I am trying to turn some of my university lectures into proper e-leaning modules. Apart from the andragogical issues, there is licensing. I don't mind the material being used by a university as part of a legitimate education, but I don't want it commercially exploited.
The AEShareNet Free for Education licence sounded promising. But it doesn't define what "educational purposes" are. Also it seems to specifically exclude exclude open access documents: "... but not supplied to the public". None of the other licences seem relevant.
The best seems to be the Noncommercial Creative Commons licence, I was already using. CC are working on licence terms specifically for education, but haven't got them yet.
CC are working on several education related projects in their "ccLearn" project. One interesting project is Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations (ODEPO). This is attempting to build a directory of who is doing what in eLearning. There is also a "Universal Education Search" for education content.
But ccLearn have more to learn about "universal" projects. As an example one of their projects is to be released in "the Spring of 2008", but when it that? I am in the southern hemisphere, so is this my spring, or that of San Francisco, where CC is based?
First link in the post is broken
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry Tom, but doesn't the phrase "for-profit company charging thousands of dollars" fit the modern university pretty well? What's the difference, apart from a bunch of old sandstone buildings and a huge amount of government funding?
ReplyDeleteIan wrote August 28, 2008 5:08 PM :
ReplyDelete"... doesn't the phrase "for-profit company charging thousands of dollars" fit the modern university pretty well? ..."
Technically, Australian Universities are "not-for-profit" organisations. But perhaps I am just old fashioned. ;-(