Creative Commons affiliate team at Notre Dame University—Louaize (NDU) in Lebanon held a two-day symposium on “Open Educational Resources (OER): Trends and Prospects” from September 15-16, 2016 as a part of their 2017 roadmap to create awareness and cultivate openness culture within the university . The symposium highlighted the University’s strategic commitment to the integration of openly-licensed educational resources in the teaching and learning process. The occasion also marked the one-year signing of the Affiliate Agreement between Creative Commons and NDU.

To commemorate the event, NDU hosted Naeema Zarif, Creative Commons Regional Coordinator for the Arab World. Ms. Zarif met NDU President Fr. Walid Moussa, who expressed the importance of capitalizing on recent trends in open education to broaden access, foster innovation, and alleviate student textbook costs.

During the symposium, Dr. Fawzi Baroud, Assistant Vice President for Information Technology, described the history of  NDU’s involvement with open education beginning with his own participation in the U.S. State Department sponsored Open Book Project in 2014 and the continued collaboration with Creative Commons to create awareness and devise capacity building projects for an optimal OER culture within the university. He also traced the University’s future trajectory with regard to OER and the role it will play in advancing OER in Lebanon and the region. Ms. Zarif went on to speak about CC licenses in a panel titled “Creative Commons Licenses and the Future of Open Education in the Arab World.”

The symposium’s second day (titled “NDU Student Attitudes toward the Use of OER”) focused on the piloting of OER in a university-wide English course targeting close to 600 students in more than twenty sections across three campuses. Dr. Kamal Abouchedid, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, highlighted the integration of OER as a strategic initiative at NDU and as a means of fostering open education.

The design of the course was described by Dr. Sandra Doueiher, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of English. Joining the discussion from Denmark via Skype, Dr. Ena Hodzik spoke about the scholarship of OER, specifically about the issue of quality and utility in the integration of OER. Dr. Hodzik went on to explain that the student survey administered by NDU closely aligned with the major themes in the literature of OER.

Survey results were presented by Dr. George Abdelnour, Chair of the Department of English and Translation. The extensive survey sought student feedback on the use of OER based on general attitudes, effectiveness, quality, and learning outcomes of the resources used. By a 2 to 1 margin, he explained, students showed high levels of satisfaction and engagement with OER. The findings also showed a favorable inclination toward enrolling in courses using OER in the future.

The post OER Symposium held by affiliate team at NDU in Lebanon appeared first on Creative Commons.

In March we hosted the second Institute for Open Leadership. In our summary of the event we mentioned that the Institute fellows would be taking turns to write about their open policy projects. This week’s post is from Dr. Jane-Frances Agbu from the National Open University of Nigeria. We also interviewed Dr. Agbu about her work in September.

---

My name is Dr. Jane-Frances Obiageli Agbu. I am from Onitsha, a small but vibrant town in the Eastern part of Nigeria in West Africa. I work with the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). I was the Head of NOUN-OER unit from 2014 till July 2016. Currently, I am the Dean of Faculty of Health Sciences of NOUN, which gives me the opportunity to focus on OER-Health. I am also an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology.

Photo by Jane-Frances Agbu, CC BY.

It is natural to view anything that is ‘open’ and ‘freely available’ with a sort of hesitation or anxiety. It is also natural to presume these types of resources to be of less quality because of our contemporary instinct that almost everything should be paid for, and that the more these materials are hoarded, the pricier they will be. The open movement, with its initiatives around ‘Open Education’, ‘Open Access’, and ‘Open Educational Resources’, can make many people very uncomfortable.

I embraced the concept and practices of Open Education in 2006 when I joined the National Open University of Nigeria. Back then, I was a mother of three very young, and I needed to work close to home. NOUN was just five minutes away from my home. It was a perfect situation, and with very minimal knowledge about open education, I applied and got a job there. At the time, NOUN then was just three years old. However, they offered robust training for new entrants in the open education space, since the concept and practice was relatively new in Nigeria.

My friends and colleagues, who were so used to the conventional face-to-face mode of education, were disappointed with me. They asked me, ‘What is “open” about the open university?’ and said, “You should seek appointment in a ‘normal’ university in order to be respected and advance your career”. these comments were both troublesome and motivating. I wondered whether I made a mistake joining NOUN, but a chance encounter in an elevator with one of our students got me thinking. He simply asked, ‘Do you work here?’, and when I nodded my head, he said ‘thank you for giving me the opportunity to work and learn’. It was heartwarming, and 10 years later I am happily still an advocate of open education.

I became more involved in the Open Educational Resources movement in 2013. It was another chance encounter because the invitation to the workshop that introduced me to OER was initially meant for a senior Professor at my University, but he was busy and I was asked to attend. The workshop took place in Abuja, Nigeria and was organized by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in collaboration with UNESCO and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). There, I met Abel Caine of UNESCO and Alex Gakuru of Creative Commons. Alex said something that really stuck with me: “We are Africans, we live communal lives, we cook together, we work together. It is in us to share, so why are we not sharing knowledge?” I was incredibly captivated with this statement, and I wrote a long proposal to my institution on the need to embrace OER. A year and half later, I was asked to champion OER within NOUN. With support from UNESCO, we were able to organize an OER workshop to educate policy makers, university faculty, and course content developers. In December 2015 we shared our experiences with the Federal government of Nigeria.

You’ll see that my journey toward embracing open education and Open Educational Resources has not been a straightforward one, but it is a life that leaves me with smiles and appreciation. Mysteriously, it appears that some angels have crossed my path in this journey and further helped me to understand the beauty of opening up knowledge for common good.

While pondering on the palpable anxiety for the ‘open’ movement, let me share with you a bit more of my thinking:

• Naturally, with whatever knowledge we have, we want to be the “sage on the stage rather than a guide on the side”. This famous statement from Allison King brings back floods of memories for me. I can still visualize my former professors speaking eloquently in class, filling students with respect and awe. I felt anxious and wondered if I could ever get to be as knowledgeable as my professors. They were knowledge personified. But for me, open education has demystified this sort of reverence toward dissemination of knowledge. Open Educational Resources—with its five Rs (reuse, remix, repurpose, revise, retain) and the flexible license options of Creative Commons—has humanized and democratized teaching and learning. Surely there are some that still believe in sole ownership of knowledge. Those people will continue to feel threatened by the ‘open movement’, but we’ve seen the incredible opportunities of open education, and we’ll continue on our path.
• Some are also hesitant to share knowledge because of fear of scrutiny. This of course is a natural instinct (no one likes to be criticised), but overcoming this shows that you view criticism as an avenue of learning and improvement. I think we will come to see that the costs of being ‘closed’ are much greater than the costs of being ‘open’, and that in the long run ‘open’ will be more personally gratifying, and help the most people.
• Also, is it possible that this initial anxiety toward being more open is triggered by the desire for conformity? It is a lot easier to move with the popular opinion, while advocates of OER and other open initiatives are still in the minority. But we must realize that it takes courage to walk with the less-traveled crowd. And we will realize that we are not alone, and that there is an increasing support network of educators, students, and advocates to rely on and collaborate with.

Photo by Jane-Frances Agbu, CC BY.

In March 2016, I was selected as one of the participants for Institute of Open Leadership (IOL2). I met other beautiful individuals that share a similar vision for ‘open’. In a lush garden up high in mountains of Cape Town, we shared our experiences, our projects, and open policy plans. The beauty remains with me as we continue to receive guidance from our mentors and share information amongst the IOL2 fellows.

IOL2 Fellows + Mentors, by Cable Green , CC BY 2.0

Here are some useful links related to my work:

• The Best of Two Open Worlds at the National Open University of Nigeria
• Embracing the Philosophy of Open Educational Resources
• “It upholds the dignity of mankind”: The power of OER in West Africa
• OER for Teachers video

The post Pondering the Future of Open Education in Nigeria appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’ve submitted a proposal to get the Creative Commons logo, license, and public domain icons into Unicode (more specifically, the Universal Coded Character Set or UCS). Unicode is the industry standard for encoding characters into text, which means that virtually all text-based editors, or tools with text-based editors, enable those characters and symbols that have been encoded into the standard. Examples of encoded characters range from ancient Greek letters to the current day ©, @, and universal ♲ symbols.

We’re excited about our proposal for several reasons: if encoded, creators will easily be able to mark their CC-licensed works with icons in text; users will be able to provide attribution for CC-licensed works they use with icons; and, if nothing else, in developing the proposal we became better aware of the ubiquitous use of our icons across a diversity of media, contexts, and domains. (Thanks for your contributions of CC-marked physical media on Twitter!)

We wanted to share the proposal (pdf) to get your thoughts as our community, especially if we missed any examples of use you think we should have included for future iterations. We are still planning on submitting a separate proposal for Creative Commons Emoji – adding CC icons to Emoji would put icon attribution in the hands of everyone with mobile devices – so your feedback is valuable. More importantly, we would still like to know: how do you currently indicate the CC license on a work without Unicode? How would you like to be able to indicate the license on a work? See the form below to submit a quick response to these questions.

Lastly, you’ll note in the proposal that the CC logo and icons are governed by a trademark policy, while most unicode characters are not. We address this point directly (we don’t think encoding CC icons in Unicode would jeopardize our trademarks or that having a trademark policy clarifying their usage undercuts the purpose of having the icons encoded), but we also welcome your questions and thoughts.

---

<script type='text/javascript'> jQuery(document).bind('gform_post_render', function(event, formId, currentPage){if(formId == 11) {} } );jQuery(document).bind('gform_post_conditional_logic', function(event, formId, fields, isInit){} );<script type='text/javascript'> jQuery(document).ready(function(){jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [11, 1]) } );

 

The post Our proposal to get the CC logo and icons into Unicode appeared first on Creative Commons.

It’s Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. The goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

---

Today marks the conclusion of another productive, informative Open Access Week. There were dozens of in-person workshops, online webinars, blog posts, and other actions from institutions and individuals all over the world aiming to educate and advocate for a more open system of producing and sharing research.

On Monday we took a look at the increasing drumbeat around improving access to publicly funded research. On Tuesday we published an interview with Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust, exploring the perspective of philanthropy in supporting open access publishing. Wednesday we launched a beta version of our Termination of Transfer Tool, a project that empowers authors to learn about whether and when they can regain rights from publishers in order to share their works on an open access basis. We also published an interview with scientist and advocate Erin McKiernan about her work for open science. On Thursday we hosted a Twitter chat with members of the library and scientific community to talk about some of the problems with the current scholarly publishing system, and what we can do about it.

It’s clear that our work and advocacy in open access can’t end today if we expect positive change in support of improved access to scientific and scholarly research.

As Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley wrote in WIRED:

If it wasn’t so well-established, the traditional model of academic publishing would be considered scandalous. Every year, hundreds of billions in research and data are funded, in whole or in part, with public dollars. We do this because we believe that knowledge is for the public good, but the public gets very little access to the fruits of its investment.

It’s a shame that our movement needs to argue with policymakers that the public should get access to research that it pays for. It’s a shame that instead of experimenting with an “open by default” approach to sharing scientific information, in much of policy and practice the status quo remains closed.

The work of open access needs to keep in clear view the ultimate goals of science and scholarship—a fundamental search for knowledge—that is now supercharged for sharing and collaboration to solve the world’s toughest scientific and social problems.

But open access is not just about working to flip the default from closed to open.

There are increasing threats to access to information, education, and freedom of expression. Just last week in Uruguay, 14 people were convicted and sentenced to prison for the crime of making copies of educational resources for noncommercial use. In Colombia, student Diego Gomez is being prosecuted for the crime of sharing a research paper online. A copyright “reform” proposal has been introduced by the European Commission, but many of its provisions do little to improve the rights of users and the public. Instead, much of the proposal reinforces protectionist measures for incumbent rights holders, while providing only limited benefits for researchers, teachers, internet users, and consumers.

The open access movement should cooperate and collaborate with related communities of action, including the important work to rebalance the underlying systems of copyright to benefit creativity, innovation, and access to knowledge.

We’d like to thank SPARC for leading this week’s activities, Authors Alliance for their partnership on the Termination of Transfer tool, and the countless libraries, universities, advocacy organizations, and individuals who participated in Open Access Week.

The post ‘Open In Action’ Requires Continuity and Solidarity with Fundamental Copyright Reform appeared first on Creative Commons.

Last week, 14 people were convicted by an Uruguayan judge for the crime of making copies of educational resources. The defendants, owners of copy shops located near the University of the Republic (Universidad de la República) in Montevideo, have been sentenced to seven months in prison, although the judge has conditionally suspended the imprisonment. The case began in 2013, when a major police operation shuttered copy shops in the area surrounding the University, confiscated photocopy machines, and detained 32 people.

According to Uruguayan copyright law 9.739, all copying of works under copyright—even if there is no profit-seeking motive—are criminal offenses. Therefore, anyone who makes copies for study or to access culture can be indicted with a single complaint.

Following the copy shop raid in 2013, the Uruguayan Student Federation presented a draft bill on educational and library exceptions to copyright. The proposed text would remove the criminal penalties for infringements that are not commercial in nature. The bill has been preliminary approved by the Parliament, but still needs to be finalized. As expected, collecting societies and the Uruguay Publishers Association oppose the bill, arguing that copyright exceptions will destroy creators.

Creative Commons Uruguay, along with a large group of social organizations, are urging legislators to give early approval to the copyright reform bill, before more people like students, librarians, and internet users are convicted of making non-commercial copies of educational resources.

Jorge Gemetto is co-director of Ártica and team member of Creative Commons Uruguay. 

The post In Uruguay, 14 people convicted for making copies of educational resources appeared first on Creative Commons.