One of the projects I lead at Southampton is the EdSpace project which is funded by JISC under the institutional exemplars programme. We are producing an institutional share for educational resources. (See edshare.soton.ac.uk)
As we develop our educational share we are inevitably raising interesting issues about who should be able to see the information that has been shared?
The technology allows the user who deposits an item for sharing to choose whether they wish to make the shared item to be visible to:
- Only themselves
- Only people in their School
- Only people in the University of Southampton
- Anyone in the World
(There is also an option to allow a named list of users)
The first set of issues then centres around the question of which of the above options should we encourage people to choose, e.g. by setting it as the default selection. The search engines such as Google will be able to see all resources shared to the world, and we can expect a significant increase in the number of people who download and view such resources.
The emerging political correctness of “Open Content” suggests that generally educators should wish to make their content (designed for students in a privileged UK University) available to all, especially the less privileged. Also there are possible knock on effects in terms of the publicity and esteem that we might gain from being seen to have a wealth of high quality teaching resources. And if a culture of open sharing were to emerge we might hope for a reduction in the workload in preparing some courses and a corresponding increase in the quality of materials we exposed to our students.
On the other hand the university management is worried about copyright and IPR. Will we get into a lot of trouble if our resources are seen to include significant amount of material that is lifted from elsewhere? They want EdShare users to jump through the hoops before they are allowed to deposit an item. The EdShare team is trying to resist this sort of regulation, as it will kill enthusiasm to use the system; we would rather ask users to apply a reasonable risk analysis (Where did you copy this material from? Was it Disney, in which case expect to be aggressively sued, or was it from another academic’s openly available website, which you have cited?). We believe that such a sensible approach, coupled with a clearly articulated “take-down” policy, for the case where any outsider complains of copyright or IPR infringement, should keep us out of any serious trouble.
But perhaps surprisingly, it is the academics themselves who are often the most reluctant to share openly. While they are happy that other people share with them, when it comes to sharing their own materials we see all sorts of excuses:
- “It isn’t finished yet”. Well how come they have been using it with their class for the last three years? If it’s good enough for them why would it not be good enough for me?
- “Its my IPR”. Yes – that’s fine – they can use creative commons – and they can still publish it in a book if they want.
- If someone re-used my material in an inappropriate way it would make me look foolish”. Yes. So what? Never publish anything?
Actually I think a lot of these excuses are a cover for insecurity about the content. Is the material original or derivative? Does it contain diagrams scanned from a text book? Will my peers in other universities sneer at my offerings?
Developing a culture of sharing of educational resources is going to be hard. There are two things I want from Santa this Christmas.
- A clear and simple policy on the legitimate re-use of teaching materials in not-for-profit on-line learning materials, which would be the equivalent of the Copyright Licensing Agency Higher Education licence.
- I want some reward to give to staff who do share. I’m not quite sure what form this reward should take? Direct financial reward is of course always welcome, but often academic motivation comes from other drivers such as increased esteem. Perhaps we should consider the teaching equivalent of research metrics, where a lecturer might point at the external downloads and comments on their teaching resources as one measure of the quality of their teaching.
