Scientific Discovery and the Creative Commons

Tim Spuck's students discuss their search for T Tauri stars with renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at the American Astronomical Society conference in January 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a recent episode of Cosmos: a Spacetime Odyssey, Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke of the dissemination of scientific ideas and publishing as part of the scientific method: "Science requires openness to flourish: our understanding of nature belongs to the world." Ironically, in the same week, I visited our university library to discuss how the College of eLearning and Extended Ed could support their work and one of the librarians told me that they had to drop the journal Nature because it is too expensive. For our little institution it would be over 10k a year for the basic journal - forget about specialty journals. The old model of publishing hampers scientific progress! It certainly limits the examination and testing of ideas to only the colleges that can afford those particular journals. What happens to us if the genius that will cure cancer can only afford a state college? Or is in another country? How much do we lose when the responses, counter-arguments, and reproduction of experiments can only come from a particularly privileged perspective? We all benefit from diverse points for view, including the original investigators. Yes, I would like it if some alumni were able to pool their resources and get us a subscription to Nature and its associated journals. But I would like it even more if more journals followed a Creative Commons model and opened research up to everyone. I loved what the Creative Commons website has to say about this:

The more we understand about science and its complexities, the more important it is for scientific data to be shared openly. It’s not useful to have ten different labs doing the same research and not sharing their results; likewise, we’re much more likely to be able to pinpoint diseases if we have genomic data from a large pool of individuals. Since 2004, we’ve been focusing our efforts to expand the use of Creative Commons licenses to scientific and technical research. (Emphasis my own.)

There are new models of scientific publishing that include openness. Even Nature is taking advantage of open licenses in a limited way.

Another exciting development is the Directory of Open Access Journals which searches 5,622 journals at the full-text article level.

Everyone benefits from open access to data and information. Lets serve the research, not the business models. As the Berlin Declaration on Open Access puts it open access scientific literature should be publicly available, free of charge, and on the Internet "so that those who are interested can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, refer to and, in any other conceivable legal way, use full texts without encountering any financial, legal or technical barriers other than those associated with Internet access itself."

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Reports on the Death of the Book are Greatly Exaggerated

William Shakespeare

I was at a poetry reading at the library a while back and one of the poets had a poem about how lost in cyberspace everyone is and the implication was that he was seeing the end of print culture and the book. Never mind that there was not an empty seat in the house to hear a poetry reading on a Thursday night! But there we have it - technology is phasing out the book. But it is just changing media. We don't need hand copied books either. More and more books are being written electronically and read on electronic devices. This isn't news. What is funny is to watch people with one foot in the old paradigm trying to make sense of the new. This includes myself. I have always thought of books as something that I had to own. They are objects to be held and even if they are not held in my hand, they must be contained in something that I own!  I had a funny thing happen the other day. I was downloading an ebook onto my iPad and I got an error message that said my iPad was full. I was incredulous. How could this happen? I have 16 gigabytes of space! I went through Kindle and iBook to take a look at what happened. I downloaded a lot of books. My electronic book shelves had swelled to the autodidactic, polymathic, bibliomaniacal proportions that my home bookshelves used to have. I got onto a vintage, historic cookbook jag and that cost me some room. I have the Washington DC Cookbook from the turn of the century which allowed me to send my actual hard copy to my Best Man, Steve Boutchyard, who is currently in culinary school. But I also have a copy of Beeton's and numerous others. I had the complete works of Poe; a raft of Elizabethan playwrights that are not Shakespeare as well as the complete works of the Bard; numerous volumes of Balzac; a complete library of philosophical works; everything related to Art History that is free in iTunes and Google Books that is downloadable and the list goes on. And so here I am, just like I was in the 80s, before I had a computer, with book shelf issues. I have noticed an uptick in people talking about classic literature and I think it is because so much of it is freely available in accessible formats via places like Gutenberg.org. I also have a couple of ebooks that I actually bought that I am reading with no small amount of irony: I am reading an electronic book about a physical archive where the author is able to convey in deeply poetic detail what it is like to work with the physical texts that go back hundreds of years in the Paris police archives.

I still own a lot of physical books, but not nearly as much as I used to since the dawn of the internet. I love a good physical copy of a book as much as anyone: there are some books that I have that are gorgeous old books with fine bindings, thick paper that has the wire ridges where the paper dried on a screen, and beautiful fonts that press deeply into the paper. They have a texture and presence that you can't get from an etext. That said, I was looking for a book on Ausonius on line today and I found what I was looking for on Amazon and the physical book was going for $540. And you can bet they are not being as thoughtful about design and fonts as they once were. Needless to day, the electronic version of an equivalent text from Google Books at no cost will suffice.

In the late 90s, I thought that there would be no limit to the amount of books I could put on a computer. So how I could eat up 16 gigs is just incredible; a bit is the smallest unit - a 1 or a 0, on or off, a byte is 8 bits which make a single character, 10 to 15 bytes go into a sentence, and a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, and a gigabyte is a 1000 megabytes. And I had 16 of those! If you are using an Apple or Android product, you probably already know about the iBook and Google Book apps, but there are other sources of free books. If you want to fill up your iPad or eReader quickly with free books I would suggest spending a rainy afternoon browsing:

1. Gutenberg.org
2. The Online Books Page from the University of Pennsylvania
3. The Internet Archive's Digital Books Collections
4. Forgotten Books  
5. The Sacred Text Archive
6. World Digital Library
7. ManyBooks.net
8. Libravox - free audio books

On top of all of that, there are the numerous texbooks that are licensed with the "Creative Commons" license that you can download through various repositories like the Open Textbook Library and College Open Textbooks. There, I just exploded your iPad!

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Open Textbooks and Student Success

Cable Green (Photo: Jeffrey Beall)

The tirelessly brilliant and ubiquitous Cable Green sent out today's announcement from Creative Commons about the U.S. PIRG Education Fund report called, “Fixing the Broken Textbook Market: How Students Respond to High Textbook Costs and Demand Alternatives." This report reinforces what the research is already showing - open textbooks can be a significant contributing factor to student success. The results we saw with projects like the Kaleidoscope Project was that students were actually doing better in courses that were using openly licensed, free textbooks. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the reasons at College of the Redwoods was that the faculty created textbooks were written for a particular student population to solve particular problems. The books actually addressed the needs of the community. You can still find articles out there about the so-called suspect quality of open education resources, but they are being written by folks who have not looked at what is out there now.  Articles like “The cost and quality of open textbooks: Perceptions of community college faculty and students” by TJ Bliss, John Hilton, David Wiley, and Kim Thanos go a long way to dispel those myths as does "A Preliminary Examination of the Cost Savings and Learning Impacts of Using Open Textbooks in Middle and High School Science Classes," by David Wiley, John Levi Hilton III, Shelley Ellington, and Tiffany Hall.

Commercial textbooks have their own myths to deal with - like whether or not they are reliable!

This is a very dynamic time to be involved in open textbooks!

Related articles

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• Lumen Learning / OpenStax Partnership (opencontent.org)
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• U.S. PIRG report finds students would perform better with open textbooks (creativecommons.org)
• Students saving money with open textbooks (downes.ca)
• Majority Of Students Have Skipped Buying A College Textbook Because They're Too Expensive (huffingtonpost.com)

OER: Neuro-Cloud: a new model of textbooks

I am really excited about Neuro-Cloud. I heard about it in a tweet from Creative Commons this morning and went to take a look. This is a textbook that is being created by a community of neuroscientists who first began the project as an open journal. It is free for anyone to use because they are using the CC-by license instead of traditional copyright. It is still a work in progress: they want to have a finished textbook by July of 2013.

I have been very interested in textbooks that are created by a community of scholars rather than the traditional subject matter expert model of the traditional publishers. The math textbooks at my previous college are an example of this. I think it is particulary fitting that this is how a textbook on neuroscience is written and supported because neuroscience is a rapidly changing field. Every advance in technology gives us more ways to look at the brain and like astronomy or physics, the deeper in we look, the more we find. What is fascinating about this project is that students will be reading a text written by this current generation of neuroscientists and then will go on to do research and work that will contribute to the later editions of this book. This is a living community of scholarship as much as it is a textbook:

"The goal of the Neuro-Cloud Textbook Project is to provide a free, accurate and comprehensive introduction to neuroscience for both educators and students. This is to be accomplished through an online collaborative environment where the next generation of neuroscientists will have the opportunity to work with colleagues from all over the world. By providing students experience, connections and a chance to showcase their knowledge, all while providing a needed service to the community, the Neuro-Cloud Textbook Project creates a situation where the whole world can benefit."

There has been a lot of hand wringing about "sustainability" over open education resources and open textbooks. As soon as we move away from the education-as-a-product model and move towards education as community (I am thinking here of the Connectivist model), questions about money become less relevant.

Related articles

• OER: 12 Sources of Open Textbooks (cain.blogspot.com)
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• Pure OER: SOC101 (saylor.org)
• The Growing Adoption of Creative Commons Textbooks (usnews.com)

OER: 12 Sources of Open Textbooks

(Photo credit: opensourceway)

With the State Department's announcement and posts on twitter about failed business models, I think this is a good time to revisit how to find actual free, openly licensed textbooks. There are many ways to find free, openly licensed textbooks on the internet. I have listed a dozen here, but if you are still not finding what you need, feel free to contact me. I really mean that. I think making education financially accessible to your students is just that important. Some of these resources over lap, but that is okay - you will find some of these sites easier to use than others. There are a lot of things happening in the world of open textbooks. A lot of the criticisms that you may have heard in the past are fading away as sites dedicated to the peer review and vetting of open textbooks become more prevalent. This is not the definitive list - if there is a site that you use or prefer, please post a comment and share.

1. Saylor Foundation
Each of the books listed below is freely available for download, online reading, and sharing, under one of various open licenses.

2. OpenStax
"OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course."

3. MERLOT
"Putting educational innovations into practice. Find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education."

4. College Open Textbooks
If you run into any links to Flat World Knowledge textbooks here, be sure to go to the Saylor Foundation website to get free access to those titles. "College Open Textbooks has peer-reviewed more than 100 open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 550: College Open Textbooks has already peer-reviewed several new open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 250 others for consideration. Open textbooks are freely available for use without restriction and can be downloaded or printed from web sites and repositories."

5. Connexions
"Connexions is a dynamic digital educational ecosystem consisting of an educational content repository and a content management system optimized for the delivery of educational content. Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning objects or modules in its repository and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.) are used by over 2 million people per month."

6. Textbook Revolution
"Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. We want to get these materials into classrooms. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content."

7. Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources
"The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement encourages the creation and reuse of free, high-quality content and open source learning systems to replace expensive and proprietary systems. By promoting OER, community colleges can create sustainable academic resources for students and provide collaborative professional development opportunities for faculty."

8. Boundless Textbooks
"Boundless is pleased to offer open introductory textbooks in the following subjects. These textbooks are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, which means anyone is welcome to quote, mashup, reuse, and republish any portion of any book, anywhere, so long as proper citation is given."

9. Wikibooks
Wikibooks is an "open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit" with over 2,500 open-content textbooks.

10. Open Culture
A meta-collection of free textbooks.

11. Bookboon
"Online Textbooks for Free Bookboon's free online textbooks for students are focused and to the point. They are all written by highly respected professors from top universities in the world and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science."

12. Directory of Open Access Books
"The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards."

Related articles

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• Tablets to Replace Textbooks in New York Public Schools? (the-digital-reader.com)
• OpenStax announces first iPad version of its free, online textbooks (insidehighered.com)
• Open Textbooks: Community and Sustainability (cain.blogspot.com)

Creative Commons Turns 10!

Cable Green (Photo: DTKindler Photo)

 This note just in from the ubiquitous Cable Green:

As I'm sure you know, this year is Creative Commons' 10th Birthday! Starting this Friday, we'll be launching into a 10-day frenzy of celebrations leading up to 16 December - the day the first CC license suite was launched in 2002.

The celebrations will be wide ranging, including more than 20 celebrations worldwide, a dedicated website (http://10.creativecommons.org), interviews and featured resources, a social media campaign and our usual annual fundraising campaign.

As part of the CC community, there are many things you can do to help:

• Add a widget or banner to your website: you can find the official CC10 logo here: (scroll to the bottom of the page): http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC10 
• Go to a party, or encourage your friends to attend. There are CC10 events planned on every continent (except Antarctica), starting tonight and continuing almost every day through December 16. There are even some online events and webinars. See them all listed at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC10 
• Friend us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/creativecommons), follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/creativecommons), and let your friends know. The hashtag for the celebrations will be #CC10
• Give CC a birthday present! Write something, draw something, compose something - whatever you do well - and add it to our CC10 Flickr group: http://bit.ly/cc10flickr, or send it to us via Twitter, Facebook or at press@creativecommons.org
• And, of course, please encourage your friends and family to donate (or even donate yourself) at https://creativecommons.net/donate/ 

Most gratefully,
Cable

Cable Green,
PhD Director of Global Learning
Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/education
http://twitter.com/cgreen

Creative Commons is turning 10! 

Please give a birthday gift: 

https://creativecommons.net/donate

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OER: DE 101 Self-paced version

This is the stand-alone version of DE 101,  the curriculum we developed for our student orientation. It is released to the public with a Creative Commons license. Distance Education 101 is a two-week orientation on how to take an online class and how to be a successful online student. In this seminar, students learn specifically about College of the Redwoods' "MyCR" (Sakai) and how to use other tools to manage their time, work with others, and their information online. In this orientation students have an opportunity to create and participate in an online community where they can find help and make their connection to the online college.

We believe that our research shows that the two-week, free online orientation was largely responsible for the increase in online student success and retention. Our research is in the presentation below. I have written about DE 101 here before as well.


These course materials were designed for a student population new to technology, broad-band internet, and online communication. That is why there is such a 90s feel to the material. These materials need to be expanded to include more on online collaboration and personal learning networks. This is one of the reasons why we are releasing this on a wiki using the Creative Common's license - we want to collaborate with others who would also like to share their materials.

Flat World Knowledge Falls Flat

For use to open - free- education resources. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am very disappointed in Flat World Knowledge's decision to end free access to students as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was always very suspect of this company from the beginning. I am getting sick of businesses saying that they are a part of the open source movement, OER, or for Open Text Books and then coming up with some lame excuse to go back to business as usual - lets make money on the backs of students in the name of "sustainability"! In the article they admit that they are not really committed to the open license.

We should call companies like FWK businesses then and not advocates or proponents of open education resources. The idea behind OER is that faculty would freely develop their textbooks for students to freely use. I am not against business but lets call it business and not OER. I am really not interested in the content reviewers from commercial publishers because they are not in the business of creating, vetting, and customizing for my students or my college in my community with its unique issues - they are interested in packaging their material for a mass market and getting some Phd's name on the box to make it acceptable to colleges who are not quite ready to take the plunge into OER. I almost wrote a book for FWK but I realized that my content would be at the mercy of the market. I knew that at any time they could change their business model and the students would be the ones to suffer. The business of businesses is business. The business of education should be education. There are great textbooks out there with Creative Commons licenses that students do not have to pay for. We have a moral obligation to make education accessible to as many students as possible. OERs and open textbooks are a way to do that. Freedom as in free to charge the students is not the kind of freedom that I am interested in.

And what does this mean for the Creative Commons license? If a text is really CC, shouldn't a student have access to that text under the same license as FWK?

Look at any of the articles below for an alternative model of commercial businesses managing academic content.

Related articles

• Flat World Knowledge to Drop Free Access to Textbooks (chronicle.com)
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16 Resources for Free Images for Educators

Abraham Lincoln with Allan Pinkerton and Major General John Alexander McClernand at the Battle of Antietam. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The search for quality images continues...

We have faculty who are creating course materials and in some cases, replacing Fair Use images with public domain, fair use, or Creative Commons licensed images. There are still some holes in our image searches. The links here are my most recent suggestions but I know that some of these are older than others and besides Wikipedia and advanced Google Searches (which are good), there are other sources. This is really just a representative list to get us started.

These are in alphabetical order - not in order of quality or breadth.

1. Archive.Org. - This is the grand daddy of all public domain archives for images, text, audio, and film. It takes a bit to get used to using the site but once you get the hang of it, it is well worth it. Lots of treasures here.
2. American Memory - These are history images from the Library of Congress.
3. Bowdoin Botany Database - These images copyrighted but are free for educators: "Educators and students may use these images as part of their teaching, research, and/or studies, but may not sell or otherwise make a profit on their use."
4. Burning Well - This is one of numerous archives of public domain images.
5. Cadyu provides public domain and Creative Commons licensed 3-d images of objects. This would be appropriate for a design class, autocad, etc.
6. Clipart Etc. - From the University of Florida. A maximum of fifty (50) clipart items may be used in any non-commercial, educational project (report, presentation, display, website, etc.) without special permission.
7. Creative Commons Search - This combines multiple search engines and gives you the results in one spot based on license chosen.
8. Environmental Education Station.- These are public domain photos that were funded by an environmental studies grant. These photos are royalty free and may be used without charge for any educational purpose with attribution to David Anderson.
9. Images in the Public Domain - Many of these are from old encyclopedias. Still useful.
10. Library of Congress - Most of the images in these holdings are in public domain unless specifically cataloged otherwise.
11. Public Domain Images - This site collects high quality public domain images.
12. Public Domain Image links- This is from the University of Wisconsin. Great metasite with links to many public domain resources.
13. Smithsonian - They encourage educational fair use of all of their images as long as you cite the source. Many of their images are in public domain unless they specify copyright information.
14. Web Gallery of Art- is intended to be a free resource of art history primarily for students and teachers. It is a private initiative not related to any museums or art institutions, and not supported financially by any state or corporate sponsors.
15. Wikimedia sometimes works...I found that the best way to search wikimedia is to go to Google and type: site:commons.wikimedia.org "search term" where “search term” equals a single word like “photosynthesis.” Notice that there is only a single space AFTER “org.” Do not put a space after the colon.
16. U.S. Government Public Domain- The US govt. has made it easier to find images that they have produced that are in the public domain. They are freely available and need no permission.

What are we missing? Is there a source that you use? Which of these are best in your experience? We would really appreciate your comments, experiences or suggestions below!

These are just in from Bosha Struve:

Digital Media

• Behold
• ClearBits - Open licensed digital media (it has distribution plans and pricing but you can get a free account).
• Compfight
• Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Reading Room (different from the one you have posted)

Other Resource Guides

• OER Handbook for Educators
• Open DOAR
• WikiEducator: Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories

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Jerry Brown Unlocks the Nation's Digital Future through Open Source Textbook Innovation

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today, Governor Jerry Brown signed a monumental set of bills that create the nation's first free online textbook library, an effort aimed at alleviating the burden of rising costs to students attending California's public postsecondary institutions. California is now set to become the nation's first state to create a digital textbook library free of charge for the state's most popular college courses, says the 20 Million Minds Foundation.

Introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), SB 1052 provides for the selection, development and administration of free open digital textbooks for the most popular lower-division courses and overseen by the establishment of the "California Open Education Resources Council" (COERC). COERC, established by the legislation, will be comprised of faculty members from the University of California, California State University and Community Colleges to determine which courses merit inclusion. Its companion bill, SB 1053, creates the California Open Source Digital Library to house the open source textbooks and courseware.

Both bills place California first in the nation among states to combat higher education's growing price tag with open source software and Creative Commons open licenses so that students can access sophisticated tools and college-level information at no or low cost, allowing them to mitigate escalating college fee increases and save their money for student housing.

With the Governor's signature, California is set to create a competitive "Request for Proposals" (RFP) process inviting faculty, publishers, and others to develop high quality digital open source textbooks and related courseware. The materials will be placed under a "Creative Commons" licensing structure that allows students and faculty free access, and allows instructors to create customized materials from these textbooks and other courseware. Materials must also meet the rigorous standards of college core curricula, and will be reviewed and approved by subject matter experts. "This is a great victory for students and middle class families struggling with the ever-increasing costs of higher education," said Steinberg. "This is a major step toward using technology to cut costs for students while enhancing the quality of higher education in California."


"At a time when the cost of attending California's public colleges and universities is skyrocketing, Governor Jerry Brown recognized that by embracing our digital future with innovative technological advancements like open source textbooks we can save college students in California millions of dollars in escalating book costs," said 20 Million Minds Foundation President Dean Florez. The foundation has been supportive of policy measures to create quality open source textbooks for college students throughout the nation. "This is the first time government has come in with substantial dollars that match philanthropic efforts to create a library where students can access free textbooks and faculty can utilize their skills to remix, revise, and repurpose these textbooks for their students."

Funding for the bills also signed by the governor (SB 1028), appropriates five million dollars for the project from the state public college savings plan ScholarShare Trust fund to be matched by private entities and philanthropy.

Dr. Larry Green, Mathematics Co-Chair of Lake Tahoe Community College, who has been utilizing a free open source textbook for his students, praised the governor. "From the instructors' perspective, having access to a wealth of professional course materials to edit, use and share frees up time for pursuing more one-on-one interaction with students and more personalized learning," said Green. "Choosing to adopt an enhanced digital open textbook for my students spares them several thousands of dollars in combined textbook expenses and increases student success. I thank the Governor for recognizing the need to provide faculty with the tools necessary for remixing curriculum while preserving academic freedom by providing free quality textbook choices for college professors and their students."

The open source library will allow students to download textbooks for free or pay around $20 for a hard copy, and was the principle reason the signed bills received approval by the University of California.

SOURCE The 20 Million Minds Foundation

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Keeping Open Education Resources Open

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What does the "open" in "open education resources" mean? What it should mean is free to reuse, remix and share. If your open education resources are locked up with a proprietary platform, they are no longer open. If they are converted into "supplements" for a "free" text, they are no longer open. This is the fear behind those who choose a license that says "not for commercial use." That does not make it less open because you are not free to lock down someone else's work and make a profit off of it.

The reason I release materials to the wild with an open license is so that other educators can use them and benefit from them; maybe even modify them (and hey, feel free send me a copy back). I want to contribute to the education community. My intention is not to enrich some business who will repackage and "improve" on my work by locking it down into a closed system and then charging for access. The claim that I am making my work less open because it is not free for commercial use is ridiculous! That is like saying animals are only free if they are also free to be in a zoo. And the only ones who really benefit from the corporate lock-down of OERs and open textbooks are the corporations.

The Creative Commons license warning that an OER is not part of a "free culture" is an unnecessary distraction. FreedomDefined. org is not helping:
"Licenses which only allow non-commercial use are not considered Free Culture licenses. This is because in practice there are many ways that Cultural works can be used and reused which would be considered commercial. Another problem is that there is no generally agreed definition of where the border line is between Commercial and Non Commercial uses with very many cases falling in the undefined area in between. In practice Share Alike or Copyleft clauses provide a restriction on commercial profits since any reuse making excessive profits will soon stimulate a bunch of copycats which will bring prices down while encouraging even wider distribution of the works - which is the objective of the free culture licenses." 
That phrase "which will bring down prices" is the funny bit here. My goal is not to keep down the prices of my work but to remove the cost barrier altogether from my work! I want it free as in free of cost to any student, now and in the future.

The claim that OERs will not benefit from corporate modification and promotion is really missing the point. That is not the only way that OERs are adapted, developed, and distributed. OERs belong to the community of teachers and learners. They should remain there. The real work being done in the OER community is by communities of educators

So why do school districts go after corporate materials that are almost, but not quite entirely, unlike open? Because they are still clinging to the old paradigm that says that if it didn't get "vetted" by a corporate press, it lacks quality, legitimacy, the imprimatur and nihil obstat of a "reputable" press. We need to redefine this legitimacy. The corporate presses have not done education any favors: the price of education is outstripping the cost of inflation and healthcare. Each semester, publishers come up with new and interesting ways to justify their $280 dollar textbooks. And the sad truth is that the instructors know these subjects better than the project managers at corporate education publishing houses. The books are not more accurate because they went through their vetting process (see OER: The Myth of Textbook Reliability). Every open textbook that I have encountered that was created in-house or by a community of scholars has been hands down superior in every way to a corporate textbook because it addresses the needs of the teachers who created it and the students who are using it, it is lower in price and more accessible.

There are new models emerging for the development and implementation of OERs and open textbooks.   There are a number of models suggested by Stephen Downes in his article "Models for Sustainable Open Education Resources" that I feel have yet to be fully explored. There is also the implementation model suggested by the Kaleidoscope Project that begins with a community of scholars working on shared student learning outcomes and assessments and only then do they adopt OERs or open textbooks. In other words, open textbooks are an opportunity to have education content driven by the SLOs of the local schools, not by commercial interests.

Fretting over whether or not an OER is free to be exploited by a corporation is a huge step backward and a great disservice to the students.

Related articles

• What Do We Mean By "Open"? (hackeducation.com)
• Implementing OERs and Open Textbooks (cain.blogspot.com)
• OER Use, Reuse and Remixing (hackeducation.com)
• Danny Piccirillo: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (thesilentnumber.me)

Parallels in Open Software and Open Textbooks

Dr. Cable Green speaking to Creative Commons staff (Photo credit: tvol)

I was reading this morning about what makes a successful open source project and what makes one not so successful, and I found a number of parallels between successful open source software projects and the creation and implementation of open textbooks. For instance, Andy Brice writing on a failed software project lists "lack of support from the people who would actually have to use it" as one of the reasons for the project failing. Symbian is another example - this was meant to be an open source platform but after the announcement that it was going open source, a year went by before anyone had access to the source code. OpenMediaVault was meant to be open source. The software was freely available to users but developers had to pay a licensing fee. Back in 2005, Xara announced that its graphic package was going open source and "two years later, the project is stagnant and on the verge of irrelevance, primarily because the company couldn't figure out how to work with the open source community" (Nathan Willis). Online community is the backbone of any open source project; I even read about a company that wanted to take it's start up money and create an online community around their product. This is definitely a cart before the horse. What does all this have to do with open textbooks? If you have been around the open textbook community for any length of time, you will begin to see these same factors emerge in online textbook success stories. Story after story tells us the importance of community in an open source project. A successful open textbook is like an open source project in that it is:

• Freely available 
• Get money out of the way of creation & development and into support
• Keep the licenses open
• Accessible
• Make the text and files available to all in a useable, editable form
• Multiple formats will help others adapt the work for students with different needs
• Built by the community
• Find others who are interested in contributing to similar works. This was the important lesson from the Kaleidoscope project.
• An open textbook created by local teachers will be more powerful and relevant than one made by a corporation with no idea of local student needs
• Maintained by a community
• A community can edit, share, and adapt instantly
• A community can solve problems, translate docs into other languages, create new versions
• Implemented by a community
• The top down approach is doomed to failure (see your local school)

Just as the open source software community needed a license to keep open source software open, the Creative Commons organization is answering questions about licensing strategies that educators are asking as they author course materials and textbooks. The next stage in OERs (and this has started already) is building open communities around these projects. (e.g. College Open Textbooks, MERLOT and Connexions).
Here is a presentation I gave this morning making the connections between open software and open textbooks:

Related articles

• Making It Easier For Faculty To Find Quality Open Textbooks (keptup.typepad.com)
• Free Textbooks Shaking Up Higher Education (business.time.com)
• Beating the High Cost of Education with Open Textbooks (cain.blogspot.com)
• Legislator Proposes Open Access Textbook System For California (keptup.typepad.com)

Open Content Licensing for Educators Workshop

Image via CrunchBase

This is from Cable Green: 

2012 is a significant year for open education and OER. We are celebrating 10 years since UNESCO coined the term "Open Educational Resources".

In joining the global celebrations, the OER Foundation will host a free online training workshop on OERs, Copyright and Creative Commons licensing.

When: 20 June -  3 July 2012 (to coincide with the UNESCO World OER Congress in Paris).

Where: Online

Cost: Free. Registrations for this celebratory online workshop are now open:  Register today to reserve your seat.

We are aiming to break our previous #OCL4Ed record of 1067 registrations, so please share the gift of knowledge and invite colleagues and friends to join us.

• Download a copy of the poster for the OCL4Ed Workshop (614KB) and display on local notice boards.
• Blog and share the registration link through your social networks: http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators/About

We welcome graduates of former OCL4Ed workshops to join our lead facilitators and assist with peer-learning support for educators around the world who want to learn more about OER and open licensing.  More info on how you can assist coming soon. 

We look forward to welcoming you to OCL4Ed 2012.06.

With kind regards

The OER Foundation team

COL Chair in OER at Otago Polytechnic

UNESCO-COL Chair in OER at Athabasca University

OER Policy Registry: Request for Help

Image via CrunchBaseCable Green just lit the Bat Signal!

Greetings Open Colleagues,

The open community shares a need for more information to help us with our work. We know, for example, that there are many policies supporting open education at institutions and governments throughout the world. Many of us know of some of these policies, but it would be extremely helpful if we had a single database of open education policies that the entire community could access and update.

To meet this goal, Creative Commons has received a small grant to create an “OER Policy Registry.” The Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy Registry will be a place for policymakers and open advocates to easily share and update OER legislation, OER institutional policies and supporting OER policy resources. We have begun to enter OER policies into the registry, but we need your help to make it a truly useful global resource.

The open movement is reaching a stage where we’ve had some real, concrete OER policy victories and there is the potential to achieve many more. Sharing our collective knowledge of existing OER policies, in the same way we believe in sharing educational resources, will help advocates and policymakers worldwide be more successful.

Please join the effort:
(1) Contribute any OER policies you know about via this Google form.

• We are collecting both legislative AND institutional (non-legislative) OER policies from around the world. Your form submissions will be added to the draft list of OER policies.

(2) Review the draft list of OER policies. (Google doc)

• If any entries need to be fixed, please email us at oer@creativecommons.org.

(3) Forward this message to your colleagues, lists, blogs, and other channels, to ensure that we get as much input as possible. As the OER movement is global, it is critical that we capture OER policies from around the world.

Anyone can add OER policies to the Google form through the next month. Beginning May 1, the OER Policy Registry will move to the Creative Commons wiki. At that point, anyone will be able to edit and update the OER Policy Registry on the wiki, and all contributions will be licensed under CC BY.

We’re starting with a Google form because (a) it’s easy and (b) wikis require you to create an account before editing, and that may be a barrier to participation.

CC is in contact with other projects that collect similar information, including UNESCO, CoL, the Florida Distance Learning Consortium, EU OCW and a project in New Zealand. We will add OER policy data they gather as it becomes available. If anyone knows of other efforts to gather OER policies, please send them to Anna Daniel (anna@creativecommons.org) and we will reach out to them too.

If you have any suggestions or feedback on the content and/or framework, please let us know.

Warmest regards and thank you!

Cable

Related articles

• CC Salon London: Open Educational Resources - Policies for Promotion (creativecommons.org)
• Launch of the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition (creativecommons.org)
• Creative Commons Search Engine (philbradley.typepad.com)
• CC News: Why Open Education Matters Video Competition (creativecommons.org)
• Another Job Opportunity: Communications Manager (creativecommons.org)

Open Education Week from March 5-10, 2012

Image via WikipediaEfforts to Expand Access to Education and Knowledge to be Featured in Global Events

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., – (February 21, 2012) –The OpenCourseWare Consortium announces today the first annual Open Education Week from March 5-10, 2012. Open Education Week is a global event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are high-quality, free and open educational materials that offer opportunities for people anywhere in the world to share, use and reuse.

“The vision of the open education movement is to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere, is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire. The movement encompasses producing, sharing, using and modifying content, as well as innovative models of educational delivery,” said Mary Lou Forward, executive director of the OpenCourseWare Consortium. “Open Education Week will showcase projects, resources, people and ideas so that people around the world can see the breadth of what has been accomplished already, and participate in discussions about the future of the movement.”

Open Education Week is being coordinated by the OpenCourseWare Consortium. The event will take place online and in different locations around the world, with opportunities to participate in webinars, discussions and live events. Projects and events will be featured from institutions and organizations from around the world, including: University of Cape Town, University of Michigan, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of California, Irvine, Delft University of Technology, and Creative Commons.

Participation is free and open to all. Visit www.openeducationweek.org for more information.

Related articles

• Fostering Government Support for Open Educational Resources (OER) Internationally (downes.ca)
• Open Education Week and Upcoming Events (openphd.wordpress.com)
• Contribute to Open Education Week (creativecommons.org)