Page:A Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement.pdf/32

 Although Creative Commons has done an excellent job of making the various license options “human readable” (as opposed to “lawyer readable”), this is complex stuff and could produce unexpected and unintended results. The MIT OCW uses the Creative Commons License 2.5 named Attribution–Non-Commercial–Share-Alike 2.5. David Wiley has recently drafted an article, “OpenCourseWars: A Partial History of Openness in Higher Education from 2005–2020,” in which he paints a fascinating hypothetical trajectory for the OER movement triggered by litigation from industry violating the “non-commercial” attributes of the MIT OCW license. Also, as noted by Hal Abelson, we are in an era in which it is very easy for students to record lectures or any downloadable class materials and broadcast them over the Internet. As we move more boldly into an era of remix and collaborative contribution we need to clarify legal and social practice concerning the rights of faculty. Do students have permission from the person who wrote or delivered a lecture to share it? And if so, how widely?

To help address issues such as this and many more, we understand that Hewlett will be providing additional support to the Creative Commons to help launch a new division, provisionally titled Learning Commons, which focuses specifically on education. The mission of Learning Commons is to break down the legal, technical, and cultural barriers to a global educational commons. To overcome technical and cultural obstacles, the Learning Commons will provide advice and expertise to the OER community and will identify lessons learned. Through partnerships and competitions, the Learning Commons will highlight successful and innovative uses and reuses of OER. All of this is important legal infrastructure for OER and beyond.

“Openness” is complex and not a black-and-white issue—a spectrum of degrees of resource openness is developing. The future holds opportunities and challenges for enriching and exploiting this spectrum.

The OCW movement has started with reputable institutions providing materials, thus ensuring their quality. Leading with MIT was key to the dramatic kick-off strategy and quick success. Providing high-quality materials from high-quality institutions will continue to be important, but they will increasingly be augmented by material from open resources, as is now occurring in the Connexions project. The grand challenge here is how we might close the loop on the use of open educational material so that we can create virtuous learning loops that constantly improve the material through use (and through