My original post on the Open Content OU, describing the recent announcement that the OU had joined with the BBC and others in promising to open up content in a Creative Commons style license went little further that just reporting that fact. It also omitted to mention a third way of opening up content, specifically in the form of "taster" material.
Many book publishers offer sample chapters from their books as a taster, and the OU is no different, on some courses at least. The Technology Short Course T184 offers a sample 'chapter' from the TSCP Courses webpage, for example, although you'll notice that the link to the sample material does not appear on the main OU Courses and Qualifications page for T184.
There is also a not really a fourth way issue, and that's the release of copyrighted material in the form of research papers on academics' personal webpages. The position will perhaps be clarified as the OU library seeks to promote the Open University ePrints repository, which at the moment "is a pilot service which is being implemented by the Open University Library to evaluate the technical, procedural, strategic and legal issues involved in running an OU institutional ePrint service."
If you are new to the idea of ePrints, they are "electronic copies of academic papers. Universities world-wide are being encouraged to provide access to ePrints of their research output on institutional servers...".
There are many practical issues that are likely to arise from taking legacy content open, and this blog is just a signpost to a future post that will introduce them - and consider them (and more) in detail - at some later time...
Uppermost are potentially issues relating to copyright of third party material and the time and expense involved in 'cleaning' the material for open release. In the T184 taster materials, copyrighted images not licensed for use outside 'student purchased course use' are blanked out, as this T184 sample material screenshot shows.
This potentially has a lot to do with more general issues of reuse, and as such an Open Content migration strategy may well be able to learn from CURVE: CoUrse Reuse & VErsioning. The findings of CURVE are potentially even more relevant for planning the format and structure of future materials which may be relased under an open license following a period of closed, commercial use, for example.
Many of the licensing issues are covered in a report I found on the intranet dated Match, 2005, produced by Richard McCracken, Head of Intellectual Property for VCE: Open Access and Open Source and the Open University. The extent to which I pull out particular elements of this OU-SAMS protected document for comment on this public blog is something I shall consider over the coming weeks...
I'm not sure of the extent to which that document drew on what seems to have been the subject of a 'workshop' on the OU and open content held presumably at the VC's forum in November, 2004, if the URL provenance and document date on this informal report on a series of small group discussions on Open Source and the OU Model: What can the OU contribute; What would be of value to the OU?: Flipchart Output
is anything to go by.