The EdReNe Newsletter

March 23^rd – 25^th 2009, Warwick Castle, UK

The first EdReNe workshop on rights issues focused on how to provide relevant guidelines for educators and producers as well as giving emphasis on implementation models of open licensing schemes in educational repositories.

At the strategic seminar in Lisbon the following issues were given the highest priority:

• Licensing schemes (consequences for remixing; Creative Commons; presenting usage rights; cross border concerns …)
• Relevant policies and initiatives (open educational resources; education of content creators; free access to content produced for public money; incentives for commercial producers …)
• Rights clearance practices (guidance to educators; strategies for providing copyright cleared material for education …)

The network members gave highest priorities to the same rights issues as for the first workshop, demonstrating that this is not the fastest moving area. Or rather – the legal side doesn’t move very fast while user behaviour and expectations towards being able to reuse and remix content have indeed seen dramatic changes during recent years.

Most initiatives concerning rights issues and digital educational content concentrate on educating pupils and teachers to understand and comply with current copyright law. One of the conclusions from the discussions during the workshop was however that there is an equally important task in having legislation and/or licensing models that will actually meet user needs and expectations.

While licensing issues are almost inevitably sorted out in concrete projects it is still rare to see coherent strategies across the entire educational sector (or public sector in general). It is also clear from discussions that there is a clear link between current approaches to content licensing and the need for the publishing industry to develop new business models for online content.

In Scotland a concrete initiative aimed at allowing teachers to use copyright material in their own learning resources. The initiative was based on experiences from a repository showing that around 75% of teacher produced materials were rejected due to actual or potential copyright infringement. The project strategy aims at making existing behaviour permissible – as changing behaviour seems a much more difficult task. The idea is also to move effort from practitioners to administrators.
The presentation showed an approach that included setting up a new licensing model with the Copyright Licensing Agency allowing schools to scan or retype from books in order to create learning resources – on the basis that it is recorded what is scanned/re-typed.

Jim Henderson, LT Scotland
Presentation: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO14/621.pptx

Some paradoxes accompany the increased use of ICT both in schools and outside schools. Whereas ICT to a great extent can facilitate the wishes of educators to have flexible, open and contextualised materials, as well as offer great potential for personalised learning, this is often at stakes with doing all of this legally. A concrete proposal for “risk management” for educators is always to start with considering 5 W’s: i) Who am I? (today); ii) Where am I? (what am I part of?); iii) What am I doing, what stuff do I need and where did it come from? iv) Where do I want it to go? v) Why? (the existential imperative)

Marshall Mateer, Education Consultant, Shapes of Time
Presentation: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO14/618.ppt
Shapes of Time: Shapes of Time

Students at Umeå University teacher education are trained on copyright issues. The training is a two hour lecture introducing the basic concepts and a number of relevant examples. There is no common standard or format for how these issues are introduced to teachers in Sweden.

Pär Segerbrant, IML
Presentation: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO14/623.pptx

Difficulties remain for educators trying to remix content from different sources even if these are all licensed under some of the more popular open content licenses. Participants were split in groups and each group supplied with a deck of cards designed to enable a number of games exploring the intricacies of open content license compatibility issues, and the difficulties these create for anyone who wants to remix open educational resources. The intention was both to demonstrate that difficulties remain within the area of open content despite the progress made within recent years, and to initiate the discussion in the next group session on how rights issues can be presented in different ways to educators and students.

The OER Remix game (cards and game design by David Wiley): http://opencontent.org/game/betagame.html

Setting content free by providing access through all the platforms and contexts where teachers and students want it – and allowing for more flexibility with regard to reuse and remixing - can prove a more efficient business model than protecting your content. Encyclopaedia Britannica has a strategy along these lines and demonstrated the interface allowing users to interact with existing content and supplement it with their own additions.

Adam Bates, Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Presentation: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO14/649.pptx

The JISC funded Web2Rights project has developed a set of online tools and accompanying flowcharts to raise awareness about – and simplify the procedures necessary to tackle – copyright issues related to producing and using digital learning resources. Supplementary tools dealing with other legal issues (inappropriate content, data protection, freedom of information, contract and employment, international issues and liability, eSecurity, accessibility) were also produced in the project. To some extent these tools build upon the recommendations and outputs from the earlier trustDR project.

Naomi Korn, NKCC:
Download presentation: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO14/648.ppt
Web2Rights project: http://www.web2rights.org.uk/

Following flows of value, licences and content

The typical flow of rights and value in a content creation process were examined. Following a brief introduction to the basics of open content, real-world examples illustrated the different models of flow of content, permissions and value. These examples served to point out whether open content licenses would be an appropriate choice for different scenarios.

The main findings and key recommendations from a qualitative study on seven cases in the UK public, cultural and educational sector were introduced. The study aimed to develop a methodology for assessing the optimal IPR strategy in order to maximize value for public sector organizations in the UK. A noteworthy finding was that value is primarily assessed in non-monetary terms.

Prodromos Tsiavos, London School of Economics:
Presentation: https://files.itslearning.com/data/826/open/CO14/642.ppt