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The ALT Copyright and Online Learning Special Interest Group (CoOL SIG)

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The ALT Copyright and Online Learning Special Interest Group (CoOL SIG)

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https://www.alt.ac.uk/groups/special-interest-groups/copyright-and-online-learning-sig

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University of Kent Copyright Literacy Strategy

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University of Kent Copyright Literacy Strategy

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https://copyrightliteracy.org/upcoming-events/icepops-international-copyright-literacy-event-with-playful-opportunities-for-practitioners-and-scholars/

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Practice empowered by copyright literacy is an enabler

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Practice empowered by copyright literacy is an enabler

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/10baTITJbFRh7D6dHVVvfgiGP2zqaMvm0EHHZYf2cBRk/preview

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More training is needed, especially training that leverages OER and open pedagogy

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More training is needed, especially training that leverages OER and open pedagogy

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https://lisoer.wordpress.ncsu.edu/book/

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In the US librarians are charged with doing this work, but we're not always trained very well

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In the US librarians are charged with doing this work, but we're not always trained very well

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Most LIS programs don't teach it but there some good resources: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/29680

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What is a literacy in this context?

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contact us with any additional definitions or models you'd like us to include.

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EDM122: Digital Literacies and Open Practices 

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EDM122: Digital Literacies and Open Practices 

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Part of the MA in Academic Practice at City University which explores digital literacy, open practices and copyright literacy.

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EDM122: Digital Literacies and Open Practice

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A Case Study Exploring Freelance English Language
Teachers’ Engagement With And Informal Learning
Through Open Educational Practices In Switzerland

http://oro.open.ac.uk/75796/2/Redacted%20EdD%20Thesis_P.Daniels.pdf

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Student practices in copyright culture: Accessing learning resources

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Student practices in copyright culture: Accessing learning resources

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This paper by Laura Czerniewicz explores how students access resources.  The findings suggest a blurring of the legal and illegal  and the normalising of piracy practices.

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Student practices in copyright culture: Accessing learning resources

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Using Schatzki's practices framework as a lens, this paper reports on the practices of university students accessing learning resources at a research-intensive university in South Africa. Using a mixed methods approach, 1001 survey responses and six focus groups were analysed to explore how students in three professional disciplines access learning resources, with the focus on digitally-mediated piracy practices.

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COMMUNIA advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and re-use of culture and knowledge

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Licentie the role of ex-ante user rights safeguards Public Domain Dedication CC ZEROCOMMUNIA

On the 26th of January at 1530 (CET) we are hosting the first COMMUNIA salon of 2021. This edition will focus on the most controversial question of the discussions surrounding the implementation of Article 17: the need to introduce ex-ante user rights safeguards in national implementations of the directive, to ensure that legitimate uses of third party works cannot be automatically blocked.

In the discussions over the past year the need for ex-ante user right protections has become apparent. In its targeted consultation, the Commission has made it clear "that it is not enough [...] to only restore legitimate content ex post" and, in the CJEU hearing in Case C-401/19, the Commission and the Council have argued that the requirement not to prevent the availability of legitimate uploads takes precedence over the requirement to make best efforts to prevent the availability of works that rightsholders want to keep off a platform.

By now three Member States have made implementation proposals that include such ex-ante safeguards. Germany and Austria have put forward draft laws that introduce "minor use" thresholds and allow users to pre-flag legitimate uploads. Finland has proposed a "blocking mechanism" that would require rightsholders to review uploads containing their works before they can issue a blocking request.

During the upcoming COMMUNIA salon, we will be discussing these proposals with Julia Reda (former MEP and project lead at GFF), Viveca Still (Senior Copyright Advisor, Ministry of Culture, Finland), Marco Giorello (Head of Copyright Unit, European Commission) and Tobias Holzmüller (General Counsel, GEMA). The Salon will be moderated by Alek Tarkowski (COMMUNIA/Open Future).

The presentations will be followed by an informal question and answer session and concluding remarks by Paul Keller (COMMUNIA/Open Future).

This event is open for everyone to attend and will be held on Zoom. In order to ensure smooth participation we request participants to register beforehand. Registered participants will receive login information ahead of the event.

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On the 26th of January at 1530 (CET) we are hosting the first COMMUNIA salon of 2021. This edition will focus on the most controversial question of the discussions surrounding the implementation of Article 17: the need to introduce ex-ante user rights safeguards in national implementations of the directive, to ensure that legitimate uses of third party works cannot be automatically blocked.

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Chris Bourg's keynote at the 2018 CC Global Summit.

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The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation

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The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation

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A keynote by Lorna M. Campbell exploring different and sometimes contradictory definitions and understandings of openness.

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The theme of today's conference is designing teaching and learning spaces to facilitate active learning, collaboration and student engagement however my experience lies not so much in physical spaces but in online and digital spaces and specifically open education spaces situated within the open knowledge landscape. I currently work for the Open Education Resources Service at the University of Edinburgh, I'm a Board member of both the Association for Learning Technology and Wikimedia UK, and a member of Open Knowledge International's Open Education Working Group, and all these organisations are part of the broad Open Knowledge landscape.

What I want to look at today is what we mean when we talk about openness in relation to digital teaching and learning spaces, resources, communities and practices. I also want to highlight the boundaries that demarcate these open spaces, the hierarchies that exist within them, and look at who is included and who is excluded. And I want to explore what we can do to make our open spaces more diverse and inclusive by removing systemic barriers and structural inequalities and by engaging both staff and students in the co-creation of our own teaching and learning experience.

I don't want to get too hung up on semantics, but I do want to start off by looking at a few definitions. What do we mean if we talk about openness in relation to digital education and open knowledge? This is a question that has been posed numerous times, in numerous contexts by independent scholar and technology journalist Audrey Watters who, in a 2015 post titled "What Do We Mean By Open Education?" asked

"What do we mean when we use the word? Free? Open access? Open enrollment? Open data? Openly- licensed materials, as in open educational resources or open source software? Open for discussion? Open for debate? Open to competition? Open for business? Open-ended intellectual exploration? Those last two highlight how people can use the word "open" in education and mean not just utterly different things, but perhaps even completely opposite."

Like Audrey, I don't have a simple answer to these questions because, as Catherine Cronin reminded us in her thoughtful 2017 paper Open Education, Open Questions, "openness is a constantly negotiated space". It's critically important to appreciate that open means very different things to different people, and that our perspective of openness will be shaped by our personal experiences and the privilege of our vantage point.

These are some of the spaces that populate the Open Knowledge landscape as I see it. Your perspective of this open landscape might look very different.

● Open licenses
● Open educational resources
● Open education policy and
● Open pedagogy
● Open practice
● Open textbooks
● Open badges
● Open online courses
● MOOCs (a very contested open space.)
● Open data
● Open science
● Open Access scholarly works
● Open source software
● Open standards
● Open government
● Open GLAM

I'm not going to attempt to cover all these areas, as we'd be here until next week, but I do want to explore what open means, or rather how it is understood, in some of the spaces I am most familiar with.

Open Education and OER

So let's start off with open education and OER...

The principles of open education are outlined in the 2007 Cape Town Declaration, which laid the foundations of the "emerging open education movement" and advocated for the development of open education policy to ensure that taxpayer-funded educational resources are available under open license. The Cape Town Declaration is still an influential document and it was updated last year on its 10th anniversary as Capetown +10 and I can highly recommend having a look at this if you want a broad overview of the principles of open education.

There is no one hard and fast definition of open education but one I like is from the not for profit organization OER Commons...

"The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. The Open Education Movement is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it's about participation and co-creation. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning content through engaging educators in new participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning."

And I want to come back and look at these concepts of participation and co-creation later.

Though Open Education can encompass many different things, open educational resources, or OER, are central to any understanding of this domain.

UNESCO define open educational resources as

"teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions."

It's useful to note that this definition accommodates a wide range of different resource types and it's notable that the term OER is interpreted very differently in different communities. In the US currently, OER tends to equate to open textbooks, while in the UK we have a much broader understanding of OER that encompasses a wide range of teaching, learning and cultural heritage resources.

One of the key characteristics of open educational resources is that they are either in the public domain or they are released under an open licence, and generally that means a Creative Commons licence. However not all Creative Commons licences are equal and there is considerable debate as to whether resources licensed with No Derivatives and Non Commercial licences can be regarded as OER. Some argue from a strong ethical standpoint that while education resources produced by public funding should be freely and openly available, they should be protected from commercial exploitation by Non Commercial licences. Others take the position that open education resources should be freely and openly available to all, without exception or restriction. And there are arguments that in order for open business models to be sustainable, they must enable both free and commercial reuse. For example some cultural heritage institutions will make low resolution images of their digitised collections freely available under open license, however users must pay a premium to access high resolution images. It's not my position to make a value judgement on these different perspectives as choice of licence will always be dictated by many factors and will always be highly contextualised.

One prominent voice in the debate about defining the open in OER is David Wiley who has defined five 5 permissions or activities that characterise open educational resources. These are referred to as the 5 Rs:

1. Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways.
2. Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself.
3. Remix - the right to combine content with other material to create something new.
4. Redistribute - the right to share copies of the content with others.
5. Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content.

Wiley also argues that the requirements and restrictions some organisations place on open content, such as the use of the Share Alike licence, harm the global goals of the broader open content community.

I have no quibble with the 5Rs per se, and indeed I think it's useful for anyone who is engaged in open education to be familiar with this conceptual framework, however I would caution against regarding this as a standard to which open education resources must conform as they arguably obscure some of the more important aspects of the open in open education. Indeed some argue that any attempt to standardise what may or may not be regarded as OER is contrary to the very spirit of openness.

During the 2017 Open Education Conference Ryan Merkley, Executive Director of Creative Commons stressed that

"Open has to be about more than the 5Rs. It is also about our values: access, equity, innovation & creativity."

And Nicole Allen, Director of Open Education at SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition also emphasised that

"Open is not just a set of attributes, it's a set of values and practices that make education better."

Personally, when it comes to definitions such as these, I think there is a careful balance to be struck between speaking a common language, encouraging diverse opinions and listening with respect.

Open Education Practice

These values and practices are often encompassed by the term open education practice.

Broadly speaking, open education practice encompases teaching techniques and academic practices that draw on open technologies, pedagogical approaches and OER to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. This may involve both teachers and learners participating in online peer communities, engaging with, reusing and creating open educational content, and sharing experiences and professional practice.

One description I like of open education practice is from the Cape Town Declaration

"Open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues."

And what I particularly like about this definition is that it focuses on collaboration and empowerment, which to me is what open education is all about.

Although I'm not a teaching academic, I do regard myself as an open education practitioner, and these are some of the ways that this practice manifests in terms of my work.

I own my own domain on Reclaim Hosting, an independent company that builds on the principles of the open web. I maintain a blog on this domain, Open World, which I use to reflect on my work and the open education initiatives I'm involved in. My blog also acts as an open record of my practice and it's where I host my professional CMALT portfolio. I maintain an active twitter account which I use to communicate and collaborate with my peers. I ensure that all the resources I produce are released under open licence, and I try to reuse open licensed content whenever possible. This is what my open practice looks like, yours will likely be quite different. However to my mind, the most important aspects of open practice are reflecting openly on your experiences, sharing that reflection with your peers, and engaging in collaborative learning.

MOOCs

I now want to move on to look at a much more contested open space; MOOCs. MOOCs have their roots in a small number of connectivist courses run by institutions such as Athabasca University and The University of Mary Washington from 2008 onwards. These innovative courses, such as the anarchic DS-106 digital storytelling course, focused on knowledge creation and generation and encouraged learners to play a central role in shaping their learning experiences. From 2010 onwards however a number of primarily venture-capital funded commercial MOOC providers, including Udacity, EdX, Coursera and FutureLearn, entered the market with a huge amount of hype and promises to disrupt education. Although MOOCs did not disrupt Higher Education, they do fill an interesting space in the education market, and I use that term advisedly in this instance.

My problem with MOOCs is that they are not open in any real sense of the word. The word "open" in MOOC simply means that anyone can join a course free of charge, regardless of qualifications. The platforms themselves are proprietary, and even if course content is openly licensed it is often difficult to extricate from the platform. Most MOOCs are free as in beer rather than free as in speech and even this is increasingly debatable as many now charge for premium features such as certification and continued access to course materials.

Of course one solution to this is to ensure all MOOC content is also available in open spaces off these commercial platforms, and that's the road we've gone down at Edinburgh. In order to make sure the high quality MOOC content we produce for the courses we run on FutureLearn, Coursera and EdX is accessible and reusable, for both our own staff and students, and others outwith the University, we make sure is can be downloaded under open license from our multi media asset management system, Media Hopper Create.

Wikimedia

Of course no discussion of open online spaces would be complete without Wikpedia and its associated projects.

Here in Ireland there is an active Community User Group which promotes the creation, promotion, and dissemination of free knowledge. And in the UK we have a Wikimedia chapter, Wikimedia UK, which works in partnership with organisations from the cultural and education sectors to unlock content, remove barriers to knowledge, develop new ways of engaging with the public and enable learners to benefit from the educational potential of the Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia UK also supports a number of Wikimedians in Residence who work with a range of education and public heritage organisations throughout the country. A new Wikimedia Scotland Coordinator, has also just been appointed and in Wales there is a National Wikimedian, based at the National Library in Aberystwyth.

At the University of Edinburgh we believe that contributing to the global pool of Open Knowledge through Wikimedia is squarely in line with our institutional mission and we also believe that Wikipedia is a valuable learning tool to develop a wide range of digital and information literacy skills at all levels across the curriculum. Our Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, works to embed open knowledge in the curriculum, through skills training sessions, editathons, Wikipedia in the classroom initiatives and Wikidata projects, in order to increase the quantity and quality of open knowledge and enhance digital literacy.

There is no question that Wikipedia is an invaluable source of open knowledge, however it is not without bias. The coverage of subject matter on Wikipedia is neither uniform nor balanced and many topics and areas are underrepresented, particularly those relating to women, people of colour and minority groups. For example, on English language Wikipedia only about 17% of biographical articles are about women, and the number of female editors is between 10 & 14%. Hopefully you don't need me to tell you why this lack of diversity and inclusivity is a serious problem. However it is a problem that is being addressed by the Foundation itself, by projects such as Wikiwomen in Red, and by editors and Wikimedians in Residence across the world.

At Edinburgh an important aspect of our Wikimedian in Residence's work is to help improve the coverage and esteem of Wikipedia articles about women, and underrepresented minorities, and to redress the gender imbalance of contributors by encouraging more women to become editors. And I'm very pleased to say that over the last year 65% of participants at our editathons were women. There has also been phenomenal progress in Wales, and in 2016, Welsh Wikipedia became the biggest language Wikipedia in the world to achieve gender balance.

Inclusion, Exclusion and Structural Inequality

Wikipedia's well known problem with gender balance is a notable example of systemic bias. Wikimedia is an open community, an open space, that anyone can contribute to in theory, however in reality there are many factors that prevent certain groups from entering this space. In the case of women editors, former Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner identified a range of systemic factors that discourage women from contributing to the encyclopaedia, including lack of time, lack of self confidence, aversion to conflict, and the misogynistic atmosphere of the community. In addition, the very principles which underpin the encyclopaedia discriminate against marginalised groups. Wikipedia is based on citation, yet in fields where women and people of colour have been traditionally barred, or their contribution has been neglected or elided, it is much harder to find reputable citations that are critical for the creation of good quality articles. Any article that is deemed to be inadequately cited runs the risk of rapid deletion, thus replicating real world power imbalances, privileges and inequalities.

Wikimedia is not the only open space that suffers from issues of systemic bias and structural inequality. In a paper on Open Initiatives for Decolonising the Curriculum, in the forthcoming book Decolonising the University edited by Gurminder K Bhramba, open source software developer Pat Lockley notes that universities with the highest percentages of black staff are those which spend the least, and in many cases nothing, on open access article processing charges. And he goes on to ask whether Open Access really is broadening and diversifying academia, or merely reinforcing the existing system.

When we look at MOOCs supported on commercial platforms, the situation is arguably worse. Far from democratizing higher education and reaching out to disadvantaged groups, numerous studies have shown that the majority of MOOC enrolments tend to be young, male, educated, and from the developed countries of the global north. Gayle Christensen, one of the authors of an important report on the University of Pennsylvania's Coursera courses, noted that MOOCs are failing to reach they students they had intended to empower and instead they are giving more to those who already have a lot.

Similarly, in its 2017 survey on open source software development practices and communities, Github, another important open online space, reported huge gaps in representation and concluded that the gender imbalance in open source remains profound. From a random sample of 5,500 respondents 95% were men; just 3% were women and 1% are non-binary.

And there are many other examples of similar structural inequalities in open spaces and communities. We all need to be aware of the fact that open does not necessarily mean accessible. Open spaces and communities are not without their hierarchies, their norms, their gatekeepers and their power structures. We need to look around our own open communities and spaces and ask ourselves who is included and who is excluded, who is present and who is absent, and we need to ask ourselves why. Because nine times out of ten, if certain groups of people are absent or excluded from spaces, communities or domains, it is not a result of preference, ability, or aptitude, it is a result of structural inequality, and in many cases it is the result of multiple intersecting inequalities. Far too often our open spaces replicate the power structures and inequalities that permeate our society.

In a recent article titled "The Dangers of Being Open" Amira Dhalla, who leads Mozilla's Women and Web Literacy programs, wrote:

"What happens when only certain people are able to contribute to open projects and what happens when only certain people are able to access open resources? This means that the movement is not actually open to everyone and only obtainable by those who can practice and access it.

Open is great. Open can be the future. If, and only when, we prioritize structuring it as a movement where anyone can participate and protecting those who do."

So how do we change this? Well half the battle is recognising that there is a problem in the first place, taking steps to understand that problem, and then doing the hard work to effect change. And those of us who are already inside these open spaces and communities need to take positive action to make these spaces, not just open, but accessible and inclusive. And to do that, to borrow a phrase from the Suffragettes, we need Deeds not Words.

Open Education and Co-Creation at UoE

One way we can start to ensure that our open education spaces, communities and resources really are open and participatory is to engage with our students in co-creation. So what I want to do now is briefly look at a few initiatives from the University of Edinburgh that involve students in the co-creation of learning experiences, open knowledge and open educational resources.

At Edinburgh we believe that open education is strongly in line with our institutional mission to provide the highest quality learning and teaching environment for the greater wellbeing of our students, and to make a significant, sustainable and socially responsible contribution to Scotland, the UK and the world, promoting health and economic and cultural wellbeing. Students have always played a key role in shaping the our vision of openness, indeed it was the Edinburgh University Student Association (EUSA) that provided the initial impetus for the development of an OER policy at the university. Our vision for OER builds on our excellent education and research collections, traditions of the Scottish Enlightenment and the university's civic mission, and right from its inception this vision has encouraged both staff and students to engage with the use and creation of OER and open knowledge, to enhance the quality of the student experience while at the same time making a significant contribution to the cultural and digital commons. This vision is backed up by our OER Policy and an OER Service which provides staff and students with advice and guidance on creating and using OER, and which provides a one stop shop where you can access open educational resources produced by staff and students across the university. Because we believe its crucially important to back up our policy and vision with support.

So let's look at some examples of how our students are engaging in the co-creation of open learning and open knowledge

LGBT+ Healthcare 101

A number of studies have shown that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual health is not well-covered in Medical curricula, however knowledge of LGBT health and of the sensitivities needed to treat LGBT patients are valuable skills for qualifying doctors.

The LGBT+ Healthcare project involved a team of undergraduate medical students, who sought to address the lack of teaching on LGBT health through OER. The students remixed and repurposed resources originally created by Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. In order to contextualise these materials, new open resources in the form of digital stories recorded from patient interviews were also created by the students and released under open license. These resources were then repurposed by Open Content Curation Student Interns, to create open educational resources suitable for Secondary School children of all ages. All resources are available through multiple channels including the University's OER Service Open.Ed portal and TES.

Open Content Curation student interns play an important role in OER creation at the University, helping to repurpose and share resources created by staff and other students while at the same time developing their own digital literacy skills. We're now in the third year of this internship and the feedback we have received from the students has been nothing short of inspiring.

Geosciences Outreach and Engagement

Another hugely successful example of co-creation is the School of Geosciences Outreach and Engagement course. Over two semesters, students develop an outreach project that communicates an element of GeoSciences outside the university community. Students work with schools, museums, outdoor centres and community groups to create a wide range of resources for science engagement. Students gain experience of science outreach, public engagement, teaching and learning, and knowledge transfer while working in new and challenging environments and developing a range of transferable skills that enhance their employability.

The Geosciences Outreach and Engagement course has proved to be hugely popular with both students and clients. The course has received widespread recognition and a significant number of schools and other universities are exploring how they might adopt the model.

Here's just one quote from a student, Rebecca Astbury, who participated in the course;

"Geoscience Outreach and Engagement is one of the most interesting courses I have undertaken in my 5 years at Edinburgh. Not only do I get the opportunity to find new and exciting ways to inform people of all ages about Geosciences, I'm also learning valuable skills to enhance my future career after university. This course has taught me that everyone has a different way of learning, and instead of following one strict path, we should expand our ideas on how to effectively communicate science to the general public."

A key element of the Course is to develop resources with a legacy that can be reused by other communities and organisations. Our Open Content Curation Interns repurpose these materials to create open educational resources which are then shared online through Open.Ed and TES where they could be found and reused by other teachers and learners.

Wikimedia in the Classroom

I've already mentioned the work of our Wikimedian in Residence and I'm not going to go into this amazing project in any detail as that would be a whole other talk and I'm already running out of time. Instead I'm going to let one of our students speak for themselves. This interview with Senior Honours Biology student Aine Kavanagh was recorded by our Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew. Here's Aine is talking briefly about her experience of writing a Wikipeda article as part of a classroom assignment in Reproductive Biology.

Video by Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, University of Edinburgh

And the article that Aine wrote on high-grade serous carcinoma, one of the most common forms of ovarian cancer, has now been viewed almost 34,000 times. It's hard to imagine another piece of undergraduate work having such an impact. This is just one of a number of courses at the University that have successfully embedded Wikipedia assignments and you can listen to more of our students' testimonies and find out about the work of our Wikimedian in residence here.

These are all examples of open education initiatives that are not just open, but open, diverse collaborative and participatory and, to my mind, this is what is really important

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to go right back to the title of this talk, The Soul of Liberty, which is taken from a quote by Frances Wright, the Scottish feminist and social reformer, who was born in Dundee in 1795, but who rose to prominence in the United States as an abolitionist, a free thinker, and an advocate of women's equality in education. Frances wrote:

"Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it."

I think the same could also be said of openness; equality is the soul of openness. Two hundred years down the line, Frances' conviction strikes a chord that echoes with Amira Dhalla's affirmation that open can only be the future if we design and structure open spaces and communities so that anyone can participate.

Those of us here today already have the privilege to participate in open education spaces and open knowledge communities, and we can not keep that privilege to ourselves. We need to identify the barriers that prevent some people from participating in the spaces we enjoy, and we need to do what we can to remove these systemic obstructions. We need to be aware of our own privilege, and be sensitive to whose voices are included and whose are excluded, we need to know when to speak and when to be silent. To me this is what openness is really about, the removal of systemic barriers and structural inequalities to provide opportunities to enable everyone to participate equitably, and on their own terms. We need to ensure that when we design our learning spaces, whether physical or virtual, online or on campus, they really are open to all, regardless of race, gender, or ability, because openness is not just about attributes, definitions and licences, openness is also about creativity, access, equality, and inclusion, and ultimately, it's about expanding access to education, supporting social inclusion and enabling learners to become fully engaged digital citizens.

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The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation

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The theme of today's conference is designing teaching and learning spaces to facilitate active learning, collaboration and student engagement however my experience lies not so much in physical spaces but in online and digital spaces and specifically open education spaces situated within the open knowledge landscape.

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Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education

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Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education

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A paper by Dr Catherine Cronin exploring the interface of open practice and OER.

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A blog post by Dr Melissa Highton, University of Edinburgh exploring the concept of "copyright debt".

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Three weeks ago, while preparing my presentation for e-learningforum@ed conference I was musing on the similarities between 'technical debt' and what one might call ' copyright debt'.

I was thinking about institutional risks of not being open. Institutional risks are sometimes legal, sometimes reputational, sometimes financial. Mostly, at IT directors' meetings we talk about the need to mitigate risks early on, and avoid risks in the future.

Generally, the risks of not engaging with open practice are reputational: Other institutions are doing it; we might miss out on this good thing; we should be seen to be bold in digital education and leading edge in our open research. There is a risk to our reputation if colleagues do not seem to be up to-date-on licensing and refer to online materials or data as 'open' when they are not. But most of those risks are easily hidden under a smear of open-washing and a vagueness about the definition of open in different contexts.

These are not risks which will ever convince a VP Finance and Resources to invest.

If you want to convince an IT director or a CIO to invest in systems which have built-in open-licensing workflows, protecting the institution against the risk of expensive copyright debt may be the way forward.

My definition of 'copyright debt' is based on my understanding of 'technical debt'. Technical debt is a metaphor often used in IT to explain why it costs so much to replace IT systems. I use it to explain why rather than spending my budget on new exciting learning and teaching functionality, I am having to spend it to replace something we thought we already had.

You can ready about technical debt on Wikipedia. It's the cost of not doing something properly in the first place. From the moment you build a system poorly, without due attention to software code rigour and process, you begin to accrue debt and then interest on that debt. From the moment you don't fix, patch and maintain the code, the same thing happens. At some point you are going to have to go back and fix it, and the longer you leave it the more expensive it will be*.

From the moment a colleague tells you that they don't have time, or don't care about the copyright licensing and metadata on their teaching materials and load them up into a VLE, online course environment, departmental website, online course-pack, lecture power-point slides, whatever, you start to accrue 'copyright debt'.

Someone will have to go back to those materials at some point to check them, figure out who made them and when and check for 3rd party content. The longer time passes (or staff change) between the original materials being uploaded in to the VLE the harder it will be to find the original source.

The cost will hit at the moment that you migrate from one VLE to another, or from one website to another, or from one media asset management system to another. At that point lecturers and departmental administrators will be asked to confirm that they have copyright permission for the materials they are migrating, and they will say ' I have no idea, in fact I don't even remember/know where all the bits came from'.

They will suggest that someone in a central service (usually the library) should do the checking, and that is where the cost hits. No-one in the library is super-human enough ( unless you pay them a lot) to check all the hundreds of teaching and learning materials in your VLE, so most of it will just be binned and colleagues will be outraged that they have to make it all again.

I'd suggest the common causes of copyright debt include (a combination of):

Business pressures, where the business considers getting something released sooner before all of the necessary copyright searches are complete.

Lack of process or understanding, where the businesse is blind to the concept of copyright debt, and make decisions without considering the implications.

Lack of flexible components, where materials are not openly licensed, the re-use permissions are not flexible enough to adapt to changes in course content.

Lack of time, which encourages colleagues to do quick google searches and take materials they find without checking the license.

Lack of metadata, where content is created without necessary supporting metadata. That work to create the supporting metadata represents a debt that must be paid.

Lack of collaboration, where knowledge of open practice isn't shared around the organization and business efficiency suffers, or junior learning technologists are not properly mentored.

Parallel development at the same time on two or more VLEs can cause the build up of copyright debt because of the work that will eventually be required to move content from one to another. The more content developed in isolation without clear licensing , the more debt that is piled up.

Delayed reformatting - the formats which were used for creating learning objects quickly becomes obsolete. Without clear permission to make adaptations it is hard for older TEL materials to be converted to new formats. The longer that reformatting is delayed, and the more content is written to use the older format, the more debt that piles up that must be paid at the time the conversion is finally done.

Lack of alignment to standards, where industry standard features, frameworks, open technologies are ignored. Eventually, integration with standards will come, doing it sooner will cost less.

Lack of knowledge, when the content creator simply doesn't know how or why to use open materials.

The challenge in all this of course, is that the individual academics making the materials don't care about the longer term cost to the central services of this debt. This argument won't persuade them to take the time to change their practice, so we must build rigour for open practice into the workflows of our enterprise-wide systems and services as soon as we possibly can, making it easy for colleagues to make positive choices.

Or else we risk a whole heap of copyright debt.

*Basically it is the software equivalent of ' a stitch in time saves nine'.

(While I was doing this thinking, I bumped into a session at #OER15 called ' the cost of not going open ' by Viv Rolfe which also looked to quantify costs. Viv's approach is to look at costs and savings around academic time spent creating materials, which complements my thinking rather nicely.)

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Three weeks ago, while preparing my presentation for e-learningforum@ed conference I was musing on the similarities between 'technical debt' and what one might call ' copyright debt'. I was thinking about institutional risks of not being open. Institutional risks are sometimes legal, sometimes reputational, sometimes financial.

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Journal article: An open impediment: Navigating copyright and OER publishing in the academic library

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Journal article: An open impediment: Navigating copyright and OER publishing in the academic library

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202_scholarly_communication

Scholarly Communication

Navigating copyright and OER publishing in the academic library

Lindsey Gumb is assistant professor and scholarly communications librarian at Roger Williams University, email: lgumb@rwu.edu

Academic libraries around the world are leading the way to support the adoption, revision, and creation of open educational resources (OER), both saving students money and encouraging pedagogical innovation in the classroom. While there are varying definitions depending on the organization, it is generally accepted that a resource used for teaching, learning, or research can be considered an OER if it is both free and openly-licensed under Creative Commons (CC), general public license, or is in the public domain.1

In the United States, if your library isn't already knee-deep in this process, odds are the conversation has at least begun, considering that 23 states have passed some form of textbook affordability legislation,2 and the federal government has included $5 million in its budget for the second year in a row to support such initiatives through grant funding.3 Library leadership within the open education landscape aligns not only with our professional values to provide users with equitable access to information but also ALA's motto to provide the "best reading, for the largest number, at the lowest cost."

Even ACRL's "2018 Top Trends in Academic Libraries" acknowledges that OER production through a vehicle like a university press is an opportunity to showcase the scholarship and research happening on our campuses.4

Most academic librarians are accustomed to assisting faculty with locating and acquiring quality, copyrighted learning resources to support the curriculum. Therefore, slightly realigning this process in order to point these individuals toward quality, openly licensed content hasn't required a significant learning curve beyond identifying appropriate open repositories for consultation. What happens, however, when these same faculty want to go beyond simply identifying and adopting OER content and ask for help in revising, remixing, and creating new content? In theory, the concept seems simple enough, but are we really as well-equipped as we should be to lead faculty across this bumpy new terrain of content revision and creation in respect to the nuances of copyright, fair use, and open licensing?

Due to the inherent "open" nature and intent of OER, it becomes especially vital for those of us assisting faculty with these initiatives to have a solid foundation and confidence in navigating the rules and regulations pertaining to intellectual property. If a faculty member approached you and said she was working on revising an OER and needed some help determining whether the inclusion of a copyrighted work would qualify as fair use, how comfortable would you be working through this process? I'd be willing to bet many of us would be hesitant, considering that it has been fairly well-documented that library schools historically have not provided adequate course offerings for their students on the topic of copyright in librarianship.

In 2015, LeEtta Schmidt and Michael English published a study that analyzed 51 ALA-accredited Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies in the United States and found that while 11 of them offered an elective dedicated to copyright, none had a required course for it.5 The same study found that 80% of both academic and public librarians at top-ranked institutions received no copyright/IP-specific, on-the-job training.

Even without any formal copyright training it was also found that librarians still felt obligated to provide answers and guidance to patrons regardless of their confidence in the subject matter.6 This sense of obligation we feel may stem from the pressure that library deans and directors sometimes place on their staff to provide the level of copyright support that ALA encourages in Article IV. A 2013 study revealed that library administrators often rely on staff to "deal" with copyright issues, even though nearly 90% of those surveyed felt that copyright law training in MLS or MLIS programs was in fact inadequate.7

CC licenses, which rely on the existence of copyright to function and are applied extensively to content published as OER, are now an equally important component of copyright foundational knowledge for academic librarianship. However, a 2017 study conducted by Juan-Carlos Fernández-Molina, João Batista E. Moraes, and José Augusto C. Guimarães indicated that 71.01% of respondents did not know how to publish a document with a CC license.8

The responsible curation of OER depend significantly on librarians having the skills to not only publish a resource with a CC license, but more importantly, the ability to interpret and explain the responsibilities and ramifications of each license option. This is especially true when ingesting CC-licensed content for revision or inclusion in the creation of OER, as well as during the publication process. How can librarians successfully and responsibly participate in and lead a campus initiative like open education when the majority of librarians are lacking essential, foundational skills-albeit, by no fault of their own?

Consider this: a faculty member wishes to revise an existing open textbook so that it better aligns with course learning outcomes and student learning styles. Revising any open content would mean at minimum the librarian assisting would need to be able to identify, interpret, and explain the open license embedded within the original work so that the faculty member thoroughly understands the responsibilities and limitations that may exist when making any changes. This task, however, often extends beyond simply identifying the content's overall license, because many works, while in fact openly licensed as a whole, contain copyrighted, third-party content that was included by obtaining explicit permission from the copyright holder. If a faculty member fails to secure the necessary permissions to re-license the third-party content in the new adaptation, they could be putting not only themselves or their institution (depending on any existing institutional copyright policies) at risk for a lawsuit, but also any future users who adopt the new work.9

Because of the lack of copyright preparation in LIS programs and the fact that content creation and revision is still a relatively new area of OER leadership, many librarians are simply unaware of the extent in which collaborating with faculty to revise or create their own open content will require a deeper knowledge and grasp of copyright, fair use, and licensing structures to responsibly produce a product worthy of being shared beyond the instructor's own classroom. While scholarly communication librarians also do not typically receive formal training via LIS programs, they at least have the benefit of working with these issues on a near-daily basis and may have an easier time justifying both reimbursement and time off for professional development (like copyright boot camps) because of their job descriptions.

What about the early-career professionals or those whom have had OER responsibilities suddenly dropped into their laps due to an administrative ask? Or the libraries that operate with small staffs lacking the time or access to funds necessary to seek additional professional development? How can we expect our OER programs to be sustainable if the projects we undertake require a more substantial understanding of the law and our librarians are not receiving the foundational education they need to do so? While I don't think LIS programs should be let off the hook entirely, I do think there are some things academic libraries can do immediately to place themselves in a better position to build sustainable OER programs, in terms of copyright:

Establish a relationship with your Office of General Counsel, making this entity aware of the nature of OER creation and revision will be important if you need help navigating situations beyond your capacity.

Raise awareness of the type of professional development that all librarians and staff involved in your OER program should have access to in order to navigate copyright roadblocks, and then make a case to secure appropriate funding to do so.

If funds are tight, collaborate with a consortium or professional organization to set up an in-person copyright boot camp with reputable professionals. If your library is struggling with these problems, odds are others are, too.

Subscribe to listservs that address OER and CC inquiries and use them as a community of practice. SPARC Libraries and OER Forum and CC-openedu are very active.10

With the open movement charging ahead, librarians are potentially entering uncharted territory in terms of what it means to provide copyright support in an academic library. The literature spanning the last 20 years clearly highlights the lack of copyright education provided in ALA-accredited LIS programs. While this is not a new problem, it is becoming increasingly more of a challenge as new trends like OER continue to sweep through academic libraries. Will LIS programs work to develop required courses or even tracks to provide its students, our future colleagues, with the necessary foundational knowledge of the law to ethically support the open movement and future trends in higher education?

Equally important, will academic libraries be prepared to provide on-the-job training to librarians at all stages in their careers to support ever-evolving scholarly communication practices? Librarians will undoubtedly continue to help faculty with requests like identifying how much of a chapter they can copy and distribute to their students to have it qualify as fair use or whether the showing of a film will require the purchase of public performance rights. However, libraries acting as leaders of OER on their campuses can also expect requests to take the form of more in-depth assessments and analyses of fair use and licensing in the context of content revision and creation of OER. This new narrative of engagement comes with a great deal of responsibility that without certain foundational knowledge and experience can be risky, and dare I say unethical? As our involvement in the publishing of OER expands, our profession will need to prioritize the credentials and support necessary for librarians (beyond ad-hoc professional development opportunities) in order to create strong, sustainable OER programs and services.

Notes

1. "CC Wiki: What is OER?," Creative Commons, last modified February 8, 2016, 18:21, https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/What_is_OER%3F.

2. "OER State Policy Tracker," SPARC, accessed January 14, 2019, https://sparcopen.org/our-work/state-policy-tracking/.

3. U.S. PIRGs, "Open Textbooks Pilot Renewed, Saving College Students up to $50 Million," news release, September 26, 2018, https://uspirg.org/news/usp/open-textbooks-pilot-renewed-saving-college-students-50-million.

4. ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee, "2018 Top Trends in Academic Libraries: A Review of the Trends and Issues Affecting Academic Libraries in Higher Education," C&RL News 79, no. 6 (2018): 286-300, doi:10.5860/crln.79.6.286.

5. LeEtta Schmidt and Michael English, "Copyright Instruction in LIS Programs: Report of a Survey of Standards in the U.S.A.," The Journal of Academic Librarianship 41, no. 6 (2015): 736-43, doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2015.08.004.

6. Ibid.

7. John Eye, "Knowledge Level of Library Deans and Directors in Copyright Law," Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 2, no. 1 (2013): 1-14, doi:10.7710/2162-3309.1103.

8. Juan-Carlos Fernández-Molina, João Batista E. Moraes, and José Augusto C. Guimarães, "Academic Libraries and Copyright: Do Librarians Really Have the Required Knowledge?" College & Research Libraries 78, no. 2 (2017): 241-59, doi:10.5860/crl.78.2.16584.

9. "CC Wiki: Marking/Creators/Marking Third Party Content," Creative Commons, last modified November 19, 2003, 23:44, https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking/Creators/Marking_third_party_content#Additional_explanation_and_tips.

10. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/sparc-library-oer-forum/, https://creativecommons.org/2017/09/05/invitation-join-cc-open-education-platform/.

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202_scholarly_communication Scholarly Communication Navigating copyright and OER publishing in the academic library Lindsey Gumb is assistant professor and scholarly communications librarian at Roger Williams University, email: lgumb@rwu.edu Academic libraries around the world are leading the way to support the adoption, revision, and creation of open educational resources (OER), both saving students money and encouraging pedagogical innovation in the classroom.

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Open and closed creation and publishing matrix

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Open and closed creation and publishing matrix

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Paskevicius, M., Irvine, V. Practicalities of implementing open pedagogy in higher education. Smart Learn. Environ. 6, 23 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-019-0110-5

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Practicalities of implementing open pedagogy in higher education

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This paper presents findings from a study which explored the ways in which post-secondary educators in British Columbia are reforming their teaching and learning practice as result of open education. Using a phenomenological approach with self-identifying open education practitioners we explore how openness is being enacted through learning design.

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Victoria Stobo, Kerry Paterson and Ronon Deazley discuss avoiding, accepting, mitigating and managing the risks associated with digitising copyright-protected material and making it available online.
https://www.digitisingmorgan.org/index.php?section=Risk

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Thesis abstract and survey data: Archives, digitisation and copyright: do archivists in the UK avoid risk through strict compliance with copyright law when they digitise their collections?

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Thesis abstract and survey data: Archives, digitisation and copyright: do archivists in the UK avoid risk through strict compliance with copyright law when they digitise their collections?

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Dr Victoria Stobo's PhD thesis presents the results of a survey of the UK archive sector that explores how copyright affects digitisation of collections.
https://theses.gla.ac.uk/73030/

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Blog Post: Author copyright in the age of Open Access

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Blog Post: Author copyright in the age of Open Access

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In this blog article, Dugald McGlashan discusses how Open Access can have some important ramifications for the copyright and licensing of authors’ works. It also explores some of the issues around who owns what and when in Open Access publishing framed in relation to Creative Commons.

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Author copyright in the age of Open Access - INLEXIO

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An apparently straightforward idea, Open Access can have some important ramifications for the copyright and licensing of authors' works. In this post, we delve into some of the issues around who owns what and when in Open Access publishing. Open Access offers unrestricted online access to research publications in combination with specific reuse rights.

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Journal Article: Barriers, Incentives, and benefits of an Open Educational Resources (OER) movement: An Exploration into Instructor Perspectives

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Journal Article: Barriers, Incentives, and benefits of an Open Educational Resources (OER) movement: An Exploration into Instructor Perspectives

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The research carried our by Serena Henderson & Nathaniel Ostashewski discusses what barriers are presented to educators in relation to OER practice

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View of Barriers, incentives, and benefits of the open educational resources (OER) movement: An exploration into instructor perspectives | First Monday

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Return to Article Details Barriers, incentives, and benefits of the open educational resources (OER) movement: An exploration into instructor perspectives

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This eight minute video explains what Open Access is, but also highlights another important issue around the access to Open Access materials.

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Conference Paper: Open access barriers: An action research

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Conference Paper: Open access barriers: An action research

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In this conference paper, Mathias Klang (Fordham University), discusses both copyright and licencing in relation to scientific journals, however he touches on the variety of Open Access definitions. Should there be numerous definitions, and does this variety have implications for the open movement?

Click on "Download full-text PDF" button

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Book review of Dr Emily Hudson's 'Drafting Copyright Exceptions'

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Book review of Dr Emily Hudson's 'Drafting Copyright Exceptions'

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In this book review of Dr Emily Hudson's "Drafting Copyright Exceptions" Chris Morrison identifies the need for the copyright specialist community to work together to make copyright scholarship relating to education and research more accessible - https://www.jcel-pub.org/article/view/15210