Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Barriers to Adoption of Open Educational Resources




Just spent some useful time in a workshop with lots of colleagues looking at  some of the challenges around the adoption of Open Educational Practices.

Here is wee list we came up with

  1. Generally legal issues around publishing in open way are not recognised by institutions or individuals
  2. There are issues around current employment contracts - not clear to individuals or institutions around IP rights. Simple things like what happens when an academic leaves or moves to another institution.
  3. Some practice that are ok in classroom under fair dealing or other institutional licences are not ok if works are published on openly - few institutions have specific copyright checker
  4. Human factor too - institutions and individuals may not have an appetite for sharing - job fears, quality fears , and also concerns around or repurposing materials not invented in the institution.
  5. Not enough knowledge about things like Creative Commons and other licence policies
  6. Not enough information on best formats for publication of OER - things like EPub format not well understood
  7. On using other peoples OER even under creative commons concern around attribution of derivative works
  8. On specific things like images where meta data can be important you may want to share image but be concerned about licence of meta data
  9. Good practice identified in Holland and Denmark where academics are mandated to publish to Open Educational Journals.

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