OER Related Initiatives

CETIS liaises with and maintains a watching brief on a number of global initiatives that relate to open educational resources. These include:

The Learning Registry
The Learning Registry project is an informal collaboration among several US federal agencies that share the same goal: making digital learning resources and primary source materials easier to find, access and integrate into educational environments. Key members of the collaboration are the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL) from Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (OUSD P&R) and the Office of Educational Technology at the US Department of Education. The Learning Registry prioritizes sharing and second party usage data and analytics over first party metadata. It’s an enabling infrastructure accessible by anyone, has no mandated data standards, can be replicated worldwide and is open, cloud-based, and app ready.

In addition to maintaining a watching brief on Learning Registry developments CETIS staff participate in the project's discussion groups and liaise with project staff on a regular basis. ADL's Dan Rehak has contributed a guest blog post to the CETIS Other Voices blog and Learning Registry staff and developers have travelled to the UK to participate in a number of JISC and CETIS events, most recently the OER Hack Days and Advances in Open Systems for Learning Resources at Repository Fringe 2011. In addition JISC have sponsored UK developer Pat Lockley to participate in a Learning Registry plugfest and are exploring other potential collaborations with the project.

Links

 * The Learning Registry official website
 * Learning Registry Discussion Group
 * Learning Registry Developers Discussion Group
 * Learning Registry: Social Networking for Metadata guest blog post by Dan Rehak, ADL
 * The Learning Registry Plugfest: Report and Developments guest blog post by Pat Lockley, University of Oxford

Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that increases sharing and improves collaboration. Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. Creative Commons supports a number of open educational resource initiatives and states:


 * We work with the global Open Educational Resources movement, providing the legal framework for Open Educational Resources (OER) — learning materials that are freely available to use, remix, and redistribute. With CC licenses, teachers and learners can use and remix textbooks and lesson plans, and universities can redistribute lectures. The OER movement has the potential to yield much wider access to and participation in global education, but only if a critical mass of educational institutions and communities embrace openness. Our licenses, especially our Attribution license, are free and simple ways to implement the philosophy of OER using a commonly accepted standard for “open”.

The JISC / HEA Open Educational Resources Programmes recommend that all projects use open licenses such as Creative Commons.

Links

 * creativecommons.org
 * creativecommons.org.uk
 * Creative Commons Education projects
 * Discover.Ed a search prototype developed by Creative Commons to explore metadata enhanced search for OER.