OCL4Ed

Access to education is a fundamental human right and UNESCO considers this essential to exercising the other human right  The course Open Licencing for Educators ODL4Ed  is contributing to the inevitable outcome in the future where open education will be taken for granted by all education institutions. The course run by the OERu, and facilitated by the Commonwealth of Learning Chairs in OER Waine Macintosh and  Rory McGreal, and myself, from Lund University in Sweden has had very, very many participants from all over the world. Thanks  a lot for joining and your activelty participtation and your lively discussions throughout the weeks.



Today many education institutions, sadly to say,  restrict access to learning by locking content behind all rights reserved copyright. In today's world where the cost of replicating digital information is near zero combined with the affordance that the cost of developing high quality courses collaboratively using open educational resources is far cheaper than doing this alone, we have unprecedented opportunities to promote the sustainability of education futures for all.

The 2 weeks MOOC on Open Licencing for Educators OCL4Ed  is approaching its end today, or rather its beginning, a start of a maybe a new journesy for many of us,  or another phase and awareness around this wonderful world towards open education, accessible for everyone, at anytime and everywhere.2 weeks MOOC on Open Licencing for Educators OCL4Ed


The course has had the following themes:

• Orientatiion

• Why open matters (2parts)

• Copyrights, your rigt to copy

•  Creative Commons, unplugged

• The right licence

The course has had discussions through blogs, tweets, FB, and other social media. Many of the participants gave evidens to lack of awareness of copyright and  the use and rights of creative commons. What is often discussed in higher education at least is plagiarism, but not very often about CC. In one way CC is very easy, it is just to decide your self , which kind of openness you prefer and there are useful guidelines step by step hpw to do. Of course some case are more tricky, for example when research results are presented. The  overall answer would be, awarness and soundness, of course in some case restrictions even with CC will be the best, but with CC you always decide yourself, and that is teh real clue!


More on CC, listening to Lawrence Lessig, who is a political activist and professor at the Harvard Law School. His most recent book, Republic Lost, argues that the economic realities of modern elections have created an inescapable structural corruption where politicians spend so much time fundraising they cannot help but be influenced by the funders of their campaigns. He recently marched across New Hampshire to bring attention to this issue.