In a couple of earlier posts, (Open Content OU, Open Content Issues) I mentioned that a no longer presented course had been taken open by the Course Team. It seems this has not gone down too well with the powers that be:
WE'RE GOING OFFLINE FOR A BIT...
The Open University is currently reviewing its policy on the licensing of its teaching materials. Given the unparalleled range of those materials and the depth of its archive, this review has to address some complex issues and is taking some time to complete. (Our partner organisation, the BBC, conducted a similar review in relation to its Creative Archive project, and that took quite a while too!).
We've been asked to take this site offline until the Open University review is complete. We hope to be back soon, but in the meantime please bear with us.
The T182 material was originally posted under a Creative Commons license. I'm not clear whether it was released just before - or just after - the OU Creative Archive announcement, but a question that came to my mind immediately was whether the OU would be able to cope with a mixed economy of open licences - and whether it should?
What is clear, though, is that the system appears to be twitchy about the consequences of taking content open (please let me know if you see someone else hosting the T182 material! ;-) Talk about how we should take content open takes you so far, but when the content is actually out there, you are forced to think about it in a different way (i.e. for real, and not just as a thought experiment).
In my own mind I keep coming back to a set of questions that I posed when I first came back to the OU 6(?) years ago, and never received an answer:
What do we 'sell'?
Who do we sell it to?
Why do 'they' buy it?
These all impact on whether or not open sourcing our wares is a Good Thing (and whether it impacts on our "core business"). If you believe we sell content , it's possibly hard to defend. If you think we sell assessment, qualifications, structure/pacing, supported open learning/tutorial support, or even just membership of the OU community, then it's perhaps a different story?
PS So people can stay posted about progress on T182 et al., a mailing list has been set up for future announcements: Open-Feedback.
Posted by ajh59 at May 26, 2005 10:40 AM