The OpenSpires Project

Rowan Wilson, Legal Officer

Lisa Mansell, Project Coordinator

2 March 2010

• Part of the HEA/JISC-funded Open Educational Resources Programme

• Two main objectives:– Release audio and video podcasts as OER

(open content)– Investigate and disseminate the institutional

implication of OER release

What is open content?• Content that is licensed in a way that makes it

freely available to anyone who wants to use it • Provided you are credited with the creation of

the original material, you can allow others to reuse, redistribute, and adapt/modify (e.g. translate) your content

• You can specify if you will allow commercial use and if you require adapted versions to use the same licence

Who else is doing this?• Our strand: Coventry, Exeter, Leeds Met, Leicester,

Nottingham and Staffordshire• Other strands for individual academics (8) and subject

centres (14)• Globally ~170 members of Open Courseware

Consortium (>10 courses each) including MIT, Yale, Tufts, Open, Kabul Polytechnic

• Others who are not OCW members such as Yale

The licence: • Derived from free and open source software licensing

• Founded in 2001 by Prof Lawrence Lessig at the University of Stanford

• Designed to push back against increased enclosure of ‘intellectual commons’

• Six ‘general’, regionalised licences for easy sharing of rights in content

• A suite of machine-, human- and lawyer-readable licences

What are the conditions?• Attribution

• Non-commercial

• No Derivatives

• Sharealike

More information from creativecommons.org

Our approach• Built on the success of podcasts.ox.ac.uk and

iTunesU; widespread participation providing a pool of academics to approach

• Inhabit an existing content production workflow (iTunesU) and adapted it to make OER release a low-effort option (including IPR process)

• Used ‘agents’ to communicate the value of the project around the institution

• Encouraged devolved model of content production but supported the majority of recordings from the podcasting service

A small selection …

Achievements so far…• 8 lecture series (around 65-70 hours)• 30+ sets of other resources (including seminars,

interviews, conference presentations and panel discussions).

• Over 180 media items are currently available as open content through http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/openspires.html

• Over 100 Oxford academics and visiting have signed theOpenSpires (Creative Commons) licence

• Subject areas already covered include politics, economics, environmental change, business, research ethics, medicine, physics, English, classics, art history, philosophy ....

Delivery channels

Lessons learned • Building on existing workflows means OER release is

more likely to continue even without further funding• Less resistance from academics than expected• Must have minimal impact on academics’ time• Audio is cost-effective – simple entry point• Contributors want easy, clear legal process• Our material may prove more attractive for re-use

than full course materials

and many more, see our final report in April

More information:

http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/

Please visithttp://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/openspires.html

Thank you!