OER: from left field to mainstream

I really enjoyed catching up with Derek Wenmoth over the weekend to work with some schools in Wellington, and while we sparked off each other in a number of areas, one of the threads we kept coming back to in our discussions was the potential of OERs: Open Education Resources. We use OERs a lot, mostly through Wikieducator, but we're always looking for ways to grow the community and expand the work we are doing. We have a Creative Commons policy at our school which means that every policy and teaching and learning resource our teachers produce is made available under a CC licence by default. Our staff and students build collaborative teaching and learning tutorials and resources online which can be used reciprocally by other students, classes and schools all over the world. When Derek blogged recently about OERs, he neatly captured some of the things I've been mulling over for a while:

"This is indeed the challenge – how we move from the peripheral interest in OERs, driven mostly by individual practitioners at the edges of their 'day jobs', to where there is wider acceptance and adoption of OERs as a core part of an institutional approach to the organisation and management of resources to support learning"

Blackboard embraces creative commons

What a difference a few years makes. This is a powerful acknowledgement of the importance of creative commons, collaboration and open access:

"Critics called for a boycott of Blackboard in 2006 after it used a flimsy software patent to sue a rival, and raised fears that it would sue universities that were using their own teaching software tools rather than Blackboard’s products... last week, it announced it would help instructors tag their material with Creative Commons marks, a system of licensing that allows others to use a work without fear of being sued for copyright infringement."

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-why-patent-bully-blackboard.com-became-a-creative-commons-advocate/