1 Open Educational Resources Defined
Isaac Mulolani
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this chapter, the reader will be able to:
- Define open educational resources
- List the different Creative Commons licenses
- Describe the 5R framework
Open Educational Resources
In the 1980s Richard Stallman initiated the Gnu Project to write a complete operating system free from constraints on the use of its source code.[1] This led to the Free Software Definition by the Free Software Foundation in 1986:
The definition was further refined to its current modern form to include the following four freedoms (See Wikipedia):
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The key issue to note is that Freedom 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code is highly impractical. This is a key element of the open-source movement – providing source code for each project for others to be able to modify as needed. In 1989, the Gnu General Public License was published. Although there is no commonly agreed upon definition of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), various groups maintain approved lists of licenses (see Wikipedia). From the list provided on Wikipedia, there are over 50 different open source licenses currently available.
This glance at the open-source movement is deliberate because it was a pre-cursor to open educational resources. Under the open-source movement, there were people who were creating educational materials for their courses putting them under an open license (GPL) and sharing them with others in the community.
Open-source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open source software must comply with the following criteria:
The open-source software tools commonly used were TeX-based tools in the majority of the cases. TeX user groups (TUG mirrors) sprang up across the globe where people would share code snippets with one another and sometimes links to source code that was downloadable for users. The global sharing that has been occuring in the open-source community since the 1990s forked into the open educational resource movement in the 2000s.
Open Licensing
One of the key issues borrowed by the open education movement from the open-source movement is the idea of open licensing. What sets copyrighted resources apart from open resources is the license placed on open resources. These licenses allow users to remix, rework, adapt, retain redistribute copies of the resource.