OER Challenges
From the teacher's and the student's point of view, the development of OER sounds all good. But there are OER challenges, and some people only see the down side to OER. This page looks at the OER challenges and how they can be tackled.
OER challenges
The challenges that OER face include:
- Establishing and maintaining quality;
- Ensuring modularity of the resources;
- Ensuring stability of the resources;
- Standardization, so as to ensure transferability;
- Persuading subject matter experts to release their intellectual property for open use.
Responding to the OER challenges of copyright
In response to this last major challenge, Creative Commons, a non-profit organization, was founded to assist authors who may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights the law affords them. Creative Commons works to define an alternative to copyrights by filling in the gap between full copyright, where use of resources is not allowed without explicit permission, and public domain, where permission is not required at all. Creative Commons Licenses allow users to copy and distribute their work under specific conditions, general descriptions, and legal clauses.
To this end, Creative Commons has developed a set of free public licenses to enable authors to share their work with others. Authors have the flexibility to specify that the use of their resources would require attribution, that it be non-commercial, or that the product be shared under the same license. Thus, while 'open' on the one hand can mean 'without cost', it does not necessarily translate to 'without conditions'. The following is an example of the logo and text that would appear on a work using a Creative Commons license:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
OER challenges and copyright law
Larry Lessig is an authority on copyright issues who has brought fresh thinking to the field of contemporary copyright law. A Stanford professor and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society, he foresaw the response a threatened content industry would have to digital technology - and he came to the aid of the citizenry. He chairs Creative Commons, the free licensing scheme for individual creators.
In this video, Lessig presents "three stories and an argument." He brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code.
