5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 17/21)

As Wayne and Richard point out, there are potential economic drivers outside of the situations outlined above. Wayne and Richard, you have both worked at institutions that have large course design and production functions and understand the financial commitment and economics of traditional large-scale production of courses and education materials. There are some indefinable potential benefits to OERs for these types of shops. For example:

• Lower costs associated with creating and recreating existing content including graphics, audio files, case studies, original interviews, etc.
• Lower costs associated with regularly revising course materials that are dynamic.
• Higher quality revisions and materials when they are modified, checked, and edited by multiple authors on short and dynamic development cycles.
• Etc.

Following along with the article and following comments above, that these and other potential benefits will be liberated when some barriers are reduced and a “economy” for OERs is established. Just to summarize, two of the barriers discussed above include:

• Low barrier (free) tools to design, create, publish, edit, package, publish, identify, catalog, search, etc. content, and
• Appropriate distribution licensing.

Just as an aside, following up on the use and non-use of the NC license element, here is a table that outlines the licensing agreements that have been adopted by a number of the larger US open courseware initiatives:

This prompts me to ask:

• If we could identify just a few factors that would promote an OER Economy, what might they be?
• What OSS (free) software tools are available to reduce some of the barriers?
• What OSS tools still need to be developed?

12. wayne mackintosh - april 9th, 2007 at 3:25 pm

Hi Ken,

I like your suggestions regarding the use of OERs in place of text books - particularly in the area’s you’ve identified. Smart thinking! These are the area’s we should prioritise in the free content movement from a strategic management perspective.

Regarding the tabulation of licenses used you can add OpenLearn of the British Open University that also uses the NC restriction. I can’t find the link at the moment, but David Wiley announced after much research and debate on the NC restriction that the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University had taken a decision to remove the NC restriction from their courses - which speaking from memory was about a third of their OCW offerings.

I must stress that all the projects using the NC license are using a non-free content license that does not meet the requirements of the Free Cultural Works definition. The freedom culture are working hard behind the scenes with the Creative Commons to separate out non-free licenses from those that are free. All free content is per definition open content - however, not all OERs are free. There are two substantive reasons why not to use the NC restriction: