Notes from Ahrash's Talk

Open Ed 2011, Oct 25 2011

Note: Please don't use the chat box on this etherpad - it has "ping" notifications turned on (and gets very annoying very quickly)

Notes:

• The Licensing "thing" is such an amazing distraction 
• It dominates so much of the discourse
• People tend to get tied up in knots
• Difficult to understand the subtleties of all the different terms (NC, ND, etc.)
• Also - hard to see what is the "right" license
• Ahrash asks -> Can we move past this?

The only thing that is really special about OER is the ability to freely derive and adapt them

If goal is -> Put out a pool of resources that anyone can take, change, and (most importantly) republish for anyone else to use

Then -> the license needs to make that vanishingly simple. 

The only license that does that is the CC BY license (PD does the same, but legally more complex). Others may argue for CC BY SA for the community mechanisms. 

Let's focus on the person, who is in this situation --> I want to publish materials CC BY, but I also want to eat. How do I get there?

To help that person we created a strawman: OER Decision Tree

(It's available under CC BY - .... need a link)

Legal Issues

Business Issues

Dual Publication Model

Scenario -> An organization may create resources that are core to their business, and there are various reasons why adapting those resources may be a bad idea. A lot of value-add work may have put in (aligned with standards, fine-tuned for pedagogical effectivness, etc.) where changing it reduces the value of the product.  (is he suggesting one work licensed under two separate sets of terms could be a good idea? i have played with this idea myself a little when thinking about nc clause)

Yet - how do we help this organization become part of (or closer to) the OER movement.

Discussion

Reasons for people to publish under open license -> "Publishing OER will help you get your stuff out to more people" 

• Not sure the open license is necessary. Andrew: If it's free people will find it.

How do for-profits survive without making money? 

• There are a whole range of business models for for-profit. You can sell "convenience" - but that doesn't mean we have to limit access to the raw materials

The for-profit publishers are sometimes "stealing" the authors material. They make changes to materials and then re-publish.

Doesn't the NC option take care of a lot of these problems? 

• NC causes a lot of uncertainty. Are there ways to not use these restrictions, yet still preserve what we want the open license to accomplish. E.g. the BY requirement means that links to the open 

Do we really need to care which license people choose? Two reasons why YES:

• Assurance for people who put their content out on the web
• Foster certain kinds of characteristics, encourage more re-use, create sustainability models and so on - In this case, we don't really know "anything" about what works. If we have a plethora of derivatives floating around there is no control over them. 
• My feeling is for now - let people use whatever license makes them feel comfortable to put things out on the open, and then do research on how licesnes affect sustainability, remix, etc. - and document back and then make informed licensing decisions

Maybe we should stop worrying about it? 

At MIT OCW originally we started out thinking we had to choose a license to (... missed this part ...) Now I see the legal environment responding to us as more of "educators around licensing". Choose whatever license you want, eventually the legal environment will adapt. 

No - there are reasons why license choice is important. We do know a lot about the implications of different license choices, because we can look at the history of open source / free software. The GPL won (although Mac users use the BSD license - which ended up as closed / proprietary software). There are some differences between software and educational content, but there are lots of similarities. 

• "Just choose what fits you" leaves out the long-term dynamic results of license choices.
• The other issue is license incompatibility
• If our goal is a large pool of resources, then standardizing on one open license has benefits.
• Response: This debate has held the debate stuck at the point where we are now. What I am hearing is that we need simple guidelines for people to choose "their first license" - but otherwise largely try to move past the debate

Other restrictions, besides licencing restrictions -- Other restrictions (not the licence). Sometimes the materials come in technical formats that prevent implementation of the rights that the licence entitles the user to exercise. Should authors match the legal permissions with their choice of techincal formats, etc.?

What takes at the institutionsl level may be different from personal decisions. In OCW projects, institutions are making the decisions and tend to be quite caucious. The kind of bargains that get struck to be able to release OER/OCW is to choose less open formats for their openly-license materials.

It's a big ask of individuals to publish their materials in open formats - asking them to openly license is already a big ask, but requiring re-formatting and publishing in different ways, maybe asking too much.

It might get easier and easier to "unlock" what are today unusuable / closed formats. There maybe a technical solution for making materials adaptable - even if the publisher intended to use the technical format as a protective layer. 

Culturally, authors notition of their IP, is probably embedded in the formats they choose. 

Against the vision of the "canonical" version of resources. I would like to change the conversations. One thing that OER licensing does (which I think is a mistake) it makes the assumption that there is ultimately one version. I would like to see version be adapted by communities. if we can move the culture to develop community resources instead of "I am the great professor" and here is my stuff. 

• We tried this at open college textbook libraries, and our choices affect the communities ability to take ownership
• Is there a Wikipedia type system for hosting open content where communities can take ownership?
  • WikiEducators, Wikiversity, WikiBooks, Connexions, Curriki
  • Other communities like P2PU
• Challenge is to create the scale of community around the materials that is required to make this work. 

Keynote: We want all this research and discover what works and pick that one thing that works. I don't think there is one "right" version or way for every one. 

What is the situation for students? They produce high quality lecture notes. Students are very powerful resources for open ed that we haven't tapped into yet.

In Japan, the copyright exception only allows for reproduction not creating derivative works, so licensing choice matters.

• Open education content is more about the improvement to learning and teaching experience (the content itself is not the goal / purpose). It's important to talk about how usable the materials are for teachers and learners and others. 
• If people start experimenting with all kinds of licenses (which has started happening in the open world) Open source software lists some 60 licenses as acceptable open source licenses. All of them now have their own version of open licenses. But if you think about the cost of reading licenses - and worrying about combining materials that are published under different licenses - that is an enormous waste. So it's important to have some level of standardization. 

Does the OCW community consider the stuff they publish as "generative" or "reprsentative"? 

• Representative means others can use it as a mode, but not as raw materials
• What we seem to see is that people don't directly build on existing resources, and then share them back. 
• Is that a problem? Or just the reality of the world? 
• As an instructor - there is a big question about where do I put it back, and then also a question about the value that others derive from the small changes that I made. The time issue here is huge. 
• Even in free software, remixing is not a huge success. Most active 10% of software projects, the avg number of contributors is 1. Top 2% avg number of contributors is 2.
• We don't have to look at that as failure. In education we'll have the same. There will be thousands of 1-contributors materials, and then very few OER with thousands of contributors. 
• We have done some of that for textbooks, where we remixed parts of other peoples' materials. Main incentive was cost. In the community college system - textbooks are very expensive. 

This discussion depends a lot about the type of author we are thinking about. We seem to be focusing a lot on individual use, and considerations, but when we think about licensing recommendations we worry a lot about what "business" not "individuals" will do. The way we make decisions around the licensing is often based on this perception of something bad that business will do with our materials. When you take businesses out of the picture - authors are much more comfortable giving away more rights. It's a challenge for the community to focus on grassroots use, rather than be too concerned with business use.

If you think about the first principle of "the academy" - we build on other peoples' work, we give attribution to other peoples' work. The community is based around these standards. We should come back to these principles in OER as well - where too often we feel like we have to build everything from scratch, over and over again.