OER Case Studies
This is a list of the most compelling OER projects and implementations of CC in educational policies around the world. For a more comprehensive listing of all case studies about OER, see the Case Studies project.
Contents
Argentina
Gleducar
Started in 2002, Gleducar is a community of educators, students, and activists that self-organize around several educational issues and projects. It was declared of National Interest by the Senate of Argentina three years later and is considered one of the most important open educational projects in Argentina. The community is supported by Gleducar's nonprofit/NGO status. [1] Community initiatives revolve around building a repository of open educational resources (OER), promoting more open intellectual property and educational policies, encouraging the use of free technologies and distributed networks, open access, and educational innovation in general. All content on Gleducar is licensed under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Australia
University of Southern Queensland OpenCourseWare
The University of Southern Queensland’s OpenCourseWare (USQ OCW) provides access to free and open educational resources (OER) for students, academics, and interested readers worldwide. USQ OCW contains sample courses from each of the University’s five faculties, together with courses from its Tertiary Preparation Program. USQ is the only Australian member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, an international collaboration of more than 230 higher education institutions and associated organisations ‘creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.’ All USQ OCW is available under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike.
Canada
Athabasca University
Athabasca University is Canada's open university that is aiming to replace as many of their course materials with open educational resources (OER) and is home to the worlds first University Press dedicated to open access publishing, where authors choose whether to release their work under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives license. Athabasca University is also the base for the UNESCO OER Community that was first launched in 2005. Athabasca University OER is available under various CC licenses and the UNESCO OER Community publishes all content under CC Attribution-ShareAlike.
BCcampus
The BCcampus initiative is a collaboration of 25 post-secondary institutions contributing and sharing open educational resources under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license or a BCcampus license for use within the system. It is an "online learning and educational technology service agency established and funded entirely by the Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development."
Chile
Cybertesis at the Universidad de Chile
Cybertesis is a joint publishing program for academic theses online, and is an initiative of the Université de Montreal, the Université Lyon2 and the Universidad de Chile, among other 50 institutions in Europe, Africa and America. It is financially supported by Fonds Francophone des Inforoutes and UNESCO. The objective of Cybertesis is to promote the publication and diffusion of university theses online, implementing international standards for digital publishing, and technology that facilitate the access and interchange of information, based on interoperable and open source tools. Cybertesis supports the copyrights of its authors, by explaining the law and asking the authors for authorization to include their works in the system. Cybertesis offers several options, such as “not authorizing”, “embargo” (which allows postponing the release of the works temporally), and licensing with Creative Commons. The Creative Commons licensing system has become the standard adopted by Cybertesis to manage the rights of authors.
Colombia
Eduteka
Eduteka is a primary and secondary educational portal for Spanish language open educational resources (OER) offered under a default of CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike. It is supported and run by the Gabriel Piedrahita Uribe Foundation in Colombia and has been awarded the National Prize for Technology in Education twice by the Iberoamerican Network for Technology in Education. Eduteka has also run pilot programs, incorporating OER into schools in order to "[increase] the competency of students and teachers in ICTs" and "[improve] the integration of these technologies into the regular curriculum."
Escuela Virtual del Deporte
The Escuela Virtual del Deporte, or the Virtual School of Sports, leverages CC licensing and tools offered by ICT (Information Technology and Communication) to make available open educational resources (OER) in sports education. It is a collaboration between the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional, the United Nations Program for Development, and Colombia Aprende, and was created within the framework of government policies aimed at overcoming the digital divide. All content is available under CC Attribution-ShareAlike.
Virtual School for Latin America and the Caribbean
The Virtual School for Latin America and the Caribbean is an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme Regional Bureau and provides training in the applied sciences for social transformation in three academic areas: Human Development (HD), Democratic Governance (DG) and Crisis Prevention and Recovery (CPR). Its mission is "to strengthen democratic governance and contribute to human development in Latin America and the Caribbean." School resources are licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike or CC Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives.
Czech Republic
RVP Metodicky Portal
The RVP Metodicky Portal is an educational portal to Czech open educational resources (OER) licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike and CC Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives. It is a government-funded initiative by the Czech Republic and the European Social Fund, and is run as part of a research project by the Institute of Education in Prague and the National Institute of Vocational Education. The project aims to provide "systematic support for teachers in teaching methodology and didactics, development of learning communities," and more "effective ways of learning."
Finland
Le Mill
Le Mill is an online community for "finding, authoring and sharing" open educational resources (OER). Le Mill was developed by the LeMill team led by the Learning Environments Research Group of Media Lab at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland. As of November 2010, Le Mill has nearly ~15,000 teachers contributing from 63 countries and almost 24,000 learning resources in 83 languages. Le Mill resources are licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike.
India
Pratham Books
Pratham Books is a non-profit children's book publishing house in India that uses CC licenses, specifically CC Attribution and CC Attribution-ShareAlike, to further distribution, translation and reuse of its works. The books are available for purchase at low cost or for free online at their Scribd channel. Pratham Books also has a Flickr account where they publish pictures of their community under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike.
Computer Masti
Computer Masti (CM) is a series of books, activities, and interactive content for computer education in primary schools in India. It is a research-based product created at the IIT Bombay in collaboration with InOPEN, a tech start-up that works with Free and Open Source (FOSS) technologies. The books are available online under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike with additional permissions for commercial use via CC plus (more info to come in their legal section). Site content is licensed under CC Attribution.
Netherlands
Wikiwijs
Wikiwijs is an open educational resources (OER) platform for teachers launched by the Dutch Ministry of Education to "stimulate development and use of OER", "improve access to both open and 'closed' digital learning materials", "support teachers in arranging their own learning materials and professionalization", and to "increase teacher involvement in development and use of OER." Wikiwijs builds on the wiki philosophy of Wikipedia but customizes an existing OER platform, Connexions, to host and distribute its content. Wikiwijs is focused on all levels of education, from primary to higher education. All content on Wikiwijs is available under CC BY.
New Zealand
OER NZ
OER NZ is a joint effort by the New Zealand Ministry of Education and the OER Foundation to build an open educational resources (OER) portal for New Zealand schools. In keeping with the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing (NZGOAL) framework, which specifically recommends "the licensing of government copyright works for re-use using Creative Commons licences and recommends the use of ‘no-known rights’ statements for non-copyright material," a national portal for OER would involve building a "sustainable Open Education Resource (OER) ecosystem for New Zealand teachers to create, share, repurpose and reuse digital content in support of the national curriculum." All content will be under CC Attribution or otherwise meet the free cultural works definition.
Otago Polytechnic
Norway
- Norwegian National Digital Learning Arena (NDLA)
"All the different provinces (except Oslo, the capital area) joined together to take some of the money the state transfers to them to ensure free access to textbooks for Norwegian students, and uses it to develop digital resources (or purchase from publishers or other producers) that are released under CC BY SA. They have existed for a few years, and have produced a very large amount of materials."
Here's an example, this is their English materials (for high school students): http://ndla.no/en/node/42
Poland
- Orange Academy (Akademia Orange)
- We Read While We're Listening (Czytamy słuchając)
