Killing 2 birds with 1 stone - Activities 9 & 10

Activity 9

I hadn’t really considered attaching any particular licence to my blog content (at least not for this course blog). I don’t see it as a resource which would necessarily be reused, and if anybody reads it and likes an idea and wants to repeat that idea, then I think attribution is fair (and I would always do the same myself if quoting from somebody else’s blog). If I had to add a CC licence then I’d probably opt for CC-BY. 

For other content which I am working on in my professional role, the story is different and more complex. I’m currently working, with a colleague, on a resource for lecturers/teaching staff in HE aimed at showcasing examples of good practice, encouraging experimentation with new technologies, providing resources and guides for the use of our VLE (Blackboard) etc. The content will be a mix of our own screencasts, documentation, images and videos and (little) OERs from other institutions. The intention is for this to be an OER – although there will also be a staff only Blackboard showcase module which will require an institutional login. As I see it there are two issues here:

1. Making sure that we give the correct credit for the little OERs that we use (relatively simple).
2. Thinking about which type of licence to give our own site (more complicated). As it’s quite a comprehensive site, with a variety of different types of content, it’s not appropriate just to slap a Creative Commons licence on to cover everything. For a start, many of the OERs we use will have different types of licence, others may be resources we’ve developed which we wish to release as Non-Commercial or No Derivative and so on. We may end up with an overall copyright statement on a separate page, while applying a variety of CC licenses to individual resources within the site.

* If anyone’s interested, our site is www.celtelearning.org  - it’s very much a work in progress. (comments /feedback welcome!)

 Activity 10

I found the exercise of trying to apply the 3 models suggested by Wiley of limited use, although as a process it succeeded in getting me thinking about issues of sustainability and different approaches to open education initiatives. It was difficult to find any really clear matches, so I agree with others who have found that most of the initiatives don’t fit into just one model and tend to be a hybrid of more than one. Also, given that the USU model was clearly not sustainable, as it closed down in 2009, it may be that this is not a great model for others to follow!