Greetings Open Education Friends,
UNESCO is drafting an Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation. This
is an official UNESCO instrument that will both advise national governments
on how to support open education in their countries and report on those
efforts.
The draft Recommendation text has been prepared by a group of open
education experts from UNESCO, researchers and practitioners from all world
regions. The OER Recommendation builds on the Ljubljana OER Action Plan, a
product of the 2nd World OER Congress.
The online consultation process is now open. This is an invitation to
contribute to the draft. In addition to providing your own comments, please
share this opportunity through your networks.
The text is available in English and French:
- https://www.oercongress.org/unesco-oer-recommendation
- https://www.oercongress.org/fr/recommandation-sur-les-rel
The deadline for submission of contributions is: 1 June, 2018.
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Note: Some of us have discussed taking this opportunity to update the
UNESCO OER definition. If you agree with this recommended edit, please
include it in your comments. I have included detailed*** rationale for the
edits below.
- Existing UNESCO OER definition:
- Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching, learning and research
materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in
the public
domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost
access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited
restrictions.
- Proposed updated UNESCO OER definition:
- Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and
research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have
been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use,
adaptation and redistribution by others.
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With gratitude,
Cable
Cable Green, PhD
Director of Open Education
Creative Commons
@cgreen <http://twitter.com/cgreen>
Join: CC Open Education Platform
<https://creativecommons.org/2017/09/05/invitation-join-cc-open-education-platform/>
Join the CC Global Network. Get involved today.
<https://network.creativecommons.org/get-involved/>
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** *Details re: suggested changes to the UNESCO OER definition:
(1) Change (OERs) to (OER)
- reason: OER is both singular and plural.
(2) remove: "– digital or otherwise –"
- reason: "digital or otherwise" is redundant with “in any medium”.
"Any medium" means: text, digital or other formats.
(3) remove: "with no or limited restrictions"
- reasons:
- Because all open licenses come with some kind of restriction (e.g.,
the requirement to provide attribution); "limited restrictions" is
redundant with "open license."
- OER in the public domain has no restrictions. Because the
definition says "public domain" - it is redundant to say "no
restrictions."
- In addition to being redundant, the phrase "limited restrictions"
implies an author might add additional, custom license restrictions on
her/his OER. This is not helpful messaging when the education
community is
best served by using standard, interoperable (not custom) open licenses.
