow adaptation.

I mean, this is a debate David [Wiley] and I have had on many occasions. The license I would use for educational material is Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike (CC BY NC-SA), and you know Noncommercial is a contentious clause… and the reason I use the noncommercial clause is that I don’t want to participate in a plan where educational materials are taken and made commercially available in such a way that the openly and noncommercial available version of the resources is not available. And that’s what happens where you share things with a license that allows commercial use.

But making your work available through an Attribution only license (CC BY), [though] it does allow others to reuse it and maybe even use it in a commercial enterprise, it does not prevent the access of the original work online. So how–

Here’s what happens right: You allow for commercial use so somebody prints that and say, takes it overseas and takes it to this remote community and then lobbies against the provision that enables access to the materials on the grounds that the content is available anyways. See, there’s a situation in these communities where their only access to a resource is commercially, and the commercial quarter’s interest is ensuring that the noncommercial access is not allowed, is not available. They take and produce commercially in proprietary formats, like the Kindle reader… so the materials are not available outside the Kindle, or only commercial materials are. So a person using the Kindle, say, that has acquired it perhaps through their high school, can only access the commercial version of the resource. This is what happens. To the person, access to the noncommercial material is closed so that only the commercial content is accessible.

So you’re talking about areas that don’t have Internet access to the original?

Well that’s one kind of closed, right? But that’s not the entire picture. You can have them closed by geography; you can have them closed by technology; you can have them closed by legal arrangements.

So do you have a specific example of any country or region in the world that this has happened to–where they’re not allowed to access the free [and open] work but only the commercial versions of them?

I mean, not allowed or not able? ‘Cause I gave an example of the Kindle… which is a case where they’re not able to access the open version of the work. Go try to open up Kindle right now; you cannot open your Kindle. And then any place with limited Internet access is a place where only the Kindle version is available.

But what’s stopping people from… or other enterprises from taking the original work and making it available in those regions?

Well, look at what’s happening in Britain with the BBC. The BBC is attempting to take educational materials and make them accessible and agencies like BSkyB are taking them to court because they view it as a quote-on-quote ‘unfair competition’. Let’s take the public Internet companies in the U.S. It’s the same story. People, themselves, are forming pockets in order to create Internet wireless gatekeepers… And companies who aren’t actually involved in wireless of any sort, in communities, are taking them to court… Again, arguing that free content is an unfair competition. So this is the sorta thing that these kind of examples reflect.

Since they’re dealing with it in the courts, your preference is just to operate in a separate sphere outside of the commercial sector? [And you're way of doing that is] not licensing it with a Noncommercial license.

Basically, yeah..

But you still support initiatives like Flatworld Knowledge, for instance, who–they’re the only ones who have control over the work to commercially make it available because they have licensed their textbooks under a Noncommercial [license]…

Yeah, I find it kind of ironic that after all the conversations I’ve had with David Wiley whether we should use a Noncommercial license, he gets involved with Flatworld Knowledge. I mean, one of the purposes of Noncommercial licenses is to protect the commercial advantage of the person who issued the license. I don’t have a problem with that; I don’t consider the sale of content to be the provision of free learning, the provision of open educational resources, but if they can make money selling something that they’re already offering for free, I don’t mind that. Besides if it’s not a matter of whether it’s open or not, it’s outside my realm, my interest.

Ok, I guess we can move on from noncommercial. I’m interested in your view on open courseware. David Wiley recently distinguished between open courseware 1.0 and open courseware 2.0, and that was in reference to the recent discontinuation of funding for Utah State Open CourseWare.  And he suggested that it wasn’t the lack of funding on the part of the university, but the lack of priority for developing resources which, after the fact, would become OER.

Yeah, what did George Siemens say…

There’s a quote by George that says, “Openness should be built into the process of curriculum design and it should be systematized.” I was wondering if you agreed, or what your view on that was.

Yeah, in the short version I agree. There’s a longer version that’s a lot longer. Now, the point George made, and that is the inspiration for mine as well, is that creating an open educational resource is kind of like creating a customized version of the resource. It’s like creating a low carbon emission car is what you’re doing, but in general you just want the car… It’s like you want whatever comes in the box however it is you want to throw it in the box. And you don’t want to set up a development like a car where the creation of open resources is only some kind of add-on or customization, and that’s the case right now.

The other aspect has to do with sustainability. Like David Wiley who was at Utah. Then he moved to Brigham Young and there wasn’t the local support at Utah to continue the program there… and that creates a great division between open resources that seek funding from foundations and community based resources, such as Wikimedia, Wikiversity, Wikieducator and the like… The model we see coming out of foundations is a model where some content producer creates its content and sends it out into the world with a great act of charity, and the world sits and receives those open resources that rain down upon them. The other model is more sustainable, where it is community based or driven. The community is part and parcel of the process, and OER is the consequence of doing other activities that creates, almost if you will, a chapter of learning materials and open resources, in the process of doing other work. Like if it’s physics, just in the course of doing teaching, you develop resources, and these resources could be open educational resources. Something like that… you can’t depend on foundations for it to work. If we’re going to have sustainable open educational resources, it’s going to have become people and groups sharing for themselves.

So then are you suggesting that, instead of approaching it as an institution-wide type of policy of OER or open courseware we should just focus on the local–the cultural and different local, academic and open access groups, etc., for them to each develop their own resources?

Yeah, and with concern to the initiatives that get funding, I would focus much more on tools and processes that enable development of resources rather than the production of the resources themselves.

I think that’s all the questions I have for now… thank you so much for doing this.

Oh, you’re welcome.

However, the average OER creator cannot afford to wait, especially if they value their work as part of a global learning commons. In order for OER to be global, the copyright of the OER must be viable across jurisdictions. OER that are available under a CC license are global, as CC licenses are effective worldwide. But the inclusion of third party content that is not under the same terms of the license changes the global nature of OER, potentially walling it off from use in other countries. Thus, ccLearn has developed some practical recommendations and alternatives for those OER creators who are concerned with the global reach and impact of their works.

ccLearn Recommendations – Dealing with Legally Incompatible Content in OER

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are defined by the use of a Creative Commons license and are generally created by those who would like to share their work globally. However, some creators find the need to consider the costs and benefits of incorporating third-party materials with incompatible licenses into their “otherwise open” OER. This document recommends ways of managing or avoiding the problems that will arise.”

This and all ccLearn Recommendations and productions are licensed CC BY.