Stephen Foerster

In the last ten years, accelerated by the rise in popularity of the Internet, there has begun a movement to develop “open content” that is free for anyone to use, copy, or modify. Developers of this material sometimes release it into the public domain, and sometimes retain copyright but release the material under permissive licenses that allow for the material to be used freely.

“Open content” means different things to different people. In this context, however, it has two important components. The first is that open content is free, as in costless to the end user. No royalty must be paid to the developer of open content in order to make use of it. The second is that open content is free as in unencumbered. One is welcome to make derivative works based on open content, usually with the only restriction that the derivative work must itself be released as open content.

Similarities with open source software are not coincidental. An early form of open content was a permissive license called the “GPL Free Documentation License” applied to the text documentation for open source software projects. Many of the philosophical pioneers of the open source software movement were also influential in the formation of an open content community, such as Eric S. Raymond, and Tim O'Reilly (“Open Content”).

As the community has matured, so too has it become more organised. The best known advocacy group is probably Creative Commons, founded by Stanford Law School professor, Lawrence Lessig. Creative Commons sponsors conferences, publishes licenses that are easy to apply to new works of open content, and helps developers of open content to catalogue it so that others can find it easily. The organisation is international in scope, with a license designed specifically for the benefit of developing countries, and with an International Commons project handling the legal aspects of designing licenses that navigate the intellectual property legislation of many different countries.

The most common objection to open content is the perception that it subverts copyright. This is not so, however. In order to release material as open content, the developer must either release it into the public domain, which does not affect the copyright privileges of others, or else must release it under a specially designed licenses which itself requires copyright to be valid.

A typical complete OpenCourseWare offering includes a syllabus, lecture notes, handouts, and other ancillary materials. However, the syllabus will typically include a list of required reading, and that this reading typically centers around a commercial textbook. This is important because it demonstrates a focus on providing convenient free resources to instructors, but not to students themselves.

Connexions, housed at Rice University in Texas, USA, is an online collaborative system that publishes materials under the Creative Commons attribution-only license, an extremely permissive license that allows use, copy, and modification of works with the only restriction that the source must be acknowledged. Connexions is noteworthy because it has developed a Web-based authoring interface so that authors can add content and modify existing content directly into the project's database. Additions and modifications are controlled by required login, however, preventing a “free for all” wiki-style approach to development. The online interface approach diverges from the approach taken by the OpenCourseWare projects. Like OpenCourseWare, however, Connexions produces “courses” and “modules” meant to be plugged into an existing instructional framework, rather than existing as standalone educational resources, like textbooks would be.

This project, sponsored by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, represents an evolution of the MIT-style OpenCourseWare concept from that of being a general repository to that of one focused on a specific discipline.

Johns Hopkins's approach also introduces another differentiator, that of differentiation itself. Indeed, their project even seems to take a competitive tone relative to other, more established projects. For example, on the default page of the site, a testimonial is prominently displayed which begins, “I was a user of MIT's OpenCourseWare earlier, but with the more health care-focused initiative by Johns Hopkins, I think the world is opening its doors to all knowledge-seekers, irrespective of their social or ethnic backgrounds.”

The Open Learning Initiative from Carnegie Mellon University is a similar initiative to the OpenCourseWare projects. In keeping with the university's strengths, the project has released material pertaining to economics and statistics, critical thinking, and the natural sciences. Indeed, the project describes itself as adding “to online education the crucial elements of instructional design grounded in cognitive theory, formative evaluation for students and faculty, and iterative course improvement based on empirical evidence.”

The Free Curricula Center, founded by this paper's authors, seeks to fill a gap left open by Connexions, Open Learning Initiative, and OpenCourseWare projects: that of textbooks and other standalone educational resources. While other projects have done a thorough and admirable job providing resources that educators should find useful, thus far initiatives have been of most use to those who are either searching for resources that will be useful in an online environment or on campus where students are accustomed to buying textbooks. This leaves behind those on the other side of the digital and socio-economic divides, such as students in developing countries and minorities in the West, e.g. those attending Native American tribal colleges and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Having said that, the Center is not as useful to educators as other services because it has yet to release a great deal of material. It is a new organization, still in the process of incorporation, acquiring 501(c)(3) status, grant seeking, and networking with participants. Nevertheless, as of March 2006 its catalog consisted of seven introductory textbooks on subjects ranging from Physics to Philosophy.

The Annenberg Foundation is well known for its support for a wide variety of educational projects, including the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California as well as underwriting a wide variety of programming on National Public Radio in the USA. They are also a noteworthy supporter of elementary and secondary education, however, and one form of their support is the Annenberg Media project that produces educational television programming free for schools to use in class.

Their service also includes the Annenberg Channel, which broadcasts their programming non-stop. Their material is freely available to any organization with a Ku-band satellite dish and a DigiCipher II satellite receiver, or with a broadband connection to the Internet. While there would be costs to either reception method, the amount of programming that would be freely available is considerable.

Open Educational Resources, a service of the Development Gateway Foundation, seeks to provide educators with access to digital resources. It does this by providing a directory to existing resources, primarily those of MIT's OpenCourseWare project and similar endeavors. The Foundation describes itself as follows:

“The Development Gateway Foundation is an enabler of development. We help improve people's lives in developing countries by building partnerships and information systems that provide access to knowledge for development.”

This description is interesting because it fails to take the digital divide into account. Educators in the developing world largely do not have reliable access to the Internet, and when they do it is seldom indeed that they will be able to use curricula designed for online courses that will reach the truly underserved members of their communities.

This site, founded by Dr. Robert S. Stephenson of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, USA, also purports to have a focus on the developing world. It allows groups interested in focusing on a particular discipline or focus on a targeted geographic area to set up what it calls a “collaboratory”, a sub-site that makes certain standard tools available to all participants.

While the idea of enabling a personalized sub-site to participants with a particular goal is interesting, this project suffers from many of the same drawbacks as many of its competitors. One is the implicit expectation of widespread broadband Internet access in the developing world. The other, also common to other projects, is that of introducing prospective participants to a vast new lexicon of educational technology jargon. For example, it's entirely possible that a participant who could assist greatly with developing material for political science would be put off by a welcome page that refers to “reusable learning assets” rather than focusing on how the new participant can make a difference.

This portal was founded by Jason Turgeon, Justin Peters, and Wynn Williamson, three postgraduate students who were continually dismayed by the costs of the textbooks required for their courses. It serves as a catalogue for open textbooks available online. One can search its database to find a list of freely available books on almost any conceivable subject.

The site serves an important purpose by cataloguing the disparate open textbook offerings available online. For instructional designers interested in using an open textbook, it is an ideal first stop in seeking a base text to use as the foundation for a course, whether distance learning or on campus.

Best known for Wikipedia, the first and largest volunteer-edited encyclopaedia, the Wikimedia Foundation also sponsors an array of related projects, one of which is Wikibooks. These projects have built a large amount of open content by allowing anyone to add material or revise existing material. Even anonymous contributions are encouraged, the philosophy being that over time the positive contributions will prevail, leading to high quality resources.

Some have expressed concern that allowing anyone to edit encyclopaedic material will lead to a result that is less than scholarly. However, a recent study by Jim Giles published by Nature suggested that for scientific articles, the quality of entries in Wikipedia compared with those in the EncyclopÃ¦dia Britannica.

Founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, this volunteer network makes available digital copies of books that have entered the public domain. In the beginning books were keyed in manually, but in the intervening years scanning technology has simplified and accelerated the process to the point where eighteen thousand works are now available from the project's web servers.

Because they are in the public domain, these texts are completely free to use without royalties. However, most works in the public domain have that status from age, such that few works available are up to date. However, age of materials is more important in some disciplines than others, and while the materials may not be particularly useful for an instructional designer building a science course, for a course in literature it might be perfectly acceptable.

The most immediate implication of open content for the developing world is the same as it is in developed countries: lower costs. Lower cost to the student means improved access to higher education. Lower costs are important in developed countries, but in developing countries it can spell the difference between a student being able to attend university or not. Lower costs to the institution mean that more resources are available to strengthen the educational experience for all students.

As important as lowering costs is to the student and the institution, there are broader economic implications. By allowing more people to be educated locally, the value of a nation's human capital increases. Moreover, when more students can be educated locally, fewer people leave to get educated who will never return. The long term benefits are stronger extended families, less cultural diffusion, and faster economic development.

There is another aspect to free curricula other than its lack of a price tag, however. Not only is it free as in costless, it is also free in the sense that it is unencumbered by intellectual property restrictions. This means that it can be tailored by a particular audience to meet specific needs. As examples, a textbook on entrepreneurship that uses conventional banking as case studies can be modified to use case studies involving microfinance, or an older work on anthropology or sociology can be updated to reflect more modern cultural sensibilities.

While the listed examples refer to textbooks, it is important to note that there is a wide variety of material available, ranging from textbooks, to articles, to audio lectures, to online interactive learning exercises. This distinction is important in that some available materials are useful primarily for online courses, while some is useful for both online and the conventional classroom curricula. While an increasing number of textbooks are freely available, these other materials mean that it is easier to utilize open content in online courses. In essence, for some disciplines it is possible in online courses not only to supplement a textbook with references to open content, but even to replace the textbook altogether. For example, a course using an expensive literature anthology may replace the text with links to online versions of the literary selections to be studied.

This wealth of available material suggests that curriculum designers at universities would do well to consider the extent to which open content might be used in their institution, perhaps even appointing an instructional design committee to consider the matter and formulate recommendations.