Open Educational Resources at the mAlliance and OAS Seminar series

Carolina Rossini, LL.M., MBA, JDOER-Brazil

www.rea.net.br

Open Educational Resources

Concepts, Environment, Policies and Brazil

Paul Baran (1964)

GNU General Public License:The use of IPs to create freedom

Open Science

“Information is an activity; information is a life form; and information is a relation.”

John. P. Barlow

“OER are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the

public domain or have been released under an open licence that permits their free use and re-

purposing by others.”

“An open license is one that allows anyone to access, reuse, modify and share the OER. The

use of open technical standard for OER platforms and files improves access and reuse

potential of OERs which are developed and published digitally.”

The OER 4 freedoms

Reuse the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form

Revise the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself

Remix the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new

Redistribute the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

http://opencontent.org/definition/

Interoperability (legal and technical) as essential condition for new institutions

= An issue of design

the opposite of open isn’t “closed”

the opposite of open is “broken”

“OER are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the

public domain or have been released under an open licence that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.”

The OER 4 freedoms

Reuse the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form

Revise the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself

Remix the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new

Redistribute the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with othershttp://opencontent.org/definition/

• Open education policy: Governments, school

boards, colleges and universities should make

taxpayer- funded educational resources OER.

• Open content licenses: OER should be freely

shared through open licenses which facilitate use,

revision, translation, improvement and sharing.

• Collaborative production: Educators and students

can participate in creating, using, adapting and

improving OER.

Strategies for OE

“Social inclusion has today a new and important dimension: digital inclusion. Digital inclusion is an attribute

of citizenship: a new right in itself and a way to ensure basic rights to people, such as free expression and access

to culture and education. For Brazil, digital inclusion is a tool to ensure that citizens and institutions have the means

to access, use, produce and distribute information and knowledge through Information and Communication

Technologies (ICT) so that they can participate actively in Information Society, as receivers and providers of

knowledge.”

Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at UNECO OER@Paris Conference

http://a2knetwork.org/sites/default/files/IPWatchlist-2012-ENG.pdf

• The right to copy books;• Taxpayer funding;• Government providing tax • exemptions, funding and buying;• 30% out of print• Problems access due to high cost• 90% covered by state through scholarships

http://www.gpopai.usp.br/

86% of the books (sample of 1,910 books adopted by 25 different courses in more than 14 institutions) were authored by full-time, employed professors from public institutions. the total invested by universities and public financial agencies (such as the Sao Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP), through scholarships and publication grants, is R$78,410 over three years per master’s thesis per student and R$155,344 over three years per doctoral thesis per student.

By comparing these values with that invested by publishers of books derived from theses, the GPOPAI (2008) study concluded that 17.9% of the total cost of a book based on a master thesis comes from private investment, while 82.1% comes from public investment.

For doctoral theses, 9.9% is from private sources, while the remaining 90.1% comes from public investment.

Who pays? Yes – we pay twice!

The Green Paper*

There are four axes of structure to the OER context in Brazil, echoing internal structures of traditional education as well as the new opportunities afforded by the move to digital networks for dissemination and use of educational materials:

• public access to educational materials in general, as an open education strategy to include the individual, the family, the community and the whole society in the process of learning and of collaborative knowledge production;

• the economic cycle of educational materials production and its impact on the “right of citizens to learn”;

• the possible benefits OER may bring to learning strategies, the production of educational resources more sensitive to issues driven regional diversity and regional standards of quality;

• the impact of digital, online, open resources on teachers’ continuous professional development

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1549922.

Case Studies

• Analysis of more that 14 Brazilian Projects which missions are to provide (open) educational recourses.

• The analysis was done on its legal and technical interoperability, and in regard to who owns the rights over the content.

• Conclusions and recommendations were built.

http://rea.net.br/site/rea-no-brasil-e-no-mundo/rea-no-brasil/http://rea.net.br/site/rea-no-brasil-e-no-mundo/projetos-mistos/

http://www.livrorea.net.br/livro/home.html

47 questions and answershttp://rea.net.br/site/faq/

Partner with Legislators

who care about:

• efficient use of national / state money coming from taxes;

• saving students money;

• increasing access to education;

• Understand the need to innovate in educational methodology.

• Efficient use of public funds to increase student success and access to quality educational materials.

The National Plan of Education (PNE) represents the highest level of educational policy in Brazil.

Discussions to include OER in the PNE directives started in 2008.

More than 3,000 changes until now, the Plan sets guidelines, goals, and priorities to be implemented by 2020.

OER is mentioned in two guidelines (7.10 and 7.12)http://www.camara.gov.br/proposicoesWeb/fichadetramitacao?idProposicao=490116

“Há muitos anos trabalho a questão de acesso ao conhecimento e entendo a Internet como instrumento

fundamental a tal fim. Ao repensar a educação na era da sociedade do conhecimento, me deparei com o conceito de

recursos educacionais abertos e percebi como nossa legislação não trabalha esta questão. O Brasil não pode ficar

de fora deste debate, ainda mais porque nosso governo é um dos maiores financiadores de recursos educacionais,

seja por meio de compras públicas, seja por meio de salários e bolsas de estudo e pesquisa, seja por meio de

isenção de impostos em toda a cadeia produtiva de livros. Os números impressionam! Creio que todos, empresas e

pessoas, que recebem tal montanha de dinheiro vindo dos cofres públicos, têm uma obrigação para com a sociedade:

compartilhar o resultado de suas pesquisas e o desenvolvimento delas com a sociedade que o/a financiou,

permitindo o uso livre de tal recurso educacional”

Deputado Paulo Teixeira

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/OER_Policy_Registry

Conclusions

if you care about the emergence of knowledge

federation systems that allow broader access to knowledge) you may have to have some kind of intervention…and not wait for organic emergence.

Inclusion/cooperation

Wide dissemination of education contributes to more inclusive and cohesive societies,

fosters equal opportunities and innovation in line with the priorities of a renewed

social agenda focused on the knowledge society. In this sense, this study brings a series of recommendations to foster this

dialogue.

the opposite of open isn’t “closed”

the opposite of open is “broken”

“It just takes all of some of us!”

@wilbanks

Thank you!Gracias!

Obrigada!

[email protected]