The Next Steps
41 Open or closed?
Open Educational Resources (OER) and their history
Educational resources refer to any material, nowadays increasingly digital, which will play a part in education: textbooks, presentation slides, curricula and exams. They will be open when they can be freely shared with others (a more exact definition will be given in a moment).
Even if education has been open in many aspects in the past, the actual terms were better understood. The following definitions of OER and open licence were revised in connection with the recommendation on November 25, 20193:
- Open educational resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials, in any format or medium, that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that has been released under an open licence and that permit no-cost access, reuse, re-purpose, adaptation, and redistribution by others.
- An open licence is one that respects the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner and provides permissions granting the public the right to access, reuse, re-purpose, adapt, and redistribute educational materials
The terms open content and OER refer to any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms such as open source) that is licenced to grant the following rights (also known as the five Rs)1,2:
- to Retain – the right to make, possess, and control copies of the content (eg, download, reproduce, store, and manage);
- to Reuse – the right to use the content in a variety of ways (eg, in class, in a study group, on a website, in a video);
- to Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (eg, translate the content into another language);
- toRemix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (eg, to embed the content);
- to Redistribute – the right to distribute copies of the original content, revisions, or their combination to others.
These rights are not trivial. For example, the third right (to revise) is essential for teachers. It allows them to take someone’s learning material and adapt it to their own purpose, to the duration and level of their classroom and perhaps to geographic and cultural specificities.
Why AI wants open data
On the other hand, as demonstrated in different parts of this book, and also by the financial investments of the industry, education can be seen as a market. As machine learning is the principal force driving artificial intelligence, it is fair to deduce that for AI to thrive, AI for education will need data.
The difference between user data and knowledge data
There are two types of data necessary for AI education.
There is data about the users, such as asking, how do they learn? What triggers good learning? What allows them to learn better? As Daphne Koller once put it: “Let’s make education science into a data science!” This data can only be produced by the users themselves. It is therefore essential fo