Key policy questions include:
- What policies are in place to ensure that a portion of public spending in education is invested in ongoing curriculum design and creation of effective teaching and learning environments within courses and programmes? This is important in order to provide for the development of high-quality teaching and learning materials to address key national needs.
- What Intellectual Property (IP) regimes should govern public investments in public education programmes?
- Are government officials aware of the IPR and copyright challenges posed by digitization of content, and the variety of open licences available to help deal with these challenges?
Illustrative case studies:
- A national initiative to improve school leadership. Case study and resources on the Teacher Education Space of the OER Africa website.
- Materials published by government: what rights pertain?
Related toolkits:
National policies:
- The Survey on Governments' Open Educational Resources (OER) Policies prepared by Unesco and the Commonwealth of Learning provides an overview on national policies.
- New Zealand: New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework (NZGoal)
- Austria: Open Data - Open Government. This presentation provides an example of what the Austrian Federal Government has been doing related to open access to government information.
Questions to think about:
- Can the teacher in country Y assume that because she found the workbook on the internet, she can a) print it and use it, and b) make changes to it? Would it make any difference if she charged students/parents for the reworked materials?
- The default legal position in most countries is that unless otherwise stated all materials are published under an ‘all rights reserved’ copyright condition. However, in some countries all documents published by government are assumed to be in the public domain. What is the case in your country?