Title: About OER and Creative Commons Licencing
Course: Stage 4 Resources and OER > Section: 2. Open Educational Resources & Open Licencing

What are OER?

Image source: UNESCO

We now introduce Open Educational Resources (OER). We also provide reasons why you should care about Open Education and pay attention to copyright and open licencing.

“Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.
Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work.” ( UNESCO / COL Paris OER Declaration , 2012)

OER include: full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

So OER includes any educational content that is shared under an open license, whether or not it is a part of a course.

Open Courseware (OCW) is the free and open digital publication of high-quality tertiary‐level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content. (Open Education Consortium). So OCW is a subset of OER.

Image source Open Education Consortium

Why do we need OER?

Figure 4.1: Adapted from CILT, UCT slides.

OER has the Potential to: (OER Africa , 2012)

- Increase availability of high quality, relevant and need-targeted learning materials
- Reduce the cost of accessing educational materials
- Allow adaptation of materials and possibly contribute to enabling learners to be active participants in educational processes
- Support collaborative partnership of people working in communities of practice, preferably across/within institutions
- Build capacity in higher education institutions by providing educators with access, at low or no cost, to the tools and content required to produce high quality educational materials

Why should we care about Open Education?

- Watch the Open Education Matters video (Nadia Mirele, 2012) (3:31m): Why is it important to share content?

Copyright and Creative Commons Licencing (CC)

- What is Creative Commons Licencing?

“Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question “What can I do with this work?”  (creativecommons.org, 2020)

- Why should we pay attention to open licencing?

Creators of materials have a choice to make some of their rights reserved and sharing is made easy and legal.

- How does Creative Commons (CC) Licencing work?

The permissions can be combined in the following ways to form conditions for reuse:

*CC0 (indicates Public Domain)

Figure 4.2: CC Permission Combinations ( Creative Commons.org , 2020)

In summary, these licences can be viewed on a continuum from least restrictive to most restrictive.

Figure 4.3: CC Licence continuum (creativecommons.org, 2020)

Creative Commons Licencing Explained (Process Arts, 2011) (video, 5m32s)

Now undertake Activity 4.3 Licencing Practice Exercise (asynchronous)

Where can we find useful OER?

We now examine strategies about how to find OER for your course and information about repositories of open resources for your faculty.

Now that we know what makes an OER and have an understanding of the associated Creative Commons licences, we need to find out how we can search for relevant, good quality OER for our own courses.

"There is not an online ‘one-stop shop’ for OER, no single repository where they are stored. Instead they are scattered across the internet, often stored within institutional repositories or organizational websites. If you are going to use OER, then you need to know how best to search for them and identify where relevant resources for your particular discipline are most likely to be found. In this topic, we will investigate OER search techniques." ( OER Africa , 2020)

OER Repositories are collections of stored and curated OER, sometimes with a single theme and sometimes serving multiple academic disciplines. At the beginning, searching will seem difficult and time-consuming, but as you persevere, you will find which repositories are best suited to your own particular discipline, and you will get to know the OER authors' network, in the same way you get to know a research network in your area. You will be provided with a list of repositories to aid you in your search, and you could also use a search engine such as Google (Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4: Searching for OER Images using a Search Engine

Now undertake Activity 4.4: Searching for OER (asynchronous)