CC Asia Pacific OER

= A glance at OER from the Creative Commons Asia Pacific Affiliates, April 2012 =

''This is the text of a collaborative resource provided by Creative Commons New Zealand and Asia Pacific CC Affiliates at the 'Policy Forum for Asia Pacific: Policy and Practices in Open Educational Resources'in Bangkok, April 2012. The forum was co-organized by UNESCO Asia and the Pacific Regional Bureau for Education, Commonwealth of Learning and Thai Teachers TV to showcase innovative practices in OER, and contribute to the draft 'Paris Declaration'on OER. ''

Creative Commons Mainland China
Professor Chunyan Wang of Creative Commons Mainland China has co-authored "Open Educational Resources in the People’s Republic of China: Achievements, Challenges and Prospects for Development." This resource is a review of relevant academic research and concepts related to the open educational content as applied to the Chinese context, published by UNESCO IITE.

Open Source Software Packages in Taiwan
Open Source Software Application Consulting Centre (OSSACC) have OER related projects which are funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education. Because of their free licenses, they have allowed for wide and grass-root usage in Taiwan and elsewhere.

Localization of the popular “PhET” Interactive Simulation software originally developed at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

EzGo9 is a Ubuntu-based distribution tailored for K-12 educational use in class rooms and at home by teachers and students. It includes a vast collection of (localized) educational software packages. 

(From Tyng-Ruey Chuang, CC Taiwan)

Related to the Japanese Earthquake in 2011
Yahoo! Japan: Higashinihon Daishinsai Shashin Hozon Purojekuto (Great Earthquake of Eastern Japan Photo Archiving Project) with nearly 40,000 pictures posted. Google: Mirai eno kioku (Memories for the future).

The intention of these projects is to preserve pictures and videos of the affected areas of Japan before the earthquake, of the devastation, and of the recovery process for the victims and others, including future generations. Google encourages use of CC licenses, and Yahoo! Japan requires the submissions to be available for noncommercial educational, research, and other uses. Google, after receiving multiple requests, decided to provide “street views” of the affected area before and after the disaster. The National Diet Library has recently launched similar project involving web archives. Open government and open data policies have gained momentum (and are now in the formative stage) following calls for better access to information to the Japanese government by its citizens during the crisis.

OpenCourseWare in Japan
SNOWBALLS - University of Tokyo: student-driven OER repository /content management system on safety issues and engineering terminology. TIES - Tezukayama University: inter-university sharing platform for OCW and teaching tips iOCW - Kyoto University: search engine concept for OCW discovery. Tokyo Tech OCW/OCW-i - Tokyo Tech: course management system interfaced with OCW repository

Japan’s OpenCourseWare Consortium is one of the largest OCW consortiums in the world. About two dozen higher education institutions participate as full members. There are 16 for-profit corporations and several non-profit organizations who are also supporting members. The Asia Regional OpenCourseWare and Open Education Conference was held in Japan in 2011.

The most extensive OCW repository is that of Tokyo Institute of Technology, offering over 1000 courses. Their course management system has the functionality to publish the materials to OCW. In general, many in-house systems surrounding OCW exist in Japan and are a major focus of the open educational efforts.

Additional funding availability (in the form of large donor organizations, or venture capital) is less present in Japan than in the United States’ OCW environment. (From Tomoaki Watanabe, 'CC Japan')

OER in South Korea
SNOW “Sookmyung Network for Open World” is a community type OER platform that delivers remarkable courseware around the world to a Korean speaking audience. Users can upload OER content to share, discuss with comments, and translate into Korean. SNOW was established to overcome language barriers to knowledge, and the disadvantages of scattered academic content. The website now carries approximately 8,500 videos with Korean scripts. In particular, SNOW organizes events such as the SNOW Knowledge Forum and records them. Sookmyung Women’s University is supporting this service. Since the content was selected and brought in from various OCW sources, importance is placed on CC licensing conditions. In order to educate the users, SNOW provides a CC licenses users’ guide.

KOCW is a public OCW repository and utilization service run by KERIS (Korea Education and Research Information Service). Users can view and search through the respository’s resources of approximately 165,000 items. The material is collected from government funded research, Korean Universities and laboratories, and overseas OER organizations. ARIADNE, TED, OERCommons, NIME, LORNET, edna, YouTube/Edu, MERLOT, and ReaserchChannel are some such Cooperating overseas organizations. KOCW provides 3 types of material – open course material, course preparation material, and course-related sources such as class notes. It offers a full curriculum opportunity to those who are not necessarily enrolled to post-secondary institutes.

Korea University’s OCW is the official Open CourseWare site for Korea University and makes course materials available through CC licensing. It holds more than 270 classes, provided by professors who believe in sharing and opening up their resources.

Since 2009, the University of Ulsan has run its OCW website for students and general users. It shares more than 500 classes by over 24 professors throughout 11 colleges.

e-Nanoschool is a nano-technology focused online educational program. It is one of the first OCW actions in Korea, and was initiated by Korea Univerity’s Professor Kyu-tae Kim. It provides courses in a full-semester length curriculum. The class caters for both academia and industry based students. In 2012, e-Nanoschool has offered Nanomaterials and Nanobiology.

Egoing is a independent blogger who is voluntarily uploading online tutorials. His project has been described as the “Korean IT version of Khan Academy.” His most well-known curriculum “Life Coding” encourages people to become familiar with IT and learn how to code by themselves. This program offers video tutorials, a discussion board, Facebook group, and a mutually shared study schedule. It is an example of how a non-organization initiated open education program can be successful through a self-motivated and dedicated program developer and networking participants. Some of the passionate, lively inservice teachers in the elementary and secondary schools of Korea run their own blogs for OER sharing. The most popular and helpful ones are 'Betizzang's history travel blog', 'Cozoo's happy Korean class' – and are dubbed "Power Bloggers" by portal sites. Korean Arts&amp;Culture Education Service provides scholastic material for arts &amp; culture educators and teachers. It issues an open online/offline magazine.

EduShare’s textbook share is built by a voluntary community consisting of university students in Korea. All materials are used and shared for low-income, underprivileged children. After several years of voluntary night school activity, EduShare opened their accumulated materials-textbooks through CC licensing.

Future Directions of OER in Korea are 1. Integrity between OERs, 2. Using various media devices, 3. Working together to maximize effectiveness for building, running, sharing, and promoting, 4. Encouraging more individual, NGOs, community, and groups participants. (From the team at 'CC Korea')

OER in Australia
The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) is a strong provider of distance education programs, with 75% of its students studying by distance education. USQ’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) portal makes 10 courses available under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

‘Bridging the Gap: teaching adaptations across the disciplines and sharing content for curriculum renewal' commenced in January 2012. It is led by the University of Tasmania and funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd (ALTC) – now Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT)). The project aims to ‘enhance the teaching of adaptations (the study of the adaptation of an original novel, play, film, poem, video game or other form of narrative to a different medium) in an Australian context through the creation of a community of practice of scholars’. It will develop a repository of OER relevant to learning and teaching adaptations. Creative Commons Australia is consulting the project on use of Creative Commons licences for OER.

Australian National University has an Open Content Licensing IP policy.

There are good sources of educational information in the Australian public sector, including The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. The Atlas of Living Australia is an authoritative, freely accessible, biodiversity data management system funded by the Australian Government, which encourages contributors to apply the CC licenses to their material.

(From Anne Fitzgerald, 'CC Australia')

OER In New Zealand
The New Zealand Government has its own New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework which provides guidance for agencies releasing data and content for reuse. The framework recommends CC BY as the default licence for this.

CC New Zealand collaborates with the Ministry of Education to provide professional development for teachers around New Zealand on Creative Commons and OER. We encourage and support schools to follow in the path of Albany Senior High School, who have a CC intellectual property policy at their school, and utilize open source software.

The Open Education Resource Foundation has its base in Otago. Otago Polytechnic was the first institution in the world to adopt default CC-BY intellectual property policy, and five Kiwi institutions are founding anchor partners of the OERu initiative. (From Jane Hornibrook, CC New Zealand)