As the term OER (Open Educational Resources) gains traction the definition of what makes an educational resource “Open” in terms of content licensing is a mixed picture.

ccLearn have released a report entitled: “What Status for Open? An Examination of the Licensing Policies of Open Educational Organizations and Projects.” that is essentially a baseline of current OER projects mapped to cc and non cc licences.

A recent HEFCE/Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme: Call for Projects with c£5m funding should generate a significant amount of UK OERs during 2009/2010 that will be mandatorily deposited into JorumOpen. Out of the 107 sites reviewed in the ccLearn report with standard licences JISC is currently listed as using CC BY-NC-ND and Jorum as using a custom licence.

Prior to the start of HEFCE/Academy/JISC projects under the call there should be a bit more clarity on the meaning of “Non Commercial” following a questionnaire conducted by Creative Commons earlier in the month. Personally I would like to see OERs collated and published under this call to become more available and open to the “commercial” sector rather than “locked” into the JorumOpen for academic users only - rather like MIT OpenCourseWare and The Open University OpenLearn LearningSpace.

A copy of the ccLearn report (as uploaded to Scribd) is provided below.

From the Executive Summary:

The World Wide Web is home to a wide array of educational resources, such as course materials, reference works, lesson plans, slide shows, instructional videos, historic photographs, scientific demonstrations, and the like. Some providers make a point of designating their resources as "open" or "free" resources, and some specifically designate these as "open educational resources" (OERs), a term adopted by UNESCO to designate resources that promote open education. Indeed a global movement has grown up around these resources as crucial components of open education.

But, what makes an educational resource "open"? Is it enough that resources are available on the World Wide Web free of charge, or does openness require something more? These questions have become more urgent as the open education movement has gained momentum and as potential users of OERs increasingly face uncertainty about whether permission is required when they translate, reuse, adapt, or simply republish the resources they find.

With the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ccLearn surveyed the copyright licensing policies of several hundred educational projects or organizations on the Internet to assess whether these legal conditions limit the usefulness of self-designated open resources from the user’s perspective.

The study reveals three principal findings:

• The copyright licenses or terms of use associated with some OERs are difficult to find or to understand;
• The majority of OER projects or organizations have adopted a standardized license created by an independent license provider, and of these, the large majority have adopted one or more of the six Creative Commons copyright licenses ("CC licenses") to define the terms of openness. But, a sizable minority of OER providers have chosen to craft their own license – often borrowing terms from one of the standardized licenses. Thus, as a group, OER providers have adopted a diverse, and often customized, set of license conditions that in some cases require significant work by users to understand;
• The usefulness of OERs as a group is limited by incompatible license conditions that functionally prohibit combination or adaptation of OERs provided by different sources.

From these findings, ccLearn derives three recommendations for the OER community:

• OER license terms should be easy to find and to understand by users and their search tools;
• OERs should be governed by standard license terms to facilitate use;
• OER licenses should be mutually compatible whenever feasible to facilitate collection, adaptation, and recombination of OERs from multiple sources.