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- licenses. Like lecture notes, assessments are something that educators have to create as part of their job functions. There is little additional work required to publish these under open licence. However the contribution to the institution, as well as to the educational community, could be significant. Release of this would also force educators to invest in ongoing re-design of assessment strategies, thus keeping assessment practices current and helping to reduce plagiarism (because the temptation of teaching staff to re-use old assessment activities would be reduced given that they would be openly accessible).
- Do staff members understand copyright issues and the different ways in which they can harness openly licensed resources?
- By virtue of their core functions, educational institutions are positioned to be at the forefront of knowledge societies. In many institutions, though, educators have limited knowledge of or exposure to issues around copyright and the proliferation of online content, much of which is openly licensed. These issues are growing in importance, as they are central to the rapid growth and development of new, increasingly global knowledge networks, driven by the growing functionality and reach of the Internet.
- These emerging knowledge networks – effectively niche groups of specialized areas of interest sharing and developing knowledge across national boundaries – are complex and diverse, but have become an essential feature of the knowledge economy and of many academic endeavours. This means that educators increasingly need to understand the complex issues surrounding these knowledge networks and how they may be changing the ways in which content is both created and shared. Accordingly, it is becoming increasingly important for institutions to ensure that they invest in awareness-raising exercises to bring these issues to the attention of their staff and to explore how the institution and the educators can benefit from them.
- Are there compelling reasons to retain all-rights reserved copyright over curricula and teaching and learning materials?
- Assuming that institutions have copyright policies that vest the copyright of such materials in the institution, their next consideration may be whether they derive better value from retaining all-rights reserved copyright or from releasing some of the rights. While a small percentage of teaching and learning materials can – and will continue to – generate revenue through direct sales, the reality has always been that the percentage of teaching and learning materials that have commercial re-sale value is minimal; it is also declining further as more and more educational material is made freely accessible on the Internet.
- It is becoming increasingly evident that, on the teaching and learning side, educational institutions that succeed are likely to do so predominantly by understanding that their real potential educational value lies not in content itself (which is increasingly available in large volumes online), but in their ability to guide students effectively through educational resources via well-
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