Opentextbook glossary
There are three lists in this document: terms defined by Jacky Hood, terms defined by UNESCO, and terms defined by ISKME OER Glossary on Connexions
The following definitions were written by Jacky Hood April 17, 2010
book: a document of substantial length containing one or more of the following: prose, poetry, photographs, or illustrations. Typically a book has content with value lasting at least several months and often years, decades or centuries. This contrasts with newspapers and magazines with limited content durability.
electronic book or ebook: a book (see book definition) created and stored in a computer memory or electromagnetic disk or tape.
digital book: an electonic book that is represented as on/off electronic or magnetic charges (ones and zeros) rather than as a electronic or magnetic representation analogous to the book content. The latter would be an analog book and would primarily be useful for phototographs. Digital books can contain any of the items found in a book plus movies, slideshows, sound files, and more.
ibook or Internet book: a digital book available on the international digital network that may contain all the assets of a digital book plus links to other materials on the Internet.
textbook: a book that accompanies an educational course or training class. A textbook will contain lessons and possibly also examples, questions for the reader, exercises, and more.
traditional book: a book that holds a Copyright All Rights Reserved designation that allows only the copyright holders to claim authorship of the book and sell multiple copies. Purchasers of copies of the book may hold, rent, lend, or re-sell that copy only. Purchase of a copy does not give the buyer the right to copy the book or claim authorship of any of its contents. In the USA, very small portions of a copyrighted book or other work may be used by educators, reporters, critics, and satirists under the Fair Use doctrine. Authors of traditional textbooks typically receive a royalty payment for each new book sold (but not for sales of used books) while the other book creators (illustrators, editors, designers) receive payment during the creation of the book but no ongoing royalties.
open book: a book whose copyright holder has reserved only partial rights. The rights relinquished may be copying rights and possibly modification and even the right to sell created copies.
open textbook: a textbook with an open license that can be modified by the adopting instructor. Typically a digital textbook will be low in cost to students, possibly free of cost to those with computers and/or internet access.
open textbook reposository: a storage location where complete textbooks are housed. Typically, it will be possible to reach the repository on the Internet.
open textbook list: a group of textbook titles on a website with a means of transferring to the repository where the textbook is housed. Examples of lists are OCW, College Open Textbooks, and MERLOT.
Connexions: CC BY repository associated with Rice University.
Orange Grove: a repository of open educational resources created as a joint endeavor of the University Press of the Florida and the Florida Distance Learning Consortium.
Orange Grove Texts Plus: the textbook portion of Orange Grove plus links to open textbooks on other repositories.
articulation: attribute of a college course that allows credit for that course to be transferred with the student to another institution.
The following are from the UNESCO OER glossary (accessed April 17, 2010)
Attribution (BY)
Creative Commons license condition that allows others to copy, distribute, display and perform a copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give credit to the original author.
Attribution restriction
The original author(s) or producer(s) of content licensed under a Creative Commons license, as well as the author(s) or producer(s) of derived works, must be acknowledged and given credit for their contribution.
CMS
Content Management System, or Course Management System
Copyleft restriction
If a creative work carrying this restriction is altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, resulting work may only be distributed under an identical license that includes this restriction. Copyleft is a generational protection of Attribution-ShareAlike. Copyleft means that anyone who changes a work must give the changes back under the same license. It also means that the changes are made known.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets - a World Wide Web Consortium-endorsed style sheet format for HTML documents (web pages) that gives site developers and users more control over how pages are displayed. Using CSS, developers can create formatting and layout for a web site independently of its content.
DRM
Digital Rights Management
EFA
Education for All. An ambitious international movement that aims to meet the learning needs of all children, youth and adults by 2015. For more information see the UNESCO Education Sector's webpages on EFA.
FLOCUS
Free Learning and Open Contents - Universal Sharable
FLOSS
Free/Libre Open Source Software
FLOSSE
Free/Libre Open Source Software for Education
FORE
Free and Open Resources for Education
Granularity
The size of an educational resource. The more granular a resource, the smaller the chunk of information it contains. For example, a single learning object, such as a graphic used in a lecture or for class teaching is more granular than a complete course presented in a format which prevents its being broken down.
IANAL
I am not a lawyer. Discussion participants often start posts on copyright, intellectual property and licensing with this acronym.
IIEP
International Institute for Educational Planning. IIEP is a semi-autonomous institute of UNESCO, established in 1967, with a mandate to help strengthen the capacity of UNESCO's Member States to plan and manage their education systems. For more information, see the IIEP website. The Community of Interest on Open Educational Resources was created, and is supported, by IIEP.
IMS
IMS Global Learning Consortium is a global, nonprofit, member association that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning and educational technology industries through collaborative support of standards, innovation, best practice and recognition of superior learning impact.
IMS CC
The Common Cartridge harnesses a variety of IMS specifications addressing content packaging, assessment,and integration with third-party tools. These are augmented with IEEE LOM for metadata and support for SCORM 2004. With support from the user community, CMS suppliers, and the publishing industry, it defines the format for learning content for the 21st century. A widely adopted Common Cartridge will bring the following benefits to vendors and consumers in the e-Learning community:
1. Content providers (encompassing both commercial publishers and the open content community), will benefit from substantially reduced production, testing and distribution costs.
2. Education and training providers will benefit from the broader choice of content on offer and being able to mix-and-match content from different sources.
3. LMS providers will benefit from a broader complement of content for their platform and reduced production and testing costs.
IMS CP
The IMS Content Packaging Specification provides the functionality to describe and package learning materials, such as an individual course or a collection of courses, into interoperable, distributable packages. Content Packaging addresses the description, structure, and location of online learning materials and the definition of some particular content types. The Content Packaging Specification is aimed primarily at content producers, learning management system vendors, computing platform vendors, and learning service providers. Learning materials described and packaged using the IMS Content Packaging XML format should be interoperable with any tool that supports the Specification. Content creators can develop and distribute material knowing that it can be delivered on any compliant system, thereby protecting their investment in rich content development.
IPR
Intellectual Property Rights
IRC
Internet Relay Chat - a system that allows Internet users to conduct online, text-based conversations with one or more other users in real time.
K-12
Kindergarten through 12th grade in the U.S. educational system.
Libre Resource
A resource (e.g., image, video, module, course, etc.) which is available for free (as in freedom) use, modification and sharing. See Libre Knowledge.
LMS
Learning Management System
Learning Object
A digital resource that can be reused to mediate learning (David Wiley).
Localisation (l10n)
Distinguish "localisation" from translation and recontextualisation. Localisation has taken on a broader meaning in OER conversations than its common use in the software development community. For the latter it refers to automatic (programmatic) adaptations of a user interface to match the user's preferred (or system active) locale including, for example, date formats, currencies, images, colour themes, screen layout, text elements (such as titles, user prompts and other information displayed in the user's selected language), etc. In the OER community, "localisation" also includes more significant modification (by humans) of learning material to be more understandable in the context of the learners. For example, changing references to "the London bus" to more locally familiar modes of transport.
MDG
Millennium Development Goals
Moodle
An open source course management system (CMS) designed to help educators create online courses and learning communities. For more information see the project website.
No Derivative Works (ND)
Creative Commons license condition that lets others copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of a creative work, not derivative works based on it.
Noncommercial (NC)
Creative Commons license condition that allows others to copy, distribute, display and perform a creative work - and derivative works based on it - but for non-commercial purposes only.
OCW
OpenCourseWare
ODF
Open Document Format
OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
OER
Open Educational Resources
OLPC
One Laptop Per Child
OSS
Open Source Software
PLE
Personal Learning Environment
RSS
Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication is a format used to aggregate and distribute short descriptions of web content (e.g. news headlines or blog posts), together with a link to the full version of the content.
SCORM
Sharable Content Object Reference Model - a collection of specifications that enables interoperability, accessibility and reusability of web-based learning content.
Scout
A University of Michigan Internet trawler
Share Alike (SA)
Creative Commons license condition that allows others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work.
UNESCO
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. For information about the Organization, see the About UNESCO page from the UNESCO portal.
WC3
World Wide Web Consortium
Wiki
A web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum or blog, but also that allows anyone else to edit that content.
XML
Extensible Markup Language
The following are from the ISKME OER Glossary on Connexions (accessed April 17, 2010)
Bottom up: an informational classification scheme that emerges from a grassroots level. In OER, tags are a bottom up way to classify data. The opposite of top down.
Licensing: The process of choosing and assigning a license to an open educational resource by the original creator of that resource. OER creators can choose from several licenses offered by organizations such as Creative Commonswith the license typically stipulating the conditions under which that resource can be used, shared, adapted, or distributed by other users.
Localization: The process through which educational resources are adapted to meet local teaching and learning needs. Resource localization might entail, e.g., translating a lesson plan into another language, removing parts of a course module that are too complex for a given set of students.
Metadata: Basic descriptive data about an educational resource, which help users more easily find and use the resource. It is data about data, or attributes that describe the data, and includes descriptors such as title, language, author, and grade level, creation date, etc.
OER Commons: OER that can be accessed through OER Commons are created, housed, and maintained through institutions, collections, and authors that partner with OER Commons to share their data.
Open Educational Resources (OER): Teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student, or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.
Open textbook: Digitized textbooks freely available with nonrestrictive licenses.
Parent materials: Materials that belong to other people that you used in creating your own.
Parent URL: The web address where the parent materials are located.
Peer production: The process of online, collaborative content creation by peers, most often facilitated through an authoring platform or wiki. The project Free High School Science Texts, which draws on online volunteers and a collaborative authoring platform to create free-to-use textbooks for South African schools, is one example of the peer production process.
Remix: adapting the work for your own use.
Reuse: The adaptation, remixing or modification of OER for new and/or local purposes.
TagCloud: A set of tags associated with a resource or a set of resources, which are displayed in a cluster next to the resource(s). The size of the fonts that represent the tags in the cloud provides an indication of how common each tag is: Common tags that occur frequently across a set of resources are typically displayed in large, bold font, while less common tags are displayed in a smaller font.
Tags: Tags are a bottom up, user-generated classification system for educational resources, and frequently serve as an alternative or addition to a top down, expert-created classification system. Tags are words assigned to resources by the users of those resources. For example, one user of a lesson plan about the Spanish influenza of 1918 might assign a tag such as flu, while another might assign a tag such as pandemic. Once assigned by users, tags are tied to the given resource, and become a searchable way to find that resource as well as other resources that are tagged or associated with the same labels.
Top down: an informational classification scheme that is created by a site’s administrator. In OER, keywords are a top down way to classify data. The opposite of bottom up.
URL pointer: The web address where your shared materials are stored.
