Page - 3 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

1 Open and FreeAccess toEducation for All 3 education, but prior to the advent of the internet, the other forms of openness were seenasmoresignificant. Itwaswith theadvent ofopensource software that ‘open’ and ‘free’began tobe linked or used synonymously. 1.1.2 Open EducationalResources (OER) In2001,theOERmovementbeganinearnestwhenMITannounceditsOpenCourse- Wareinitiative.MIT’sgoalwastomakeall thelearningmaterialsusedbytheir1800 coursesavailablevia the internet,where theresourcescouldbeusedandrepurposed as desired by others, without charge. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who funded the MITproject, define OERs as: teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing byothers.Openeducational resources includefull courses, coursematerials,modules, text- books, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access toknowledge (Hewlett Foundation n.d.). Note that free cost is now a key component, but also central to this definition is thestresson the license thatpermits freeuseandrepurposing. Inorder tosatisfy the definition, it is not enough to simply be free as in cost, it has to be reusable also. There are other definitions of OERs available (see Creative Commons, 2013a for a comparisonof these)butevenif theydonotexplicitlymandateanopenlicense, they all emphasise the right to reusecontent. Lane (2009) notes that openness as interpreted by the OER movement centres around the freedoms offered by the associated open licenses: • freedom from paying any money to access and use the content for specified purposes, • freedom tocopy and make many more copies, • freedom to take away and reusewithout asking prior permission, • freedom to make derivative works (but not necessarily freedom to make profits from them). This listvariesfromtheoneabove,beingfocusedoncontentrather thanaccess to theeducational system.In thisconceptualisation, theOERmovementperhapsowed moretotheopensourcecommunityintermsofinfluencethanitdidopenuniversities. It grew out of the growth of the internet and digital technology in the mid-1990s, which caused many educators to examine different models of content creation and sharing. The precursor to OER was Learning Objects, which specifically borrowed fromsoftwaredevelopmentideasofobject-orientedcode,toenhancereuse.Buteven though it borrowed little from the OU model, open access to education was a key driver for the OERmovement. Forexample,aJISCreviewof thevariousOERprogrammesin theUKidentified fivemajormotivations (McGill,Falconer,Dempster,Littlejohn,&Beetham,2013):