Oer15: Window Boxes, Battles, and Bandwagons | Open Education Working Group

"So OER15, with its theme of ‘Mainstreaming Open Education’, introduced a bit of a quandary. On the one hand recent times have seen a fair amount of Open Washing (Audrey Watters definition: “having an appearance of open-source and open-licensing for marketing purposes, while continuing proprietary practices“), and on the other mainstreaming often means compromises. Changing the world is never easy… The OER conference is now in its 6th year and continues to be organised as a community event by stakeholders interested in the progression of OER. This year the host city was Cardiff, a seemingly perfect fit due to the recent Open Education Wales policy. There is no doubt that there a buzzing community interested in OER in the UK and beyond exists, but is this still the same players who saw the potential of OER many moons ago, or have things moved on? Has OER moved into the mainstream and are Open Practitioners becoming the norm? ... With over 27 million buttons (licenses) created per day Creative Commons have officially made it, but to some extent openness is now a victim of its own success. Cable Green, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons, gave an opening plenary in which he called out those who are using the term open content when not adhering to the 5 Rs – reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, retain. Cable explained that we should not tolerate ‘rented content’ in education and that currently the way we spend money on public education is immoral and unethical – all publicly funded educational resources should be open. In the US the cost of textbooks and the implications of this on students has really driven the open movement. Creative Commons would like to see a world where all textbooks are online and can be printed out, resulting in the saved money being spent on teachers. There is still work to be done raising awareness by faculty but projects including z-degree (entire degree programme is OER) have made progress. Alongside open textbook work Creative Commons have been carrying out extensive policy activity (see the Open Policy Network and theInstitute for open leadership) advocating for public funding bodies to set the default when giving money to open i.e. an open licence requirement – all publicly funded resources should be CC0 licence with no embargo period. Cable highlighted new work which involves shifting our learning to solving global grand challenges – water shortages; environmental issues; complex problems, and also a look forward to how open data fits in the space. Cable concluded by highlighting work they are doing to see what market penetration looks like for OER. Add your insights to the Google doc ..."