In April, ccLearn crossed telephone lines with Italy and Ukraine for the first time. Executive Director Ahrash Bissell spoke with eIFL.net, Electronic Information for Libraries, an international nonprofit organization whose interests, among many, lie in open access publishing and fair and balanced intellectual property laws for libraries.

Below is a follow-up interview over email with Rima Kupryte, Director of eIFL.net, and Iryna Kuchma, Program Manager of eIFL-OA (Open Access).

First, can you say a few words about yourselves and eIFL? How did you come to get involved in eIFL and to hold your respective positions within the larger framework? What about eIFL attracted you?

Rima
I am a professional librarian, graduated from Vilnius University in Lithuania. I joined the Open Society Institute – Budapest (OSI) Network Library Program late in 1995. The idea for eIFL was born at OSI and later the idea turned into an independent organisation which I joined from its establishment in 2003. Coming from Lithuania, which had poorly resourced libraries and where access to information was restricted when I was a student, I was very passionate about ideas—what could be done in order to improve libraries, open them and offer better services to its users. eIFL.net is a very innovative and creative organisation that offers a lot of opportunities and ideas; it makes things happen.

Iryna
eIFL’s mission statement, “Enabling access to knowledge through libraries in developing and transition countries,” appeals to me a lot. I graduated from the social sciences department and access to knowledge was one of my research topics as well as social aspects of open access, free and open source software and open content licenses. For nine years I worked for OSI in Ukraine and Open Access was one of my program areas. It was fascinating to see the positive changes in scholarly communication and I am glad I can go on with this program – Open Access – in eIFL.net.

• eIFL-IP supports the use of alternative models through open content licenses, such as CC and GPL. eIFL.net advocates for open access and OER.
eIFL-IP and CC both promote access to content (for CC digital content).
• eIFL-IP builds capacity and raises awareness, including how to use copyright law as an enabler of access to knowledge rather than a means to distort, deny or delay access. CC licenses support this goal by promoting the full spectrum of possibilities within the copyright system, i.e. from all rights reserved to the public domain.
As information professionals, librarians should be in a position to advise library clients on issues relating to access and use of digital content. With its powerful brand, CC helps librarians to understand and promote issues relating to access.

The project lead Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Berkman Fellow, has been legal lead for CC France since 2003.. A meeting of international experts in libraries, copyright, distance learning and developing countries took place at the Berkman Center 17-18 April 2008 to provide advice on the structure, methodology and the content of the course as well as its sustainability.

Iryna
Our target audience is scholars and researchers, doctors and lawyers, students and teachers. And in Open Access projects we set alliances with human rights groups, environmental organizations, patient groups demanding access to government information, Internet activists (Wikipedia communities, Creative Commons, etc.) modeling the approach of the Alliance for Tax Payers Access (a diverse and growing alliance of organizations representing taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that support open public access to taxpayer-funded research). We are working closely with SPARC and SPARC Europe, EurOpenScholar, DRIVER project, Electronic Publishing Trust, BioLine International, Association of Research Libraries, Stichting SURF, Dutch collaborative organization for Higher Education and Research on IT, Directory of Open Access Journals, and we are also glad to start working with ccLearn and Creative Commons International (and iCommons).

Yes, legal and technical interoperability is extremely important for open education. We encourage educators, scholars and students to use open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing. We advocate for Creative Commons Attribution Licenses used by a number of open access projects, e.g. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) - a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource. Everything they publish is freely available online to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way one wishes. Creative Commons did a lot for the free culture movements around the world. These approaches should be adjusted now for the educators and learners encouraging them to practice open education and raising their awareness about open content licences. Raising awareness and sharing good examples and advocacy are key elements to the success of the Open Education movement.

A month ago, I blogged about CC’s Role in Open Access at Otago Polytechnic; specifically, on their adoption of CC BY as their default IP policy. For those who don’t already know, Otago Polytechnic made a novel decision last year to essentially reverse the standard policy of most educational institutions. While other university staff must obtain permissions to release their work under a license different from “all rights reserved” copyright, Otago Polytechnic staff must explain why they don’t want material published openly under CC BY, should they desire standard (restrictive) copyright or another license. Not only does this eliminate all the red tape before getting your work out in the open, it sets open access as an educational imperative. (And by open, they mean really open–free to copy, distribute, adapt and derive the work for both commercial or non-commercial purposes.)

Because of this inversion in standard IP policy, ccLearn was curious to learn how and why and what exactly Otago Polytechnic did and thought to arrive at this decision. While most institutions, especially educational ones, slap on the non-commercial term, Otago seemed to think differently about doing so; in fact, they never even considered it.

Read on for an interview with Leigh Blackall, from the Educational Development Center at Otago Polytechnic. Some things about Leigh: he lives in beautiful Dunedin, New Zealand, develops his own educational resources with his wife Sunshine and dog Mira, and judging from this photo, is a forward thinker who will climb most any mountain.

Photo: Leigh Blackall CC BY

Can you say a few words about yourself and your position in the Educational Development Center at Otago Polytechnic? What specifically led you to the work in Educational Development?

I am officially titled as a Programme Developer which means I help develop new and existing courses here at the Polytechnic. That involves helping teachers to develop new skills or identify new avenues for their services, or to help them make courses more efficient and effective. I found my way into the educational media business because of my interest in media production and design generally. I started creating animations and movies for training in Australia. Later I found myself running a business in producing media for education, but then open source, open content and the free web services - generally referred to as Web2.0, came into my life and things changed. Now here I am in beautiful and progressive New Zealand helping teachers think about ways to integrate some of this into their practices.

In your article, “Educational Development at Otago Polytechnic,” you write that the EDC was established in 2006 “for staff development, online and flexible learning development, and research into educational development.” Can you expand on this a bit? What is the EDC’s mission, or overarching goals?

The bottom line of the Programme Development aspect of the EDC is to help faculty to provide educational services to existing students more efficiently and effectively and/or find ways to provide educational services to people we are not currently reaching. (There is a significant economic motivation behind this because the public funding we get is sadly not enough to sustain the whole operation). So this involves a lot of staff training in the effective use of the Internet and things like Open Educational Resources (OER), which in turn means that we have to be up with the play, hence research and development.

At the end of 2006, the fund for the EDC “started to engage in content creation.” Do you mean the creation of Open Educational Resources? Why was it important for Otago Polytechnic to offer free online content?

Initially OER was not the intention behind the fund. We had to change a few things first, starting with our policy on Intellectual Property. But once that was done, it gave a green light for those of us wanting to get into OER. Why did we think OER was important? Well, public education has never had enough money to do what it needs to do. In saying that though, it has at times been very inefficient with what it has tried to do. When the leadership of the Polytechnic made available money for the development of content (amongst other things), we knew it would be a finite amount and not enough to sustain the staff training and content development we were aiming to do.. or to then maintain and update what it was we managed to achieve. So it made sense to first find out what was already out there and available for reuse and adaption (OER) and then to focus our energy on the participation and creation of educational resources that filled the gaps. By making the resources freely available, by using socially networked platforms like Wikieducator, and by trying to establish collaborative networks around our subject areas, we were counting on the strengths of the OER movement to help us sustain our efforts beyond the initial funding. Imagine if we all did that!

At the same time, it was difficult for EDC staff to find “existing content with copyrights that could enable reuse.” Since, Otago Polytechnic has adopted CC BY as their default license, I imagine that by reusable content you mean not only the ability to share, but also to build upon, remix, adapt and reproduce the content. How did OP come to focus on the need for this level of openness in education?

Yes, we soon realised that while there is a huge amount of open courseware out there, there wasn’t a lot of open educational resources, or certainly anything that was ever going to easily meet our needs. You see, teaching and learning will always be a context specific pursuit and so we all need the freedom to adapt and reuse content to what ever context we might be working in. So most of the open courseware out there is not open for easy adaptation, and often carries with it a Non Commercial restriction, which could be at some stage counter to what we find ourselves operating in.. who knows? And anyway, it is ambiguous to us what exactly is commercial. So we knew that we didn’t want to use or make derivatives on content that could restrict us or anyone else we might later be associated with. We needed a maximum level of flexibility with our content and CC BY provides that. Over arching all this, and it is in our IP policy as so, we wanted to adopt the practice and principle that information and knowledge should be freely shared.

Did this realization lead naturally to an awareness of Creative Commons licensed material? How did Otago Polytechnic first hear of Creative Commons?

Well, I think probably since MIT OCW and surrounding free and open source thinking, there have been people in our organisation who have been aware of CC et al for a while now. So it seemed to me that when the opportunity arose to review our IP policy, all the pieces were in place. The key people seemed ready and willing to embrace it. I mean, who in the media and communications game hasn’t heard of Creative Commons by now? If you know someone, send them our way, I’m setting up a new and open course they can enroll in. :)

How did Otago Polytechnic decide on CC BY for their default Intellectual Property Policy? Can you elaborate on some of the specific steps that led to this choice; for instance, did OP consider other licensing options that were ultimately rejected?

Well, I think I might have already covered some of this. As for other licenses.. no we didn’t look much into the other licenses. The group of people who drafted our policy quickly saw that CC BY was what we wanted, and no one challenged that proposal. So CC BY was the first proposal, and it stayed that way. I mean, we did discuss the other options - well CC BY SA was the only other option for us, but for similar reasons to the NC restriction we decided that CC BY would be the simplest most flexible stance to take.

It probably should be made clear at this point that people in our organisation who own or are responsible for IP have the ability to use licenses other than CC BY—it’s just that they are meant to explain to the managers why they have choose to do so.. As you say, a kind of inversion to what was in place before, where people had to ask permission to be free, now they have to ask permission to be not free. :)

What about legal and technical interoperability of open educational resources? Can you say a few words about OP’s view on this and how it might have played a role in its IP Policy? Why did OP choose CC BY over the alternative CC licenses?

I find this part the hardest to explain, and in a way the answer is in your question. CC BY is the most simple to understand and easy to honour license available on CC. (Public Domain is not something commonly recognised outside the USA). If we had added other restrictions like NC or SA, then we would somehow have to monitor that, and manage what resources were what. With CC BY as our default, at least we know that anything originating from us simply requires attribution and nothing more; that’s pretty easy to ascertain and should be familiar practice to educational practitioners. But Share Alike or Non Commercial.. that requires a discussion, and with that comes complexity.

But CC BY only serves to make the content we create easy to use. Obviously the majority of resources out there use CC BY SA or equivalent.. this creates a small issue because it then means that if we sample and make derivatives from such content, then we are obliged to use the same license. This is a bummer and something I try to bring up in every forum.. but the copyleft movement is strong and uncompromising and I so far haven’t succeeded in convincing any of them to go CC BY. I guess they still worry about derivatives becoming closed. Personally, in education, I don’t see that happening for much longer. I think everyone will come to see the simplicity and flexibility of CC BY, and that alone outweighs all other concerns.

Most universities simply offer their content online under “all rights reserved” copyright, with sometimes an option to license the content openly. Otago Polytechnic revolutionizes this standard concept of openness by defaulting all content CC BY with the option for the individual to restrict. What has OP gained by having CC BY as their default policy? Can you elaborate on some of the specific benefits?

What have we gained? Your attention for one! Last time the CC Blog referenced our story, hits to our website and staff blogs went through the roof! Over time, this recognition will continue to grow through the attribution requirement with our content, and maybe that will translate into attracting funding or even students.. but really, as great as the recognition is, it doesn’t immediately change much in terms of the situation in our courses, and this is where we remain focused. We want the skills and capacity of our teaching staff and their students to continue to grow and develop; we want easy and quick access to what ever information resource is needed at the time, and the freedom to reuse it in anyway we see fit; we want to share our experience and expertise with others in similar fields so we can explore collaborative practices and networked teaching and learning; and we want to find ways in which to operate more efficiently and effectively. Our adoption of CC BY is a significant step in that direction as it removes at least one of the artificial barriers to any of that possibly happening.

What about some challenges? What are they and how does OP propose to overcome them?

At the moment, one of the biggest challenges we face is the reliance that some faculty have with all rights reserved content. This content is preventing us from developing OER practices. In some subject areas OER does not yet compete with the quality of published and restricted resources and so it is argued that using OER would compromise the quality of our services. In other areas faculty are still convinced of the possible financial gains they might make by restricting and selling content. In other areas faculty simply don’t have the time to rethink the way they teach their courses, let alone participate in OER development however beneficial it may be in the long run. All of these issues are not surprising and certainly manageable challenges that we address through normal staff development activities and support services like savvy librarians.

What advice would you give other institutions that have more restrictive open access policies?

Well, if you’re reading this then you yourself probably aren’t the one that needs convincing, no doubt it is your management. So you have a careful and indirect educational role to take. My advice would be to snuggle up with your IP lawyer if your place has one and start finding an in there. Respected 3rd parties can carry a lot of influence if they know how to play their game, and if you don’t have the lawyer on side then they could shatter all your dreams with heavy spoken opinions that really are just that.

If like us you’re lucky enough not to have one of those, then you need to watch for your next chance to participate in the review of your IP Policy. This could be a long road depending on how much support you have from key people around you.

In all these counts, it always helps to move things along by working with staff and growing things at the grass roots. If you can skillfully organise a significant event to draw attention from the local newspaper and the CClearn blog :) then that will help too. An event alone won’t do it because key people will find an excuse to miss it, so you might have to try and work it in with other things that are already happening.

Don’t be like me and flood every meeting with obsessive single mindedness. You’ll only risk alienating yourself.. I was lucky to have a very supportive boss who knew how to cope with me. Be patient, professional and diligent. It will happen when it is meant to happen.

Any last thoughts?

What was that I just said about myself?…

To find out more about Leigh and his projects, visit his WikiEducator page. To find out more about Otago Polytechnic, visit their WikiEducator page.

It’s tax day here in the USA, but let’s look to more interesting things. I will endeavor to send out an update, perhaps in newsletter form, of key ccLearn activities and plans every month or so, in addition to any announcements or interviews that we post to the site. As we continue to develop our internal capacities to manage communications and projects, I expect that these things will become more streamlined.

We are still hard at work considering the challenges of finding and creating open educational resources, and also with networking and research around existing OER projects. Look to this space for future announcements as we test and then roll out these (hopefully useful) tools.

We are also engaged in planning for a regional meeting among open education projects and CC jurisdictions in Latin America. This is just the first of several planned meeting in different regions of the world to enable greater collaboration and coherence among OER projects globally. We will announce further details about this and hoped-for future meetings as details become available.

We are helping too in planning the education track at this year’s iSummit. The iSummit promises to be an interesting opportunity to engage with open education projects in East Asia and beyond and to consider collective actions that can help to broaden and deepen the impact of the open education movement.

If you haven’t checked out the rest of the ccLearn website lately, you might pay a visit to the Resources page, where we are continuing to compile resources of interest to educators and everyone involved in open education. Also, we have gathered in one place some of the top sites for searching educational content on the web. This site is intended to help people find educational resources, but also demonstrates the challenge we face in making such searches easier.

ccLearn will be present at the upcoming OCWC meeting in Dalian, China. We’ll report on that meeting afterwards.

-Ahrash

ccLearn, the educational division of Creative Commons, was launched in Fall, 2007. Since then, we have been very busy setting priorities and managing a few key projects, such as the (Open) Education Search project and helping with the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. In the meantime, we have been putting together plans and materials for a number of other initiatives, many of which are already listed on our Projects page. In addition, we have been drafting materials to help educators and learners understand the ideas that lie behind open education, and in particular the ways that Creative Commons licenses interface with that movement.

The site is under heavy construction, but expect to see it fill in quickly. You can sign up for a feed if you want to stay abreast of changes, and you can sign up for the ccLearn listserv if you want news and events related to ccLearn sent to you via email. And of course, you should always feel free to contact us with comments, suggestions, and anything else that you would like to share.

The staff at ccLearn are looking forward to a busy and exciting year. Welcome!

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