The Center for Social Media at AU has released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare. From the press release,

“OpenCourseWare, the Web-based publication of academic course content launched in 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been lauded for making college-level courses available to anyone anywhere in the world for free. The movement has expanded to include offerings from some of the nation’s most selective universities including the University of Notre Dame and Yale University…

Now, educational organizations have a guide that simplifies the legalities of using copyrighted materials in open courseware—The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare. The code was developed by experts in media and fair use at American University and a committee of practitioners of open courseware from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, MIT, Tufts University, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, and Yale University…

The code aims to help OCW designers at U.S. educational organizations recognize situations to which fair use applies and situations that require they get permission from third-party rights holders.”

source:CC blog

Ithaka S+R has completed a multi-year investigation of innovative funding models to sustain digital projects, culminating in a summary paper and twelve detailed case studies. Now, Ithaka has produced three briefing papers for use across the public sector, highlighting suggestions drawn from this project, and suggesting how the examples provided by some of the case studies might be useful to specific professional areas of digital content creation and curation.

If you are a curator, archivist, librarian, digital project leader or involved in digital content provision at any level, these briefing papers provide tailored guidance at a glance. Download them here as PDFs, and find more resources like this on the Business Modelling Publications page.

Sustaining Digital Resources: A Briefing Paper for Curators, Archivists, and Librarians

Sustaining Digital Resources: A Briefing Paper for University Librarians

Sustaining Digital Resources: A Briefing Paper for Digital Project Managers

Online students want credit; colleges want a working business model……..

PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free lectures online.

Their site, called Forum Network, says it makes thousands of lectures available, including the Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s take on calculating happiness in a lecture called “How to Measure Pleasure,” and a discussion by a Northeastern University professor, Nicholas Daniloff, about the difficulties of reporting in Russia in a lecture called “Of Spies and Spokesmen: The Challenge of Journalism in Russia.”

The Web site also includes material featuring political figures and business executives. The offerings from PBS and NPR add to video and audio already available on sites such as YouTube EDU and from individual universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University.

This excerpt from the essay challenges the recent open textbook feeding frenzy : “OER encourages and enables the open production, sharing of, and access to educational content and resources. This alone is a valuable societal good, increasing the value of investments made in education. But OER creates the opportunity for a more fundamental and transformative change: the move from passive consumption of educational resources to the formal engagement of educators and learners in the creative process of education content development itself. Thus, the core benefits of OER should probably not be conflated with cutting the costs of materials.”

Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace brings together the background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER Community.

Dear Colleagues,
As you may be aware that JISC CETIS Educational Content SIG meeting, a joint CETIS/OpenLearn OER event was held at the Open University on 27 February 2009. The meeting included presentations from a range of existing OER projects in order to share their experiences and lessons learned. It also provided an opportunity for potential bidders to ask questions and discuss issues related to the JISC/HEA OER programme call.