Why Are Universities Fighting Open Education? | Electronic Frontier Foundation

page_amanda's bookmarks 2016-01-28

Summary:

"In December, over 3,000 of you rallied in support in support of a proposed Department of Education (ED) policy that would make ED-funded educational resources a lot more accessible to educators and students around the world. You weren’t the only ones: the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and numerous other pro-user groups spoke up. Together, we all sent a loud message: Team Internet is on the side of open education. Browsing through all 147 comments, a pattern quickly emerges. Open web advocates, open education groups, and many education professionals all support the idea of ED-funded resources being shared widely under open licenses (though we might quibble on a few specific details). One group kept confusing us, though: universities. Why were some universities opposing a rule that would directly benefit their students and faculty? When you dig a bit deeper, it looks like universities’ opposition to open licensing has nothing to do with students’ access to educational resources. What’s really playing out is a longstanding fight over how universities use patents—more specifically, software patents. Open education just happens to be caught in the crossfire ..."

Link:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/why-are-universities-fighting-open-education

From feeds:

Fair Use Tracker » Deeplinks
CLS / ROC » Deeplinks
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » page.amanda
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.legislature oa.oer oa.software oa.education innovation fair use and intellectual property: defending the balance commentary oa.policies oa.patents

Authors:

Elliot Harmon

Date tagged:

01/28/2016, 19:01

Date published:

01/28/2016, 09:26