CCCOER/Open Licensing

CCCOER on OERs
At the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER), we consider any open-licensed materials to be OER. This includes public domain, Creative Commons, various open software licenses (e.g., Gnu), and custom licenses.

Open licensing is based on copyrights; it is not anti-copyright.

Open materials are not necessarily modifiable. Many are licensed as ND = No Derivatives.

Open materials are not necessarily crowd-sourced. The highest quality individual materials (single photograph, lesson, assessment, video) are typically created by a single individual or a small group. CCCOER honors creators.

The most substantial OER (e.g., textbooks, courses) are the work of a large team of authors, editors, photographers, illustrators, designers, technologists, indexers, etc. A textbook can cost between U.S. $500,000 and US $2M to produce. A course is even more expensive.

There is no particular reason to focus on 'educational' materials. An online art gallery can be one person's education, another's entertainment, and a third person's career.

Regards, Jacky Hood Director, CCCOER http://www.oerconsortium.org

Retrieved September 13, 20101 from WikiEducator Teacher Collaboration Forum - Taking OER beyond the OER community -- Online discussion forums hosted by UNESCO/COL.

1. From the DOE's Notice of Proposed Priorities (also used in a recent Creative Commons blog post):

Open educational resources (OER) means 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 or repurposing by others.

2. From the original, 2002 UNESCO definition:

The open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes.