REVISITING THE POTENTIAL OF FREE CONTENT

By Neil Butcher

Making content free will lead to better education, particularly in the developing world. Or will it? In fact, this assertion has not yet been proven. There are many issues surrounding free content that need to be discussed and explored.

Why is the concept of Open Educational Resources (OERs) so potentially powerful?

1. Because OERs remove restrictions around copying resources, they hold potential for reducing the cost of accessing educational materials.
2. The principle of allowing adaptation of materials contributes to enabling learners to be active participants in educational processes whereby they learn by doing and creating, not just by passively reading and absorbing.
3. OERs have potential to build capacity in developing countries by providing educators with access, at low or no cost, to the means of production to develop their competence in producing educational materials and completing the necessary instructional design to integrate such materials into high quality programmes of learning.

A key issue undermining this transformative potential is an increasingly heated debate around commercialisation of 'free content'. This debate focuses on arguments about the Creative Commons licensing framework, and whether or not to impose a non-commercial restriction within the licence. It has emerged because, to many people, the concept of creating a non-commercial restriction seems intuitive in order to prevent unfair exploitation of 'free' content. However, as many commentators have argued, such a restriction can have several unintended consequences, preventing mixing of content with different licence conditions and creating unforeseen inflexibilities. These commentators observe that the Share-Alike licensing condition in the Creative Commons licensing framework serves effectively the same purpose as a Non-Commercial restriction by requiring derivative works to be released under identical licensing conditions as the original content on which the derivation was based.

Personally, I am convinced by the argum ent that releasing OERs under a licence restricting commercial use of the content creates unnecessary restrictions and should be avoided wherever possible. Thus, where I am able to define or advise on the licensing conditions governing OER initiatives, I propose that a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence be used (see www.creativecommons.org for more information on what this means). However, caution is required.

Many proponents of this position push the virtues of freedom of content by making logical leaps of faith that are not yet supported by meaningful evidence and that can potentially be educationally problematic. Most notable amongst these is the conviction that making content free (i.e. both costing nothing and freely available for re-use, adaptation and commercial use without restrictions) in and of itself will lead to better educational delivery, particularly in the developing world. I too hope that this freedom in content will make a contribution to improving education; however, this thesis needs to be proven through demonstration and good practice, rather than bluntly asserted. More importantly, it is critical to acknowledge that making content free to use and adapt is only one aspect of many required to ensure that the quality of education is systematically transformed and improved.

Sadly, the emerging dogmatism exhibited by opponents of non-commercial restrictions is serving to alienate those who are taking tentative steps towards freeing up restrictive licences governing their educational content. It may be more pragmatic to accept that a spectrum of licences is necessary to allow people and organisations a choice in deciding how best to begin contributing to the growing pool of available OERs. For example, if I am designing a course, and can distribute to learners a specific journal article free of charge, but am not permitted to modify its text, this seems preferable to me than not using it all. However, a degree of ideological determinism seems to have gripped some members of the OER movement, who argue that any restrictions bar those that they have defined as 'legitimate' should be resisted. I think we would do better to accept that, until business and educational models are established and tested around OERs, we will most likely progress fastest by retaining open minds and a spirit of compromise in engaging the interests of different parties seeking to open access to educational content.

Neil Butcher lives and works in his home country of South Africa. He is involved in several OER projects in South Africa, as well as across other parts of Africa. This is an abridged version of a longer article on the topic, which can be found at:
www.col.org/news/Connections/2007jun/fairComment/Pages/cmpltArticle.aspx