In reviewing the materials for session 1 of the Open Content Licensing for Educators (OCL4ED) mOOC (micro Open Online Course) I was immediately taken back to a brief exercise I put together for another MOOC, the Open Course in Technology Enhanced Learning (ocTEL) hosted by ALT. I use two blog posts to demonstrate open and proprietary, or closed, resources.
See http://online-learning-online.blogspot.com/2013/05/open.html and http://online-learning-online.blogspot.com/2013/05/closed.html
I thought, at the time, it was a simple way to show some fundamental differences between OER and proprietary systems.
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The commitment to using OER requires checking and verification. The commitment to creating OER is even greater, checking and verifying against known copyrighted works, and then re-creating or rewriting as necessary. Consider the following from (Brown, Holding, Howell, Rodway-Dyer, 2010):
Creating OER is a massive commitment with (currently) little recognition. It is a labor of love, of belief in humanity, and in belief that a free and open body of knowledge can exist in our consumer society.
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Reference
Browne, T., Holding, R., Howell, A., & Rodway-Dyer, S. (2010). The challenges of OER to Academic Practice. Journal Of Interactive Media In Education, 1-15.
