The update on the ccLearn project below is an extract from the Creative Commons December email newsletter, PDF versions of all previous newsletters are available.

Ahrash Bissel,  Executive Director, ccLearn

What does the future of education look like?

• Compelling lessons on the history of human migration available, for free, in eighty different languages.
• Free multimedia presentations on the chemistry of volcanoes enthralling children all over the United States, whether or not they are actually in school.
• Health care instructors in Africa, Europe, and elsewhere collaborating virtually to adapt medical school curricula to the specific needs of their students, improving both the quality and relevance of instruction in their own countries.

What makes these visions of the future possible? Open licensing.

We already know that Creative Commons makes it possible for people to share their works with the world under generous terms – to allow copies, translations, remixes, and other adaptations to be made and distributed freely. For authors, photographers, musicians, artists, and other creators, Creative Commons licenses have transformed the working landscape and galvanized creative communities worldwide.

But what about communities where sharing is already standard practice? What about in education, where the materials and insights produced by teachers and curriculum developers are usually intended to be adapted as needed to foster the best learning experiences possible? Here, it would seem that the rights granted by Creative Commons – rights to share, adapt, and improve educational resources – are well-matched by community practices that have existed for a long time. And indeed, this is so – most educators around the world agree that their primary intent in creating teaching and learning resources is for them to have a positive impact on student learning, and they therefore tend to share those resources freely with their colleagues. This culture of sharing that already pervades the educational domain has given rise to a movement – the open education movement – which seeks to realize a global learning commons, built on a pool of open educational resources (OER) which are available for anyone to use and adapt as they see fit.

But the stories described above do not yet happen so easily... Even if appropriate hardware and Internet access are available, we already know that just because something can be shared online does not make it legal to do so. Many people have suffered the consequences of this mismatch when they have tried to share music online, for example. In education, the challenge is to build a truly global learning commons, which requires a great degree of standardization or harmonization at the legal, technical, and social levels. In addition, there are many concerns specific to education, such as adherence to state-level standards, attention to quality-control mechanisms, and facilitation of local creation and adaptation of OER.
These varied and complex concerns are the context in which ccLearn, the education division of Creative Commons, was founded just over one year ago. ccLearn is dedicated to supporting the growth and impact of open learning and open educational resources. Our mission is to minimize barriers to the creation, sharing, and reuse of educational materials—legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

How Creative Commons are overcoming these barriers:

License Mapping Report

Legal barriers include the use of restrictive or incompatible licenses, which hinder the ability to access, modify, and share content in educational settings. We are analyzing the licensing "landscape" for open education, to be released as a report to the global open education community. The goal is to provide objective data about the extent to which license proliferation is actually a problem, and also insights into the extent to which the learning commons we are trying to build is fractured by incompatible licensing policies.

Universal Education Search

Technical barriers focus on the fact that open educational resources must be easy to find and access in order to be useful. For instance, many OER repositories were built in such a way that their content is inaccessible or difficult to use. ccLearn is benefiting from the amazing engineering work of the Creative Commons team by providing leadership on technical standards and architectures that have the potential to solve these problems. Specifically, we are helping people to understand how the semantic web, through RDFa (and ccREL) mark-up, enables the pool of OER to grow organically and to retain the site-specific properties that make them valuable and educationally relevant. This work stands in contrast to most efforts in this area, which either seek to create a global centralized repository or a semblance of one through direct integration of existing OER silos.

Because these ideas are fairly abstract, we have undertaken to build a proof-of-concept search engine, which we are calling Universal Education Search (UES). We hope this tool will help people to see the benefits of semantic mark-up and of open licensing. If all goes well, we will have a public release of a beta version of UES before the end of the year.

Open Education Community Site

Social barriers require that we recognize that OER development and access are only the first steps. Because Creative Commons licenses are fundamental infrastructural elements of most OER, ccLearn is naturally positioned to serve as a sort of "switchboard" and catalyst for the rest of the community, especially on an international scale. In that vein, we are currently building an "Open Education Community" site which will enable OER projects to share information and collaborate much more easily. In addition, the site will showcase the various tools and resources that we and others have created. Finally, the site will serve as a landing pad for people who are interested in learning more about the open education movement.

Reflecting on the past year: Though the fruits of our efforts are not yet widely visible, I am pleased to report that we have made excellent progress on many fronts. We are near completion on several projects and have laid the groundwork for significant advances in other areas. On a personal level, I have been amazed at the passion, drive, and competence of this global community, which is growing every day. We all share a vision of a future where educational opportunities are not limited by place, time, circumstances of birth, or even by technologies. Clearly, we are some distance yet from achieving this vision, but already there is good evidence that existing inequities in educational access and quality are eroding. It's definitely an exciting time.

Open Education Highlights from around the Globe
The OER movement is a global movement. Education is an issue that crosses borders and spans continents; open education—the creation and distribution of OER—empowers people in a global dialogue. The success of this international effort depends on a great deal, as many issues and barriers to open education are country- and culture-specific. However, despite contextual differences, significant progress has been made around the world. Some specific project highlights of the year:

• Europe
  • We have very strong connections in Europe, two of which are eIFL and Bloomsbury Academic. eIFL.net, Electronic Information for Libraries, is a giant component of the international effort, as it consists of a "network of 2,220 libraries in 47 transitioning and developing countries with a combined population of 800 million people." Though it is based in Europe, it is not limited to European countries. Back in May, eIFL voiced their commitment to the goal of "[creating] a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge." "Through the eIFL OA (Open Access) Program, eIFL members build capacity of the issues related to OA to enable members to benefit from the content, which is made freely available through OA, as well as ensuring that the local content produced within their countries is widely distributed."
    Bloomsbury Academic was recently featured in our interview with Frances Pinter. Launched back in September, it is the new imprint by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, publisher of the Harry Potter series, based in London. Bloomsbury Academic will publish works in the Humanities and Social Sciences exclusively under non-commercial CC licenses, some with additional permissions to use in certain commercial contexts. They chose CC licenses because "Creative Commons is the best known license for this kind of publishing. There are still some issues with it, such as defining very precisely what is 'commercial'. However, we felt that on balance it was best to go with a license that had such wide recognition. One reason for putting the whole text online free of charge is to avoid all the fuss and confusion that arises when publishers allow odd excerpts online and free downloads for limited periods etc. This may be good PR, but better to have a policy that is more focused on delivering what authors and readers want – which is to use the Web as a library. This is especially true of academic works."
• Latin America
  • Latam Commons 2008: The Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Open Education in Latin America, held Nov 19-21 in Santiago, Chile, was a great success. The event was co-hosted and excellently managed by the Non-Governmental Organization Derechos Digitales, and representatives from all over Latin America were present and actively participated in the meeting. Project Leads of Creative Commons jurisdictions first held a one-day meeting to discuss their projects, possible strategic initiatives and collaborations across the region, and shared challenges. These conversations are just the beginning of what is planned to become a regular regional gathering to leverage the expertise and resources that are distributed throughout the region. The next day was devoted to a highly interactive "unconference" on open education which brought together leading international advocates for open education with key figures in libraries and ministries of education in Chile and beyond. The goal of the meeting was to gather information regarding top concerns and key projects involved in the growth of the open education movement, to be synthesized and then leveraged for collaborative opportunities both within and beyond the region. Look for a report on this event in the coming months. Finally, Derechos Digitales orchestrated a seminar on the public domain which included cutting-edge research reports and discussions regarding the legal and practical elements of both defining and utilizing the public domain in Latin America. The philosophical and legal issues pertinent to consideration of the public domain is clearly of broad interest in the region, and we are hopeful that these ideas will continue to serve as organizing themes for ongoing conversation and action to enhance access to knowledge and improved scholarship in the future.
• New Zealand
  • New Zealand is the home of Otago Polytechnic, whose default intellectual property policy blasted them onto the OER map last year. All work created by the university and its members are automatically available to the world via CC BY, the most open license and ideally suited for educational purposes. CC BY allows you to freely distribute, derive and adapt the work as long as you credit the authors, making it easy to reuse and re-mix educational works. We hope that more institutions will follow Otago's lead and enact similar policies. Leigh Blackall, at the Education Development Center of Otago, shares our view: "I think everyone will come to see the simplicity and flexibility of CC BY, and that alone outweighs all other concerns."