The second topic in ONL was dedicated to openness in ones courses and materials. Inthis post, I will focus on openness on sharing educational materials, and not on being open (approachable) as on a personal level.
Many people are generally open in sharing material, but many of the materials do not have a clear source and they are most likely gathered from different people that used the content before, and improved and adjusted to ones needs for a specific class. The question is how to share material that you have made by using material that others have made. The best would be to ask for approval to open those materials. Even though it sounds easy in theory, it can have many implications and it can take a long time to get such approval, and sharing material becomes a difficult (if not impossible) task.
In general, institutions partially encourage openness in sharing course materials, as long as the quality is good, and the materials are not enough to get the same level of achievement as students that study in that institution and usually pay a fee. Nowadays, the institutions tend to have contracts with different providers of online education (sch as Corsera, Edx, etc) to provide their courses for a fee. This contradicts with the idea of openness, as long the same materials can be monetized.
An interesting idea that might have a chance of solving some of the issues that we might (legally) have when opening our materials is use Creative Commons type of licenses. Basically, all materials that we use for to be used according to the terms of the license and all the people that contributed to the materials in any way have to agree on the terms. For example, people creating something together should all agree on the license. If you just want to license certain texts, images, movies or other special content on, for example, your blog or website, you should clearly state it in connection with the license. If you have interviewed or photographed other people, they must give their consent for such materials to be used under a license.
In conclusion, being open about ones work sounds amazing in theory, but might be a pain to implement in practice.
- https://creativecommons.org/
- Bates, T. Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning. (2nd edition) Chapter 11, Trends in open education (2019) .
- https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614057/china-squirrel-has-started-a-grand-experiment-in-ai-education-it-could-reshape-how-the/
