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3.1 At-Home

Define open educational resources
Identify resources that are openly licensed, public domain, and all rights reserved copyrighted

Estimated time to complete: 30 minutes

There are many OER Definitions created by a variety of organizations and foundations.

OER Definition 1

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can be textbooks, full courses, lesson plans, videos, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge. -by Hewlett Foundation

OER Definition 2

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. -by UNESCO

In this module, you will learn what open license is, what public domain is and the difference between the two.

These videos provides an overview of what OER is and its significance in education.

The video from "Why Open Matters" by Opa Bukola is licensed under CC BY 4.0

The video from "Password: OER" by Laura Rachfalski is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Have you ever found something from the Internet that would be a perfect resource (image, video, quiz, etc.) for your course, but you couldn’t determine any Terms of Use and there was no author information, so you couldn't contact the author for permission? What did you do? Did you spend hours trying to figure out the copyright issues? Did you choose just not to use it? Or did you use it without permission?

Wouldn't it be nice if all teaching and learning resources somehow let you know “I’m free to use, no strings attached. You don’t need to ask for my permission because it has already been granted."?

Open Educational Resources (OER) is your answer to that!

There are millions of educational resources out there that are available for you to freely use. These include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, videos, tests, software, games, learning objects, things to support access to knowledge.

The image "OERs Can Be from BCOER Librarians Poster" by BCOER is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Now that you can define what an OER is, let's dig deeper. You just learned that, in order to be an OER, the resource should be either in the public domain or released with an open license. What do the terms "open license" and "public domain" mean?

What is an open license?

A license is a document that specifies what can and cannot be done with a work. It grants permissions and states restrictions. Broadly speaking, an open license is one that grants permission to access, re-use and redistribute a work with few or no restrictions (definition from Openedefinition.org).

"How to Use Open Educational Resources (OER)" image by Boyoung Chae and Christie Fierro

There are many open licenses developed for different areas of knowledge. However, when it comes to open educational resources the most typical and common open licenses used are Creative Commons Licenses (this will be covered in more detail in Week 5).

Do you know what an open source license is? It is a type of license for computer software that allows source code to be used, modified and shared under defined terms. Laulima is an open source software with which you are familiar. Laulima has been customized from Sakai, a learning management software which is offered free to download, modify, use, and share. To give you a little bit of history...

The free software movement was launched in 1983. Since then those in the computer software industry have been developing and sharing open source code with a clear licensing system.

In 1998, David Wiley coined the term "open content", and while targeted at the educational community, the term quickly entered the vernacular of internet users.

In 2001, inspired by this open source license movement, Larry Lessig and a group of experts comprised of educators, technologists, legal scholars, investors, entrepreneurs and philanthropists gathered together to come up with a set of copyright licenses that would allow creators to easily share materials that were not software code, such as blogs, photos, films, books, etc. They founded Creative Commons and released a flexible set of licenses. These Creative Commons licenses brought clarity and ease to sharing materials online.

In summary, there are many open licenses developed for different areas of knowledge. Creative Commons licenses are mostly widely used copyright licenses that would allow creators to easily share materials.

What is public domain?

A public domain work is a creative work that is not protected by copyright which means it is free for you to use without permission. Works in the public domain are those whose intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable.

Examples include the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, The King James Bible, most of the early silent films, the formulae of Newtonian physics, and the patents on powered flight

(Text in this paragraph is from Wikipedia, Public domain, CC-BY-SA).

Examples of how work falls into the public domain:

Case 1: The term of copyright for the work has expired.

As a general rule, most works enter the public domain because of old age. This includes any work published in the United States before 1923 or works published before 1964 for which copyrights were not renewed (Renewal was a requirement for works published before 1978).

(Text in this paragraph is from The Public Domain by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, CC-BY-NC).

Case 2: It never had copyright protection.

It never had copyright protection or its protection was lost. A smaller group of works fell into the public domain because they were published without a copyright notice, which was necessary for works published in the United States before March 1, 1989. Thus, if a work published before March 1, 1989 and did not carry a copyright notice, it it is in the public domain.

Case 3: The work was explicitly donated to the public domain.

Some works are in the public domain because the owner has indicated a desire to give them to the public without copyright protection.

Case 4: The work is a work of the U.S. Government.

Works of the United States Government and various other governments are excluded from copyright law and may therefore be considered to be in the public domain in their respective countries (US Copyright office). In the United States when copyrighted material (created by the federal government) is enacted into the law it enters the public domain. Thus, the building codes, when enacted, are in the public domain. Works produced by third party contractors with the government may be protected under copyright law based on the contract terms

(Text in this paragraph is from Wikipedia, Public domain, CC-BY-SA.

What is the difference between public domain and open license?

It is important to understand the difference between public domain and open license (such as Creative Commons licenses). They both grant free access to the materials, but the scope and nature are completely different.

An open license clearly recognizes ownership of an intellectual property, whereas the intent of public domain is for the copyright holder to waive copyright ownership in the work. Therefore, users are required to attribute the work to the original authors when using openly licensed materials.

In a way, public domain is the purest form of open/free, since no one owns or controls the material in any way

(This sentence is from Public Domain, CC-BY).

This diagram shows the difference between public domain and open license. "How to Use Open Educational Resources (OER)" image by Boyoung Chae and Christie Fierro

Check Your Understanding

Based on the content in this lesson, take the Laulima Quiz: "3.1 What is OER?" as a quick check of your understanding of what you read/viewed above. You may take this quiz as many times as you wish to receive a perfect score!