Open educational resources are emerging that aim to make educational materials freely available online regardless of location or ability to pay. Major projects include MIT OpenCourseWare, which shares materials for over 700 courses, and Connexions, an online repository for educational content. Creative Commons licenses provide alternatives to traditional copyright that allow some control over reuse and commercialization of open materials. As more institutions engage with technology, tools like EduTools provide comparisons of course management software and policies to inform decisions. The growing interest in open educational resources shows potential to open the web for free sharing of knowledge and creativity.

1. IAU Sao Paulo Conference, July 25-29, 2004
12th General Conference: The Wealth of Diversity
Parallel Workshops – Session II
Open Educational Resources
Sally M. Johnstone, WCET, the cooperative for advancing the effective use of telecommunications
in higher education, www.wcet.info, U.S.A.
sjohnstone@wcet.info
There are some exciting web-based activities emerging within the higher education community in the
United States of America right now that are designed to make the Web a more useful educational
resource. To make it an educational resource that everyone can use regardless of their location or their
ability to pay tuition fees. These activities fall into three categories: open educational resources; the
keys to unlocking resources, alternatives to traditional intellectual property arrangements; and tools to
enable better use of academic web resources.
Open Educational resources
At some American colleges and universities people are thinking about distance learning in different
ways than the traditional approach of enrolling fee-paying students and supporting their learning. The
best known example of this new approach is the OpenCourseWare project at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT)(www.mit.edu)i. The faculty members at MIT think that distance learning can
also mean sharing materials freely with other faculty members within their institution or around the
world. They are doing just that. By Spring of 2004, the course materials for over 700 courses from 33
disciplines in all five of MIT’s schools. That means access to course plans, lecture notes,
demonstrations, assignments, reading lists, and sometimes even the assessments. This resource is
being widely used throughout the world. Other U.S. universities are poised to follow MIT’s lead.
Utah State University has announced their own open educational resource project focused on
Biological and Irrigation Engineering. In addition, a very similar project is developing for community
colleges. It is called SOFIA, Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets, and is scheduled to begin in 2005.
Another related project is located at Rice University in Texas. It is called Connexions. This is a Web-
based repository that can house materials for courses that are created by faculty and used by other
faculty members. The materials can be lecture notes, simulations, book chapters, or anything else that
seems of value to other professors. Right now, the free, open-licensed educational materials are
primarily in fields such as music, electrical engineering, and psychology. The materials are mostly for
college-level courses, but there is some content for younger students. It is a virtual place for
communities of authors and instructors to create, find, and share content. The Connexions site
(www.cnx.org) also includes freely available course development tools and uses Creative Commons
licenses (see below).
These projects and others are part of a growing movement entitled “Open Educational Resources.”
The title was adopted as the phrase to indicate educational materials available for no charge via the
Web by the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2002. Since we
know that the greatest costs associated with a full distance learning program involve the non-academic
support for students, faculty members at higher educational institutions not planning to mount good
distance learning support can make their materials available to others to use via the Web. Sorting out
what is worth using will be up to the user.
Intellectual property alternatives
A new approach to intellectual property protection has been developed at Stanford University’s Law
School. The project is called the Creative Commons and it is basically a Website that hosts a number
of “licenses” for the use of Web-based materialsii. The concept is to encourage the collaborative

2. authoring allowed by the Web. The licenses include options, like:
Attribution. Anyone can use the posted material but must attribute it to the original author.
No Commercial Use. The material is available for educational or personal use but if anyone wants to
create a commercial product, they must negotiate with the original author.
No Derivative Works. Anyone can use the posted material, but can not use it to create new things
based on the original.
The free-of-charge Creative Commons licenses can allow faculty members some level of control over
the materials they create that are posted to the Web. This can help make the Web a richer educational
resource for everyone. The Creative Common licenses are available at www.creativecommons.org.
EduTools
As colleges and universities become more engaged in using technology in academics, the institutions
need new tools. For example, institutions developing or licensing course management software.
EduTools is an Open Educational Resource that offers decision-makers the opportunity to compare
both commercial and open source products using a common set of features that have resulted from
independent reviews of the products. EduTools also has comparisons of institutional policies
developed around technology. These free resources are currently being used by people in over a
dozen countries and can be found at www.wcet.info/edutools.
Summary
There is growing worldwide interest in Open Educational Resources. While the original projects
began in the United States, groups of universities in other parts of the world are developing their own
projects that are being shared among others with common languages and cultures. The movement is
only a couple of years old but shows great potential to help open the Web for free movement of
knowledge and creative endeavors on which others can build. This is one set of activities enabled by
ICT that is a pure service to human culture.

3. i
ii