A presentation given to the lunchtime seminar learning and teaching group at the Stockton Campus, University of Durham Medical School, 12 October 2010.
13. cc: by Least restrictive Most open Most reusable This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.
14. 2 Using Flickr advanced search for photos, diagrams and video
Anyone heard of, making, using, releasing OERs? Do you use PPT in learning and teaching? Other electronic resources? Have you posted teaching and learning materials you have created on to an institutional VLE? What about a website? Into a repository? Today, whether you are interested in OERs or not, I’m going to show you three things you can learn really quickly, to improve your content in terms of risk, licensing and copyright. Because your resources could be out on the Internet now. And there is some simple good practice we can all adopt to place ourselves and our institutions in the best possible defensible position.
The background is a huge recent investment in the UK in Open Educational Resources. A one year project we were involved in was one of 29 in the HEFCE (www.hefce.ac.uk) funded UK OER pilot programme which ran March 2009 – March 2010 The projects were administered by the Joint Information Systems Committee (www.jisc.ac.uk)and the Higher Education Academy (www.heacademy.ac.uk). Phase 2 of OER has recently been announced, with an extra 4 millions being committed in a climate of austerity, thus representing a significant policy movement in favour of OERs in the UK.
Organising Open Educational Resources had 17 HEIs as partners, who carried out 12 workpackages. The project ran for a year, with a budget of £500,000, with half of that in the form of the grant, and the rest as matched funding. It was about enabling the community. To facilitate HEIs and individuals ‘go open’ by mitigating risk and implementing policies and procedures based on good practice. Part of that is preparedness to engage with the debate, and readiness of content to be released openly. Today I am going to go right back to basics. We wanted to shed light on pools of best practice, and share that across the constituency – making sure that everyone knows in their own context, the people, policies, procedures, and permissions involved in going OER.
Thinking about copyright, IPR and what you can and can’t do with a resource is essential to all of us. We also have a duty of care to educate our students and ourselves about the differences between copyright, IPR and licenses to sue and share materials, and in this digital age, we need to begin to be modelling digital professionalism in our own everyday work. It is what you should be doing with any materials you share with students, with colleagues, with a LSE. It is good practice we should all be adopting.
One of the conditions of the funding was that we release everything under CC licenses. One of the main characteristics of an Open Educational Resource, is that it has an open license attached to it. These work in addition to existing copyright, which is made up of 2 parts: ownership and licensing. The copyright part deals with ownership – Creative Commons deals with the licensing part, making explicit to users which they can do with the resource and under what circumstances. You always retain IPR. Creative Commons is the licensing regime we were required to apply, but its not the only one. There are others. CC has a range of licenses with varying degrees of which you are allowed to do, and whether or not you can make commercial use of materials. The simplest is attritbution only, the most restrictive is attribution-noncommerical-noderivatives. There are very good reasons you may choose that license – such as if you have material containing data which would be sensitive out of that particular context. We also had to tag everything with ukoer, and deposit materials or metadata into Jorum Open, the national repository at www.jorum.ac.uk Thinking about licensing is something we should be thinking about with all of our resources whether they are going into an open repository or not. If they are being uploaded into a VLE, or if you are distributing them by email, it is likely they are being reshared via email, social networking etc.Making the use of the material and understanding what can and can’t be done with a resource is therefore essential to all of us. CC makes it easy.
In our field – healthcare education there is a third thing we should be thinking about. If there are people in our resources, if they contain any recordings – video, audio, photographs – we need to additionally think about consent. I am not going to focus on this today, but it is useful to know that there are another couple of pieces of work going on around consent and making this explicit too – email me if you want more details on this, or I can come back another time to talk to you specifically about that. I was at a meeting yesterday which is bringing together experts to put together a set of principles and a code of practice around consent, and in our OER2 project, PORSCHE, we are working with CC UK and others to put together some ideas around a Consent Commons to complement Creative Commons – making consent in resources.
As one recommendation we recommended the development of a consent commons – this carries on previous work undertaken by Ellaway et al in 2006 under the CHERRI project. Jane Williams from Bristol is taking work forward on reusing images in educational settings, via the Strategic Content Alliance, and we are presenting a paper about consent commons, which will facilitate the reuse of people centred materials, and how you ensure that the consent people have given for their data to be used in teaching is extant in the materials. Consent commons is a way of demonstrating diligence in the collection and storage of consent in non clinical use and settings – eg universities. We feel this is something we should all be doing anyway – in the same way we collect and store consent for treatment and research. Its good practice, but we would like to pick your brains as to how it might work and what it might look like……
So I promised you three things you can do today to improve good practice with your own resources – 1 thing we can all do to improve our everyday practice – since students and staff are already sharing your materials despite them being behind authentication – is make sure we used openly licenced material in our own teaching resources. I am going to show three easy ways to do this. You might have noticed a black band with a load of stuff in it – logos and text – and this slide has some text overlaid on it. All the images in this presentation were obtained using exactly what I am going to demonstrate now. DEMO ONLINE There are new services appearing all the time offering advanced searches where you can limit your exploration to only content clearly licensed for use and reuse – typically under Creative Commons licenses. Check the advanced search options. For Google , go to the Advanced search option, then expand the Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more link, then choose your preferred licence type from the Usage rights drop down list. The most open option is the free to use, share or modify, even commercially option. For Flickr , go to the Advanced search option, scroll down, until you see the Creative Commons logo, click the check box to Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content , then choose the type of licenced content you prefer. By checking all the boxes in that section (i.e Find content to use commercially and Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon ) you will find the most openly licenced items. www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/attribution This new tool pastes the licence on to the image……
Let’s jump in…..
Is this useful? Will you use these tricks? You can filter all Google content by usage rights
If you want to find resources uploaded by our project (c. 2000) these are the search tems to use with your favourite search engine. And if you want to see more resources from other projects have a look at the UK national repository, Jorum. In terms of impact – we are already seeing some significant changes in come of the partner HEIs- new committees set up, policies being checked and refined. We have engaged with over 50% of UK schools in our subject areas, and by the time we have done out 2 nd projects that will include NHS partners and over 60% of schools.
Lindsay Wood, Project Officer HEFCE, JISC and HEA
Thanks for listening…..
On the website you can find reports, the toolkit – version 3 will be significantly better in terms of the single interface, and available in November 2010. You can find information about OER2, PORSCHE and ACTOR projects, and find an increasing number of case studies – about 10 so far, though we have done about 60. Do get in touch with us and follow us on Twitter…..