During the discussion about open learning within the PBL7 group we have come across a very interesting topic. Accessibility to open learning materials suitable for open courses may be somewhat limited due to a number of reason. Also, I would dare to claim that it is very unevenly distributed between different topics (OER Commons has 250 law entries and 8888 life science entries at the time of writing this). As existence of such materials creates fertile environment for open learning, let us look into some pros and cons of openly publishing ones materials.

Some of the more general aspects of open learning materials are enumerated by University Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Based on these we can deduce:

• Increased accessibility to the materials enables rapid modification, continuous update and instant dissemination of the new course materials. This makes it possible to correct errors quickly, increase accessibility (added & translated subtitles etc.), and easily have multi-institutional cooperation on enhancing the materials.
• Potential downsides are reduced quality control and lack of incentives to enhance the materials due to lack of value since there is almost necessary loosening of copyright restrictions to make the materials openly available.

However, the negatives can be countered by the thought that taking any materials, open or licensed, and blindly mixing them into the course is not a good practice. And almost always the potential for increased collaboration outweighs the negatives.

To the above, I would also like to add another aspect that needs to be addressed when opening up course materials. Open course materials can openly include only other open course materials and cannot directly include any copyrighted or even more difficult secretive materials.

If thinking about this through the lens of copyright, we need to consider two types of materials: components of the course that are shared with the students, and materials that students use during their courses. To facilitate true open learning, all of these materials would be freely open, but that brings us back to the question of incentives for maintaining good quality materials. However, to create openly sharable courses, only the course content needs to be licensed (and made available) for reuse.

It is interesting that this model has been followed for quite a long time. At least from the early beginnings of the Internet, authors of textbooks would often freely share the slides that would follow the entire contents of their books. This creates a valid profit model where some parts of the course are open but there are still recommendations on the students to license some materials themselves. This can be constructed into a valid business model that both enables collaboration, incentives for the improvement of the materials and options for inclusion of restricted materials.