Open Content, Creative Commons, and E-Books

Open content, Creative Commons, and E-Books have opened up a whole new world for academic and other professional institutions. It has allowed the sharing and collaboration of resources much easier and quicker than it has ever been before.

According to the 2011 Horizon Report, “Open content embraces not only the sharing of information, but the sharing of instructional practice and experiences as well.” This is a great way for educators to get ideas for lessons that have worked for other educators. Although teachers need to continue to use their own creativity when it comes to creating lessons, it still helps reduce the teacher workload by at least giving a starting point for a new lesson instead of creating a lesson completely from scratch. Why not use ideas that have worked in other classrooms? Another benefit of open content is the cost effective alternatives to textbooks and other resource materials. Not only are textbooks expensive to purchase, but they are not easy to update and often times new editions are not ready for years at a time. It is not cost effective to purchase a new textbook for a class full of students every time an updated edition is available. Open content gives the ability to find, evaluate, and put new information to use. As I was looking at the OER Commons, I found that it was easy to search by subject and grade level. I can see myself using this site because I found some lessons for real world applications in math at the middle school level.

“Creative Commons helps you share your knowledge and creativity with the world. Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation,” says creativecommons.org. Creative Commons is a standardized way to grant copyright permissions for sharing free content online. This allows educators to use the information that is available under the Creative Commons license as long as they follow the given license elements that have been given along with the shared material. It has helped to alleviate some of the issues that come with open content and E-Books as far as the copyright laws and sharing of information.

The 2011 Horizon Report says, “Audiovisual, interactive, and social elements enhance the informational content of books and magazines. Social tools extend the reader’s experience into the larger world, connecting readers with one another and enabling deeper, collaborative explorations of the text.” Using E-Books, or electronic books, brings new kinds of reading experiences into the classroom with the visual interfaces with multimedia and collaborative elements. By using E-Books in the classroom, educators are able to reach students on their level with multimedia. It helps to engage the students using what they already have and know how to use whether it is an iPhone, iPad, Kindle, or computer. It is a much more exciting way to interact with the reading material for some students than merely reading from a traditional book. The possibilities that come with E-Books could transform the way we interact with reading such as using graphs, illustrations, videos, bookmarking, annotation, commentary, and dictionary look-up. Other benefits that come with using E-Books in academic institutions are reduced costs for both the institution and students as well as the portability that it provides. Because they can be accessed through a variety of portals and are available online learning can take place beyond the classroom.

Flat World Knowledge, an E-Book publisher, is published under a Creative Commons license. It allows the user to share and adapt with a limited number of licensing rules. The user must give the appropriate credit and indicate any changes that have been made to content, it must be used for commercial purposes only, and if the information is transformed or built upon when it is distributed it must be under the same license as the original information. This is a great resources and allows the user to not only use and change the information, but they are able to distribute it again as long as all the rules are followed. This is a great example of the Creative Commons being put to good use. It also helps protect material that has been shared.

Although open content and E-Books are a great way to share information around the world, they do not come without their challenges. The 2011 Horizon Report lays out some of the concerns and challenges of these resources. The concerns about using open content are the protection of intellectual property and automatic copyrights that are put on materials that are shared as well as the challenge of sharing, repurposing and reusing scholarly works. I believe that some of this has already been addressed with the Creative Commons and is in the process of not becoming the issue that it once was. The challenges for academic institutions as far the E-Books are the scarcity of academic titles, lack of features for scholarly work, restrictive publishing models, digital rights management, and accessibility issues. Again some of these concerns and challenges are slowly vanishing because of resources such as the Creative Commons. There also seems to be a challenge when it comes to keeping materials up to date. When educators and other professionals are looking up information, they are expecting to find updated information and therefore information and content needs to stay up to date. Educators, even with all of these resources, need to make sure they are still being creative and creating a learning environment that is their own. They should not become too dependent on using shared ideas only.

The benefits of open content and E-Books outweigh the challenges of concerns. This is not to say that the challenges and concerns have been overlooked, they are still being worked on and will continue to get better with time.