In 2008, ccLearn (now fully integrated into Creative Commons core) conducted a survey of educational projects online for its report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation entitled “What Status for Open? An Examination of the Licensing Policies of Open Educational Organizations and Projects” (pdf). Several months later it was followed up with a data supplement (pdf) that visualized some of the findings.

The report was developed in conjunction with ODEPO, which is a Semantic MediaWiki-based database of organizations involved in providing educational content online. Currently, ODEPO includes 1147 sites affiliated with various organizations, the majority of which were provided to us back in 2008 by educational repositories involved in the creation and expansion of Open Educational Resources (OER).

We’d like to continue supporting this database to help researchers, advocates, and learners find educational projects, analyze trends in online education, and become more effective advocates for open education. We hope that increased awareness of the digital education landscape will increase communication between consumers, producers, and curators of educational content which can lead to more open practices.

How to help: Browse ODEPO. If your favorite educational project or organization is missing, incomplete, or incorrect, please log in to or create a CC wiki account and follow these instructions. Alternatively, you can simply browse to your educational project and click the “Edit this data” button on the page.

Addendum: There is now an Open Tasks tracker for ODEPO where you can find lists of pages that need more data.

What’s particularly salient to those in the CC-community is that Trapani and Pash have authored and collaborated on the book using MediaWiki and are releasing its content under our Attribution-ShareAlike license. This means the book is not only compatible with Wikipedia (allowing it to be imported to and exported from the encyclopedia), but also free to share, sell, and reproduce online – a decision that is already bearing fruit in the form of a full Japanese translation.

You can learn more about the project at their website, where the guide will continue to be freely available.

It’s definitely exciting to see these two OER projects working together, especially since the collaboration is being generously funded by a grant from one of our own biggest supporters, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. There are various ways you can tune into its progress, including visiting the project planning node, subscribing to the Connexions mailing list, or helping them develop use case scenarios.

This supplement provides a graphical view of the licensing landscape within online education, drawing data from ODEPO, a database on our recently launched OpenEd. We find that a large proportion of educational sites are protected by “All Rights Reserved” copyright, including many sites that self-describe as “open,” which indicates a misconception of what it means to be an open resource.

ODEPO was compiled in MediaWiki, the platform that powers Wikipedia. And just like Wikipedia, anyone with an account on OpenEd can contribute to the database by adding organizations or editing current data. Future data supplements will include the most up-to-date data from ODEPO, so the more you contribute, the more research opportunities there are!