There have been a couple of notable moves by the OU to take content open, one of them announced in a flurry of press releases about the BBC et al. , one of them not.
The widely announced move relates to the Creative Archive (here's the OU press release if you're interested...(friendly format is it not?)).
The Creative Archive looks interesting, promising to open up content from the BBC, OU and Channel 4 archives to name but a few. It is largely based on the Creative Commons licensing model, although for some unmanageable reason presumably relating to either copyright, or license fee issues, (or both?!), it tries to limit scope to the UK.
As and when the OU starts opening it's content, I'll try and keep track of it here...
The other move was driven by an individual, Oxford Regional Office Staff Tutor Ray Corrigan. Ray authored a Technology Short Course Programme (Relevant Knowledge) course on Law, the Internet and Society and when that course ceased to be presented, Ray made moves to take it open. And with some success - because the open child of T182 is now available under a Creative Commons license.
I'm a little upset it doesn't reveal itself to the mozcc Firefox extension, which pops an icon in your status bar to say the content is open under the Creative Commons, but that may yet happen... (I have to admit that I haven't as yet looked to see how the extension works, so don't know why it's not spotting what once was T182...)
I hope to blog at some point in the near future some of the issues involved with taking T182 open (perhaps Ray would like to contribute some comments?), and perhaps also top up on some of my thinking about the virtues of open licenses, revisiting the Open Source Teaching Project (OSTP) report from a few years ago.
Posted by ajh59 at April 29, 2005 06:25 PM