Sharing and reuse of teaching and learning materials (open educational resources) including courses (open courseware) and textbooks (open textbooks)
The value of this open practice for my learning is that it has helped me get textbooks for free that I need to pass all my courses, especially when they are from OpenStax.com.
The link for OpenStax.com is: https://openstax.org/
said to contain the "high points of each lecture." This seems to be an attempt to patent ideas, rather than the professor's actual presentation of them.
This is concerning as students should be leaving with the imparted ideas weather in their head or on there exercise pad it is still the intention for the course to pass on to others at least the most important points.
The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
Scholarly publication is so weirdly backwards.
Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn
It is incredible how much these resources make considering the narrow audience
Thinking of your own teaching practice, have you ever revised learning content to make it better suited for your course? Why did you revise it? Did you have to get permission before you revised it?
While I am not teaching staff, as a Librarian I am often repurposing material to be better suited to my context, I may not ask for permission but I do always attribute the sources.
What roles do you think digital technologies and the internet have played in making open education possible? Are there types of open educational activities that are dependent on digital technologies and the internet?
The internet and other technologies have helped by providing many alternate methods for delivery storage and dissemination of open educational resources.
What does open education mean to you? Are there activities in the list that are part of your regular educational practice? What are they and why do you participate in them? What value do they bring to your educational practice?
Open educational resources are important in my context because textbooks are too expensive for most students, so promoting OERs to faculty is essential, also Open Publishing is a great help to our researchers who struggle to APCs
TEDx Talk from Dr. David Wile
Some thoughts from the video. Fossil Fuels are legacy energy forms. We have cleaner, renewable, and sustainable options now. Proprietary textbooks are fossil fuels. They are expensive, restrictive, and exclusive. We have the technology to allow all students to read the same book at the same time without access issues. If you are in education and you copyright or withhold your IP, why are you in education? The entire role of a teacher is to be generous with your time, information, and materials. Open Education is the only way to do education.
In recent years, the most radical opposition to the status quo has coalesced around a controversial website called Sci-Hub – a sort of Napster for science that allows anyone to download scientific papers for free. Its creator, Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazhakstani, is in hiding, facing charges of hacking and copyright infringement in the US. Elsevier recently obtained a $15m injunction (the maximum allowable amount) against her.
Save definitions to refer back to as I work. A-G are especially helpful. Moral rights is also an interesting thought.
Any reasonable notes taken during the lecture should clearly contain these high points, which suggests Moulton's turning his students into infringers
I am so sorry that the teacher has to do that. Now the students are in so much trouble, this lecturer just wouldn't let them do what a student should be doing. "Learning"
Faulkner has filed 38 separate counts against Class Notes, most focused on different types of material used by the notes provider, so there's plenty of room for a court to draw an extremely fine line between the intellectual content that remains the property of a lecturer, and that which enters the public domain.
I think many lines were crossed here.
Jack London, pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney, (born January 12, 1876, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died November 22, 1916, Glen Ellen, California), American novelist and short-story writer whose best-known works—among them The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906)—depict elemental struggles for survival. During the 20th century he was one of the most extensively translated of American authors.
Save for research
If the claims made in the filing are accurate, Class Notes may have been a bit overzealous in their copying. Some of the material distributed is alleged to be little more than sample quiz questions from the CD, with copyright information deliberately removed. But the tight integration between the CD and the class make it so it's hard to tell where standard lecture material ends and the copyrighted works begin.
This is interesting. It seems like with the internet, copyrighting and educational content are in a very grey area.
“Open education” is a phrase that encompasses a number of different activities in education and, depending on who you speak to, can mean different things to different people. One useful definition of open education comes from UBC, which define open education as a “collection of practices that utilize online technology to freely share knowledge.” Under the umbrella of open education, there are a number of specific ways in which this sharing of knowledge happens in higher education. These practices can include: Publishing research in open journals (open access publishing) Releasing data to be reused by others (open data) Using, sharing and collaboratively creating software and computer code (open source software) Flexible admission policies to institutions or courses (open admissions or open registration) Student assignments that promote student publishing or participating on the open web (open teaching or open pedagogy) Sharing of teaching and research practices (open scholarship) Sharing and reuse of teaching and learning materials (open educational resources) including courses (open courseware) and textbooks (open textbooks) While this is not an exhaustive list, it should give you an idea of the types of activities that the phrase open education encompasses. Why open? While the above definition and list should give you an overview of the type of practices that open education encompass, it doesn’t answer the questions “Why Open?” and “Why do educators choose to take on these activities and call themselves open educators?”. To help answer the question Why Open?, please watch this TEDx Talk from Dr. David Wiley and read the article Openness in Education [PDF in Google Drive] by David Wiley and Cable Green (video length is 14:55).
Open education resources do not require any payment or permission, and can be modified as to suit distinct teaching strategies and content. Digital technology and internet has certainly eased the access to open resources.
What roles do you think digital technologies and the internet have played in making open education possible? Are there types of open educational activities that are dependent on digital technologies and the internet?
Digital tech has had an immense impact when it comes to the education sector, especially when access to hard copy is limited. Students who are enrolled via distance and flexible learning are highly dependent on online OERs.
Releasing data to be reused by others (open data)
Provides a foundation for researchers to organize their project while saving time and resources.
What roles do you think digital technologies and the internet have played in making open education possible? Are there types of open educational activities that are dependent on digital technologies and the internet?
Significant and massive role!! Digital technologies enabled us from creating, sharing, accessing, publishing, reusing, finding, and collaborating on open content. Except for human intellectual efforts, almost every aspect of OE owes to digital technologies.
What does open education mean to you? Are there activities in the list that are part of your regular educational practice? What are they and why do you participate in them? What value do they bring to your educational practice?
I think 'open education' means flexible access to educational content, that is with following the open licenses conditions, anyone can benefit from accessing content and use for different purposes. Reusability is a main factor that enables open content to grow and improve.
I lead a project that generate resources of pedagogical approaches that are published under CC licenses. These resources are generated within HEI (internal team and academics across faculties) where we encourage sharing this type of knowledge (i.e. teaching approaches) among others.
Student assignments that promote student publishing or participating on the open web (open teaching or open pedagogy)
Open pedagogy is an important approach to tap into student-generated content. Generative learning theory has so much potential to foster learning experience and maximise leanring outcomes.
digital technologies and the internet have played in making open education possible? Are there types of open educational activities that are dependent on digital technologies and the internet?
I think these digital technologies and the internet effect the term education massively. With the help of these open education become globally wider. It does not matter where we live , what's our situation, education available. There are so many free courses for which we don't need money, it's all because of techno + open education.
Sharing and reuse of teaching and learning materials (open educational resources) including courses (open courseware) and textbooks (open textbooks)
Considering that resources creation is a creative but time-consuming process, I think it is important to share and reuse resources
Resources licensed under CC BY-NC can only be remixed, adapted, and re-licensed into resources containing an NC (Non-Commercial) term, which includes CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-SA. Resources licensed under CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA can only be incorporated into derivative works which are re-licensed under the same license (e.g. * BY-SA with BY-SA, and BY-NC-SA with BY-NC-SA) due to their SA (Share Alike) term. (However, it is for example, possible to incorporate CC BY with CC BY-SA resources if the resultant work is released under the CC BY-SA license). Resources licensed under CC BY-ND and CC BY-NC-ND cannot be incorporated into a derivative work, and therefore they may not be re-licensed, due to the ND (No Derivatives) term in the license.
which licenses you may use, depending on the license terms of the underlying resources:
When you apply a CC license, you give permission to anyone to use your material for the full duration of applicable copyright and similar rights.
This statement and the questions which follow it really highlights to me just how central to Creative Commons copyright really is. I hear people talk about open and Creative Commons as though they are some sort of magical panacea to the supposed problems created by copyright. Whichever regime we choose to engage with, we still need to consider questions related to substantiality, originality, ownership, and duration and how these issues tie in with how we share our work and use other people's creations.The underlying issues have not changed but the way we engage with them has.
Can I change the license terms or conditions? Yes—but if you change the terms and conditions of any Creative Commons license, you must no longer call, label, or describe the license as a “Creative Commons” or “CC” license, nor can you use the Creative Commons logos, buttons, or other trademarks in connection with the modified license or your materials. Keep in mind that altering terms and conditions is distinct from waiving existing conditions or granting additional permissions than those in the licenses. Licensors may always do so, and many choose to do so using the CC+ protocol to readily signal the waiver or additional permission on the CC license deed.
I was not aware (until now) of the CC+ Protocol tool as an approved mechanism to modify or or waive CC licence terms and conditions. I was interested to view the html markup and also see the CC+ tool used in conjuction with a CC-BY-NC-ND licence on the New York State Senate website, https://www.nysenate.gov/copyright-policy to waive 'attribution requirements and allow for the creation of derivative works and commercial usage provided that such derivative works and commercial usage do not relate to political fundraising', thereby providing broader permissions for text, pictures and graphic material.
W
The two Creative Commons licences seem rather odd in tandem
k. After getting the University to waive its copyright on the material, he worked with a company called Faulkner Press to copyright and formalize the material. That material is now available as a $90 CD
“You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”
Any reasonable notes taken during the lecture should clearly contain these high points, which suggests Moulton's turning his students into infringers. Of course, his ploy seems more squarely aimed at Class Notes, but it is the students who perhaps are suffering the most.
Aside from a business model which apparently relies upon students purchasing back their own work, to what extent are the lecture notes original works? Surely, this case is not about protecting facts which should reasonably be considered public domain? The only originality I can see here lies in Professor Moulton's arrangement of those facts.
Notwithstanding this,copyright would grant Professor Moulton the right to assert his Performance Rights in the delivery of his lecture through appropriate acknowledgement even with the University relinquishing its rights in the actual lecture recording.
After getting the University to waive its copyright
What is the University's interest here? Are these materials which are being commercialised individual works in which the University has relinquished its copyright interests or is what is being commercialised tantamount to the structure of the course/program offered by the University?
After getting the University to waive its copyright on the material, he worked with a company called Faulkner Press to copyright and formalize the material. That material is now available as a $90 CD
Should educational materials which are developed by salaried staff for a public good be commercialised in this way? I feel like this is just another version of the distribution monopoly we are trying to move away from.
small pack of electronic recording devices,
This raises an interesting question - Who owns the copyright of a recorded lecture?
Moulton's writing on the transparency fixes the copyright, and the words can easily be compared to the student notes
It should be fair and reasonable for educators to own their lectures if their academic employers agreed to the claim. It would be ideal if, through contracts, educational institutions insist that their lecturers licensed their works under the Creative Commons.
open journals
Many up and coming researchers have published in open journals when before they would have struggled. Young scholars around the world might have found open access publishing a big helping hand in setting out on their professional journey.
Not all kinds of encryption or access limitations are prohibited by the licenses.
This is very interesting and I did not realise this would be an aspect to be considered when speaking about CC. Of course, looking back it does make sense.
even if a creator distributes a work in digital format, you have permission to print and share a hard copy of the same work
It is one of positive attribute of creative common
The CC licenses are irrevocable
This means author cannot stop others using the work. So author must think before choosing license elements.
Einstein's Notes, which operates online as HowIgotAnA.com, pays students to write down what professors say in class so that the notes can be re-sold to other students in advance of exams, Sullivan claims.
I believe that the underlying intention of the project of sharing lectures is not problematic at all. Bottom line is that this is always promoted by lecturers, ask your peers for information first, then go to a tutor/professor for more information. This project creates a middle step, which is to check the notes available to students from other students, which will deliver a different explanation which might make the content clearer. This is common practice amongst students globally. However, where this case truly get murky (and moves away from my preference) is when it is sold to students. The sharing of knowledge SHOULD be free. It SHOULD be common practice for students to share knowledge freely. The reason why they are going around the copyright is so they do not have to pay, and then they turn around and sell the information they received for little to no money. This is where the project completely loses me. Good intentions, but very bad in practice. An organisation such as Studydrive is a free document sharing organisation, which is much more up my alley and has been incredibly helpful throughout my years of study by providing different perspectives on the lectures. However, I do believe that the lawsuit is defending their position of copyright with arguments that go beyond that which they wish to change. The stance of the professor is endangering the free sharing of knowledge by students world-wide and this will limit global knowledge and research sharing.
What if a student took notes, but didn't copy anything verbatim from a professor's lecture, and then decided to publish the notes online or sell them?
I am beginner in learning copyrights. I know one thing copyrights doesn't protects ideas. When I teach, students used to take notes. After understanding the concept, they take the ideas from notes and rewrite their own. This doesn't break any rules of copyright.
seeks any profits made off of the Moulton study guides
Karma. In the mean time, what about all of those students who were told they would learn something valuable and all they learned was how to repeat canned answers on an exam?
notes can be re-sold to other students in advance of exams
This is only possible if it brings benefit to students, and the learning environment in which this is profitable is so impoverished that students should actually be suing the university for dereliction of duty, incompetence, and deliberate misrepresentation.
Worrying about whether this violates someone's property rights is hardly worth the effort.
What if a student took notes, but didn't copy anything verbatim from a professor's lecture, and then decided to publish the notes online or sell them?
That would be research. God forbid that students should do research!
What if someone read the Torah and didn't quote it verbatim but explained it in their own words.That would be exegesis and expansion on meaning, extending and applying this. Talmud.
protected infringement
"Protected infringement" - such a beautiful concept. You have to love law. It is as counter intuitive as quantum physics.
Cliffs Notes, which summarize copyrighted novels
Cliff Notes - a god send to generations of students who can't be bothered with reading or thinking. This works only in broadcast pedagogy, where there is a "correct answer" to every question and that answer is in the PowerPoint presentation "that I gave you" or in Cliff Notes, if I was smart enough not to do a PPT.
students who don't always want to go to the classes they are paying for
Red flag. The writer's animosity toward students is thinly veiled. This is a general manifestation of American anti-intellectualism.
Moulton and his e-textbook publisher are suing Thomas Bean, who runs a company that repackages and sells student notes, arguing that the business is illegal since notes taken during college lectures violate the professor's copyright.
This is actually common practice in Saudi Arabia though it is often the professors who collate the notes and sell them via "student services" bureaux located near university campuses. These services also package and sell exams, which are typically reused year in and year out. This provides professors with an extra revenue flow upon which many depend.
Einstein's Notes puts a copyright notice on the cheat sheets and prints its material with black ink on dark green paper in an attempt to thwart photocopying.
This is really questionable practice, in my mind. They shouldn't be able to copyright something which they have questionably taken from somebody else. Printing materials in the way they are doing also goes against educational practices around accessibility
Moulton has registered his copyrights, cleared them with the university and recorded his lectures
This part surprises me (that the university has allowed an individual lecturer to register copyrights). Educational institutions would usually have a blanket statement in their employment contracts stating who 'owns' the materials created for the purposes of work...
ethically murky businesses
I think this is key. The case may be disputed, but everyone (probably?!) agrees that it is "ethically murky"
To make use of open social annotation does not necessarily mean that instructional activities must be done in a public layer
At OERu, we encourage public annotations tagged with the specific course code which enables these interactions to be harvested for a syndicated course feed for the benefit of the open learning cohorts.
The disdain for proprietary software on the part of free software advocates
This sounds oddly polemic for an academic paper. I wonder what Critical Discourse Analysis could tell us about this text?
Reuse, Remix, Revise, Redistribute: remixing and revising may be most common in order to adapt materials to a local use rather than to reiterate for redistribution with specific value added. Need to check source on this (Wiley, Bliss, McEwen, 2014) - oops - paywall.
This sounds oddly polemic for an academic paper. I wonder what Critical Discourse Analysis could tell us about this text?
Joseph, K., Guy, J., & McNally, M. B. (2020). Toward a Critical Approach for OER: A Case Study in Removing the ‘Big Five’from OER Creation. Open Praxis, 11
Reuse, Remix, Revise, Redistribute: remixing and revising may be most common in order to adapt materials to a local use rather than to reiterate for redistribution with specific value added. Need to check source on this (Wiley, Bliss, McEwen, 2014) - oops - paywall.
Legal Requirements and RestrictionsMake Open Content and OER Less Open
This is my comment
sites' content incompatible in an esoteric way that intelligent, well-meaning people can easily miss
As a hopefully intelligent and committed OER advocate, I prefer the copyleft provision as a mechanism to protect resources from commercial enclosure. This is not an esoteric perspective - but derived from 20+ years experience working in the open trenches.
The inclusion of requirements and restrictions in open licenses make open content and OER less open than they would be without these requirements and restrictions.
Degrees of openness. Is it really 'open' with strings attached?
download and keep your own copy
I'm wondering why there is this insistence on digital formats. Public domain materials could be reproduced by any means and redistributed.
Before printing technology, distribution required a copy, written by hand, in manuscript form. With additions in margins, and additions to the additions, and commentary in concentric waves emanating from the center. This was how knowledge spread and grew. And without it, human progress would have been impossible. There was no copyright.
(1) in the public domain or (2) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:
Of course,this means that the vast majority of resources are open and that this is, in fact, the default category for everything save what is explicitly excluded from it. Oddly, however, exclusion appears to be automatic - for a period of years - so exclusion from the exclusion requires explicit declaration via CC or some other mechanism.
No surprises, this convoluted system is designed to protect the "proprietary" rights of distributors. Viz: George Michael vs Sony
But if access, use, modification and sharing are impaired, by whatever mechanism, then conversion has taken place, and the resource is no longer open.
Conversion happens with some distributions of Linux, which are not free. This does not mean that the Linux OS is no longer open, just that this or that distribution - which is Linux plus whatever added value has been built into it - is not open. The alternative to it is any free distribution.
the purpose of a functional definition - one based on the ability of a person to access, use, modify and share the resource - is that it enables a simple empirical test. Instead of metaphysical discussions about the nature of an object
This is unique to Downe's definition. The openness of the object is not a function of the object itself, but of what one can DO with it: "Can I access it? Can I use it?" etc.
What are the reasons for this rising cost?
According to a study by U Michigan Library, 1) short revision cycles - often unnecessary and only intended to force new purchases and prevent students from selling their old books back; 2) bundling of new materials - software, workbooks etc. 3) market features: those who chose to buy (faculty) are not those who buy (students) - chooser does not bear the cost - as in prescription medicine selected by a doctor - separation of choice from payment influences cost dramatically.
That is to say: exploitative market practices cheat students and drive them significantly further into debt.
What does open education mean to you?
For me Open Education means not only sharing, but also exchange, and participation of everyone. For this exchange of knowledge and participation of everyone to occur, it is important people are allowed to do it.
What roles do you think digital technologies and the internet have played in making open education possible? Are there types of open educational activities that are dependent on digital technologies and the internet?
I think they play a very important role, because they make open materials available to a much wider audience, and not just audience, but potential adapters of shared materials. It is also much easier to let others know about resources and teaching methods that have been valuable. One example of an activity that I've assigned students that is dependent on digital technologies and the internet is content creation for Wikipedia.
can mean different things to different people
Is there any movement towards agreeing on its use/meaning?
TEDx Talk from Dr. David Wiley
Wiley talks about our being on the precipice of a new reformation in education. It will be interesting to see whether educators' need to respond to the Covid-19 crisis is what takes us over that precipice...
What does open education mean to you? Are there activities in the list that are part of your regular educational practice? What are they and why do you participate in them? What value do they bring to your educational practice?
We encourage teachers to create their own Open Textbooks and add them to our open textbooks platform: (https://textbooks.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/textbooks)
Student assignments that promote student publishing or participating on the open web (open teaching or open pedagogy)
We have been trialing something in this area with students publishing their assessment to OneNote. The assessments require them to document their daily activities and findings which can then be seen by all staff. however this is not entirely 'open' as other students and the public cannot yet access, this was our initial intention but we meet some resistance from the students due to an embedded fear of 'people stealing their work'.
Publishing research in open journals (open access publishing)
Open journals are great as they can be accessed by everyone. The open access means that the financial barrier faced by some individuals and institutions to access quality resources is removed leading to more equality.
Sharing of teaching and research practices (open scholarship)
There needs to be more of this, open scholarship facilitates<br> research and teaching opportunities.
“collection of practices that utilize online technology to freely share knowledge.”
It is a real challenge to teach to understand the real difference with internet content property. I would give examples : As a secondary school teacher, I was confronted with students who took all the Internet information as their own creation, without really understanding the role of property or author. How to set up a learning about the rules when the Internet and their authors have trouble finding their own way around these property rules ? Secondly, all universities face to plagiarism. How can the open concept be introduced and face to plagiarism as a restricted key for a university student ?
Sharing and reuse of teaching and learning materials (open educational resources) including courses (open courseware) and textbooks (open textbooks)
We recently organized an event to promote the use of open educational resources, particularly open textbooks!
What is Open Education?
This article is written from the perspective of an educator / teacher. What do you think "open education" means from the perspective of a learner? Keen to hear your thoughts!
Flexible admission policies to institutions or courses (open admissions or open registration)
I always feel that having a "flexible" admission policies to institutions or courses is one of a factor that deteriorating the quality of our graduates.
Thinking of your own teaching practice, have you ever revised learning content to make it better suited for your course? Why did you revise it? Did you have to get permission before you revised it?
Updating learning contents is a must given my subject matter. It has to be updated with the latest information and current trends. It is a crucial part of teaching practice, especially when your students are always current and up-to-date with the latest information. Major changes will need to go through moderation process whereby we call a few panels to review them before being published.
Thinking of your own teaching practice, have you ever revised learning content to make it better suited for your course? Why did you revise it? Did you have to get permission before you revised it?
Yes, I had revised learning content for courses in my programme. Other than to make it better suited to the programme objectives, it was revised to suite current or latest technologies and trends.
Whether to get permission or not in order to revise the learning content, subject to the change. Usually, major change, need to discuss/ update/ document it.
These practices can include
Are there any examples of open practice missing from this list in your opinion?
Visit each of the websites listed in the table below and add them to your browser bookmarks / favourites. (Consider creating an “OERu” folder for saving these bookmarks.)
2019.6.14
why do you participate in them?
Leading the OER Foundation, I have the privilege of working full-time in OER. I joined the teaching profession with the purpose of sharing knowledge, and open education provides a powerful vehicle to share knowledge freely for all learners.
Using, sharing and collaboratively creating software and computer code (open source software)
This is a key feature of the OERu collaboration. The OER Foundation (which coordinates the OERu) releases all software used for the OERu platform under an open source license. We also publish technical guidelines for anyone interested in replicating any of our technologies. See: https://tech.oeru.org/
This reminds me of when textbooks at my nearby school shop went from 2.45$ to 4.45$, there were a lot of complaints.
When it comes to making money off the notes I slightly agree, but at the same time notes are a necessary part of learning so they shouldn't be completely copyrighted.
This is a fundamental principle of CC licensing.
It is important to remember that CC licenses operate within existing copyright law. CC does not replace copyright - it refines it.