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Creative Commons is the air that the OER movement breathes.

Creative Commons could, for instance, leverage its networks to establish a global network of pro bono legal counseling services, or develop an array of draft intellectual property policies published as OER that can be reused and remixed by education institutions around the world. In this way, all projects benefit from the core expertise and tacit knowledge of our respective organisations.

In responding to these needs, the OER Foundation has launched the CollabOERate project. CollabOERate is the OER equivalent of research and development (R & D) for new “product” design in open content and open education. CollabOERate is an “OER remix” of industry’s “co-opetition” model where individual OER projects agree to collaborate on areas that allow them to “compete” better for their own sustainability and attainment of their own strategic objectives.

The uncharted territory, and arguably the biggest point of difference for OER lies in the remix.

At the OER Foundation we subscribe to free cultural works licensing.

. At the OER Foundation we believe in radical transparency and all our planning documents, projects and funding proposals are developed openly in WikiEducator, using Creative Commons licences.

WikiEducator believes learning materials should be free (read “libre”) for all students of the world.

By free digital resources, we mean educational materials which meet the requirements of the free cultural works definition that I mentioned before. That is, the freedom to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute education materials without restriction. This includes the freedom to use free software, and the freedom to earn a living. Consequently, we do not consider OER using the Non Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions to be free in all material aspects.

Sadly, in education circles the non-commercial restriction is widely used.

We believe that the restriction of commercial activity around OER is a material restriction of the freedom to earn a living, especially when the ShareAlike provision, if used in conjunction with free file formats, is sufficiently adequate to protect the future freedoms of digital materials against commercial exploitation.

Most national education systems are predominantly funded through taxpayer dollars. Why should taxpayers have to pay “twice” for education materials?

Capability and community development using WikiEducator’s Learning4Content training model.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 76% of the children of the school-going age for the last 3-years of the K-12 system will NOT have the privilege of attending school. The conventional education system that has evolved in the industrial world is unaffordable to the majority of our planet. Consider for example, that in many African countries, the cost of sending a child to secondary school is typically more than 20% of the per capita income.

“Access to learning and acquisition of knowledge should be freely available to all humanity. Any and every effort to realise this vision must be welcomed and enthusiastically supported by all.”

We can make a difference in widening access to learning. While the skeptics and educational purists may argue that such systems may not meet the “quality” requirements of teaching provision compared with traditional face-to-face provision, these approaches have got to be better than no education at all. Our industrialised nations can help if they release materials as OER.

To paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi: “We can be the change we want to see in the OER world!” This is what we are doing and I hope that your readers can help us.

Many education institutions perceive that the sharing of education materials will potentially erode their student base, or even worse, their “competitive advantage.”

Any researcher worth their salt knows that a thorough literature review of existing knowledge is the natural starting point in resolving a research question.

“to have reached the stage where we are technically able to share knowledge and enhance education right across the world is a wonderful thing.”

OER is not a binary question of whether or not it is going to happen, it’s simply a question of how long it will take to have free digital resources in support of all national curricula in the world.

We only need a small minority of contributors to achieve the goal where learning materials will be free for all students of the world.

Good teaching is good teaching, irrespective of whether we are using open or closed resources.