The document discusses open educational resources (OER) and open access initiatives. It describes OER as teaching, learning and research materials that are freely available online, often through Creative Commons licenses that allow reuse and modification. Examples provided include open courseware from universities like MIT, as well as learning objects, open access journals and publications, and document sharing platforms. Creative Commons and its various licenses that enable open sharing and reuse are also explained.

1. Technology, Higher
Education and Open
Access
Anne Arendt

2. Public Domain
• Public domain items are available for anyone to use for
any purpose.
• Property rights are held by the public at large
• Not controlled or owned by anyone
• Consider: http://www.gutenberg.org/

3. What we normally do
First let’s talk about what we normally do:
• Google search
• Wikipedia
• Advanced search (maybe)
• Other?

4. What we normally do
Now let’s talk about the results we get:
•Google search http://www.google.com (but lets throw in some
boolean stuff)
•Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/ (look at what their license
is and let’s try an edit)
•Advanced search such as
http://www.google.ca/advanced_search or
http://scholar.google.com/

5. Considering OER
The open educational resources movement
consists of freely accessible electronic access to
course materials, but it also involves other aspects
such as open access to books and library materials,
and access to modules of educational information
instead of complete courses. It may also include
educational communication tools or
implementation resources as well (International
Institute, 2005).

6. OER
Essentially, it is teaching, learning, and research resources,
content or otherwise, which reside in the public domain
or have been released under an intellectual-property
license that permits their free use or repurposing by
others. This may include learning content, tools such as
software, or implementation resources such as methods
or principles (Smith & Casserly, 2006; Stover, 2005;
Trenin, 2007).

7. OER
Lets look a moment at: Open eLearning Content Observatory
Services at http://www.olcos.org/
Their intention, overall, is to foster learning and the acquisition
of competencies in both teachers and learners (Open
eLearning, 2007).

8. OER
Let’s look a moment at the Open eLearning Content
Repositories they list at
http://wikieducator.org/Exemplary_Collection_of_Open_eLearning_C

9. OER
Let’s try one: http://www.merlot.org/
Huh! Free and actually accessible (without a
login or fees) multimedia based educational
resources. Novel!

10. OER
So is that the only one? Absolutely not! Here are some
good places to start:
•http://www.oercommons.org/
•http://www.ocwfinder.org/
•http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=000793406067725335231%3

11. Learning Objects
Learning objects are small, reusable pieces of instructional
material
•http://academicearth.org/
•http://www.khanacademy.org/
•http://cnx.org/
•http://www.merlot.org/

12. OpenCourseWare
The OpenCourseWare (OCW) aspect of the open learning
initiative was dedicated to the development of freely available,
stand-alone college-level online course and teaching materials

13. MIT OCW
• MIT has perhaps the most well known OCW project
known to date at http://ocw.mit.edu/
• The MIT OCW initiative has made content from all of
their approximately 1800 courses available on the
Internet at no cost for non-commercial purposes
(Matkin, 2005; Carson, 2006)

14. MIT OCW
MIT’s OCW is visited over 1.2 million times per month from
individuals around the globe with the help of nearly 80 mirror
sites on university campuses around the world including 54 in
Africa and 10 in East Asia (Carson, 2006).

15. MIT OCW
Of the visitors of the MIT OCW,
49% are self-directed learners,
32% are students, and
16% are educators from around the world, with
61% of OCW use originating from outside the United States
(Carson, 2006).

16. MIT OCW
Self-directed learner uses include:
•(a) enhancing personal knowledge (56%),
•(b) keeping current in the field (16%), and
•(c) planning future study (14%).

17. MIT OCW
Student uses include:
•(a) complementing a course (38%),
•(b) enhancing personal knowledge (34%), and
•(c) planning course of study (16%).

18. MIT OCW
Educator uses include:
•(a) planning a course (26%),
•(b) preparing to teach a class (22%), and
•(c) enhancing personal knowledge (19%) (Carson, 2006).

19. OCW Consortium
An OCW consortium is found at
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
•MIT OCW: http://ocw.mit.edu/
•Yale OCW: http://oyc.yale.edu/
•Berkeley: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

20. Reference Materials & Resource
Repositories
• http://books.google.com/
http://www.loc.gov/
• http://www.nasa.gov/
• http://www.edlproject.eu/
• http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
And some we have already looked at:
• http://www.wikipedia.org/
• http://www.oercommons.org

21. Subject or Source Specific
• http://creativecommons.org/science
• http://textbookrevolution.org/
• http://mathworld.wolfram.com/
• http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/
• http://www.flickr.com/
• http://www.youtube.com/

22. Open Access Journals &
Publications
Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.doaj.org/
Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org/

23. Document Sharing
• Mendeley: http://www.mendeley.com/
• DSpace: http://dspace.mit.edu
• SelectedWorks: http://works.bepress.com/
• 280 Slides: http://280slides.com
• Google Docs: http://docs.google.com

24. Creative Commons & CC Learn
Creative Commons which frees materials from
automatically applied copyright restrictions by
providing free, easy-to-use, flexible licenses for
creators to place on their digital materials that
permit the originator to grant rights as they see fit
http://creativecommons.org
ccLearn focuses specifically on open learning and
open educational resources
http://learn.creativecommons.org

25. Creative Commons
Larry Lessig of Stanford is pursuing something
called the Creative Commons which frees
materials from automatically applied copyright
restrictions by providing free, easy-to-use,
flexible licenses for creators to place on their
digital materials that permit the originator to
grant rights as they see fit (Fitzergerald, 2007;
Smith & Casserly, 2006)

26. Creative Commons
A summary video can be found at
http://creativecommons.org/videos/ that explains CC well.

27. Creative Commons
Six major licenses of Creative Commons:
•Attribution (CC-BY)
•Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)
•Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)
•Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC)
•Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)
•Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-
ND)
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

28. Creative Commons
• There is one last one – CC0
• No rights reserved
• In contrast to CC’s licenses that allow copyright
holders to choose from a range of permissions while
retaining their copyright, CC0 empowers yet another
choice altogether – the choice to opt out of
copyright and the exclusive rights it automatically
grants to creators – the “no rights reserved”
alternative to our licenses.
• http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0

29. Creative Commons
Individuals place Creative Commons licenses on
individual items. Thus, there is no fool-proof way to
search all items with some type of CC release on them.
Resources to gets you started:
•http://search.creativecommons.org/
•http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators

30. Creative Commons
Equally, there are a number of area-specific methods of
searching for creative commons released items.
Images
•http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en
•http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pictures_and_images
•http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

31. Creative Commons
Video
•http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_movies
Music & Audio
•http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_audio
•http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Music_sound
•http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sound
Other
•http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_using_Creative_Comm

32. CcLearn
• A development stemming from Creative Commons is ccLearn
(July 2007) focused specifically on open learning and open
educational resources. It emphasizes diminishing legal,
technical, & social barriers.
• A primary goal of ccLearn is to build a comprehensive directory
of open educational resources with the assistance of Google
with encourages their discovery and subsequent use (Atkins et
al., 2007; Bissell, 2007; Brantley, 2007).
• Learn more about ccLearn and the Open Education Community
at http://learn.creativecommons.org/

33. Closing
As Smith & Casserly note,
we are aware that all creators of
knowledge need a place to put their
materials and that flow of knowledge
should be multidirectional and adaptable
to the local learning environment (2006).