https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/34852
Cable
-----
MOOCs — or *M*assive *O*pen *O*nline
*C*ourses<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course> —
have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so,
there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online
learning, with significant investments being made in companies
(Coursera<http://www.coursera.org/>
, Udacity <http://www.udacity.com/>, Udemy <http://www.udemy.com/>),
similar non-profit initiatives (edX <https://www.edx.org/>) and learning
management systems (Canvas
<https://www.canvas.net/>,Blackboard<https://www.coursesites.com/>).
The renewed interest in MOOCs was ignited after last year’s Introduction to
Artificial Intelligence <https://www.ai-class.com/> course offered via
Stanford University, when over 160,000 people signed up to take the free
online course. The idea of large-scale, free online education has been
around for quite some time. Some examples include David Wiley’s
2007Introduction
to Open Education<http://www.opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus>
; Connectivism and Connective
Knowledge<http://connect.downes.ca/archive/08/09_15_thedaily.htm>,
led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2008; Open Content Licensing
for Educators<http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators/Home>;
and many others.
A central component to these earlier iterations of the MOOC was the dual
meaning of “open.” Justin Reich writes in
EdWeek<http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2012/05/all_moocs_explained_market_open_and_dewey.html>
,
The original MOOCs…were “open” in two respects. First, they were open
enrollment to students outside the hosting university. That is open as in
“open registration.” Second, the materials of the course were licensed
using Creative Commons licenses so their materials could be remixed and
reused by others. That is open as in “open license.”
These dual characteristics of “open” are also core to Open Educational
Resources (OER). Hewlett’s updated OER
definition<http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education-program/open-educational-resources>
begins: *“OER are 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 by others.”* That is,
for an educational resource to be “open” it must be both gratis (available
at no-cost) and libre (everyone has the legal rights to repurpose the
resource) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre>. An OER cannot
be freely available *or* openly licensed – it must be both freely available
*and*openly licensed (or in the public domain) to be an OER.
The new cohort of MOOCs are distinct from the original MOOCs in that they
are “open,” thus far, in only one respect: they are open enrollment. The
new MOOCs have not yet openly licensed their courses. As MOOCs continue to
develop course content and experiment with various business models, we
think it’s crucial that they consider adopting open licenses as a default
on their digital education offerings. In general, the value proposition can
be enhanced for the new MOOCs and their users if the MOOCs openly license
their courses. A few ideas about why this is important:
- One goal of MOOCs is to serve tens / hundreds of thousands more people
with high-quality educational content. By adopting Creative Commons (CC)
licenses, MOOCs:
- can increase the reach of their materials by making the rights to use
and adapt them crystal clear from the start;
- will be able to serve even more learners because they’ll be
granting legal permissions to use their course content in other
educational
settings; and
- do not have to respond to individual permissions requests from
users and can instead focus on delivering quality educational content to
the largest number of students.
- Commercially-focused MOOCs can adopt CC licenses to make their MOOCs
truly “open” (free of cost *and* free of most copyright restrictions)
and still leverage the scale of these courses (with potentially tens of
thousands of students) and the MOOC platform to charge for value-added
services, such as the coordination of study groups, course certification,
secure assessments, employee recruiting, and print-on-demand textbooks.
[image: MOOC] <http://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/7549370822/>
#jiscwebinar What Is A
MOOC?<http://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/7549370822/>
/ Giulia Forsythe / CC
BY-NC-SA<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/>
- MOOCs can provide features their users want by incorporating open
licensing options. Recently, the education technology company Blackboard
has permittedusers to upload educational content under the Creative
Commons Attribution license<https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/29633>.
Since many MOOCs want to support individuals who want to share their
creations as well as open collaboration between course participants, it may
be worthwhile for the MOOCs to support users with this easy-to-implement
feature.
- By supporting open licensing, MOOCs will be positively contributing to
the Open Educational Resources movement, reaffirmed in the 2012 Paris
OER Declaration <https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33089>. MOOCs
can be leaders and innovators for OER, increase their enrollment numbers,
and receive the goodwill that comes along with being an active participant
in this global open education movement.
- Online education knows no language barriers, and a large percentage of
MOOC participants are logging on from outside of North America (where most
of the new initiatives are based). For example, in a recent MIT MOOC course
with 155,000 registrations, students came from 160
countries<http://sirjohn.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/120925MOOCspaper2.pdf>
(PDF).
If MOOCs want to continue to attract and serve an international audience,
they might focus on multilingual course delivery. It should be noted that
MOOCs that release course content under Creative Commons licenses (at least
the licenses that do not contain the “NoDerivatives” condition)
automatically grant permission for users to make translations of the
materials. MIT Open CourseWare courses have been translated into at
least 10 languages<http://www.core.org.cn/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/Translations.htm>,
including Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Thai, French, German, Vietnamese,
and Ukrainian. Coursera and Udacity have already partnered
with<http://gigaom.com/video/udacity-amara-partnership/> the
crowdsourced captioning service Amara.
- Openly licensed MOOC resources can give rise to interesting new
courses and educational products and services. For instance, materials
released under a license like CC
BY<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/> can
be repurposed and reused on sites like Wikipedia and hundreds of Open
CourseWare projects. Adopting CC licensing can support the conditions
necessary for innovation that is difficult to predict (or plan for). In the
long run, supporting the open ecosystem is beneficial both for commercial
and non-profit MOOC initiatives. In addition, many educators and learners
want to be able to use the resources outside of the MOOC environment, and
open licensing grants this permission in advance. CC licensing opens up a
much broader range of pedagogical approaches that enable all MOOC
participants, instructors and students alike the ability to generate, use,
and share content with each other.
- Many MOOCs are concerned that their content will be “stolen” by
competitors. However, this fear is speculative. There are features of the
CC licenses that can help assuage the fears of MOOCs. For example, all the
CC licenses provide for attribution to the original author, preservation of
any copyright notice, and the URL to the original work. When MOOC material
are licensed under a CC license permitting the creation of adaptations, the
adapted resources must be clearly marked to indicate that changes have been
made, and a credit — reasonable to the means and medium being used — that
the MOOC material has been used in the adaptation. Also, CC licenses do not
grant permission to use anyone’s trademarks or official insignia, nor do
the licenses affect other laws that may be used to protect one’s reputation
or other rights — those rights are all reserved and may be enforced
separately by the MOOC. Finally, it should be noted that the original
educational materials remain intact and preserved, exactly as released
(most typically) on the MOOC website. So, there will be a record of the
original publishing of the content. But beyond these features of the CC
license, community and business norms make it very unlikely that competitor
MOOCs will “swoop in” and republish full courses simply because the open
license technically makes this a possibility. Norms of academic practice
typically carry more weight than any legal restriction made possible
through use of an open license.
MOOCs should address copyright and licensing early on so they are clear to
users how they can utilize and reuse educational materials offered on the
site. MOOCs should choose to adopt an open license that meets their goals,
but at minimum it is recommended that they choose a public, standardized
license that grants to its users the “4Rs” of open
content<http://opencontent.org/definition/>:
the ability to Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute the resources. The
more permissions MOOCs can offer on their content, the better. Online peer
learning community P2PU has provided some useful documentation about how to
choose a license<http://info.p2pu.org/2010/05/25/how-to-choose-the-right-licence/>.
And CC maintains easy-to-understand information about how to properly
implement the CC license <http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking> on
websites and platforms. Of course, it is important for MOOCs and users of
MOOCs to understand some of the copyright and intellectual property
considerations that they should know
about<http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Before_Licensing> before
they adopt an open license for educational content.
MOOCs have captured the public mindshare as an interesting way to deliver
high quality education to huge numbers of online learners. In order to
maximize the educational benefits that MOOCs promise to provide, they must
be “open” in both enrollment *and* licensing. MOOCs should seriously
consider applying CC licenses to content they build, asking contributing
Universities to openly licnese their courses, and making CC licensing part
of their MOOC platforms. By doing so, they’ll be best positioned to serve a
diverse set of users and support the flourishing open education movement.
--
Cable Green, PhD
Director of Global Learning
Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/education
http://twitter.com/cgreen
