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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.

Most of the advantages ­described support overall competence-building for life and work in modern, information-rich, internet environments.

The benefits reported include enhanced capacity for learning whereby knowledge of languages can lead to superior memory function, especially short-term “working” memory.

Another cluster concerns enhanced mental flexibility.

Enhanced problem-solving capability is also reported.

Greater understanding of how language functions and is used to achieve specific goals in life acts as the fourth cluster.

Finally the study reports on research that links knowledge of languages to a slowdown of age-related mental diminishment such as certain forms of dementia.

The cognitive neurosciences stress the need for powerful learning environments, and yet not enough of our language education is spent encouraging learners to engage in higher-order thinking about meaningful content that fires up the brain.

When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.

instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.

Apprenticeship learning models are among the most effective in attending to the full breadth of learning. Apprenticeship is concerned with more than cognition and knowledge (to know about) – it also addresses the process of becoming a carpenter, plumber, or physician.

We can’t teach kids to learn unless we are learners ourselves, and our understanding of learning has to encompass the rich, passion-based interactions that take place in these social learning spaces online.

When it was necessary for education to be performed face to face, a number of services were bundled together. When it becomes digital and online, this may no longer be the case, as we have seen in most content industries, such as music and newspapers (education has some similarities with content and also some significant differences). The first round of learning tools replicated the centralised model, but as the tools have become easier to use, and the methods for integrating them simpler, so this centralised approach seems less applicable. Clay Shirky (2008) argues that the ‘cost’ of organising people has collapsed, which makes informal groupings more likely to occur and often more successful:"By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management, these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort"Part of the function of universities is to provide this organisation, for example by grouping individuals together to form a student cohort who are interested in the same subject. But as this grouping becomes easier to do online, it becomes less of a valued function of the university - ie you don’t need to go to a university to find like minded people. Education then faces the same challenges regarding the cost of organisation that, say, the Encyclopedia Brittanica faced from wikipedia. Returning to the theme of this paper, Shirky’s argument can also be applied to technology, namely that the ‘cost’ of integrating technology has drastically reduced, meaning it is now feasible for individuals to do this, thus alleviating the need for centrally provided pre-integrated solutions. For example, we could reword the above quote to read:By making it easier for tools to (self) assemble and for applications to contribute to the environment without requiring integration, these approaches have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of any individual to create their own environmentProjects such as SocialLearn, illustrate that the conceptualisation of a learning environment goes beyond technical, or even pedagogical considerations. In a digital society it comes to represent the institutional response to changes in the nature of knowledge creation, sharing, and participation, in short to the nature of education itself. Shirky argues that ‘when we change the way we communicate, we change society’, and the new socially based technologies we have today are doing this in fundamental ways. It is only by exploring their potential that universities can remain relevant to the society they are helping to shape.