Access to Open Educational Resources: Report of a UNESCO OER Community Discussion
UNESCO's international Community on Open Educational Resources has been active since 2005. It connects some 900 individuals in 109 countries to share information and discuss issues surrounding the production and use of Open Educational Resources ? web-based materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in teaching, learning and research. The community returned to the issue of access... more
Otherwise Open Managing Incompatible Content within Open Educational Resources
This paper seeks to provide an overview of the problem posed by the incorporation of IC into otherwise open educational resources. This paper also describes a number of approaches to resolving this issue, including the reliance on jurisdictional copyright exceptions and limitations, and explores the trade-offs involved in adopting any one of these approaches. It is important to note that we... more
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare
This document is a code of best practices designed to help those preparing OpenCourseWare (OCW) to interpret and apply fair use under United States copyright law. The OCW movement, which is part of the larger Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, was pioneered in 2002, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched its OpenCourseWare initiative, making course materials... more
Defining Noncommercial: A Study of How the Online Population Understands "Noncommercial Use"
In 2008-09, Creative Commons commissioned a study from a professional market research firm to explore understandings of the terms "commercial use" and "noncommercial use" among Internet users when used in the context of content found online. The empirical findings suggest that creators and users approach the question of noncommercial use similarly and that overall, online U.S. creators and... more
Academic tribes: reflections on teaching large classes
This article is a reflective essay on teaching a large class of undergraduate students at the University of Durban-Westville. The class consists of 280 students in the fourth year of university training for the teaching profession. more