The OpenSpires Project

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The OpenSpires Project

• Rowan Wilson, Legal Officer
• Lisa Mansell, Project Coordinator
• 2 March 2010

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• Part of the HEA/JISC-funded Open Educational
  Resources Programme
• Two main objectives
• Release audio and video podcasts as OER (open
  content)
• Investigate and disseminate the institutional
  implication of OER release

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• What is open content?
• Content that is licensed in a way that makes it
  freely available to anyone who wants to use it
• Provided you are credited with the creation of
  the original material, you can allow others to
  reuse, redistribute, and adapt/modify (e.g.
  translate) your content
• You can specify if you will allow commercial use
  and if you require adapted versions to use the
  same licence

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• Who else is doing this?
• Our strand Coventry, Exeter, Leeds Met,
  Leicester, Nottingham and Staffordshire
• Other strands for individual academics (8) and
  subject centres (14)
• Globally 170 members of Open Courseware
  Consortium (gt10 courses each) including MIT,
  Yale, Tufts, Open, Kabul Polytechnic
• Others who are not OCW members such as Yale

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• The licence
• Derived from free and open source software
  licensing
• Founded in 2001 by Prof Lawrence Lessig at the
  University of Stanford
• Designed to push back against increased enclosure
  of intellectual commons
• Six general, regionalised licences for easy
  sharing of rights in content
• A suite of machine-, human- and lawyer-readable
  licences

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• What are the conditions?
• Attribution
• Non-commercial
• No Derivatives
• Sharealike
• More information from creativecommons.org

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• Our approach
• Built on the success of podcasts.ox.ac.uk and
  iTunesU widespread participation providing a
  pool of academics to approach
• Inhabit an existing content production workflow
  (iTunesU) and adapted it to make OER release a
  low-effort option (including IPR process)
• Used agents to communicate the value of the
  project around the institution
• Encouraged devolved model of content production
  but supported the majority of recordings from the
  podcasting service

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A small selection
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• Achievements so far
• 8 lecture series (around 65-70 hours)
• 30 sets of other resources (including seminars,
  interviews, conference presentations and panel
  discussions).
• Over 180 media items are currently available as
  open content through http//podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open
  spires.html
• Over 100 Oxford academics and visiting have
  signed theOpenSpires (Creative Commons) licence
• Subject areas already covered include politics,
  economics, environmental change, business,
  research ethics, medicine, physics, English,
  classics, art history, philosophy ....

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• Delivery channels

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• Lessons learned
• Building on existing workflows means OER release
  is more likely to continue even without further
  funding
• Less resistance from academics than expected
• Must have minimal impact on academics time
• Audio is cost-effective simple entry point
• Contributors want easy, clear legal process
• Our material may prove more attractive for re-use
  than full course materials
• and many more, see our final report in April

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• More information
• http//openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
• Please visit
• http//podcasts.ox.ac.uk/openspires.html
• Thank you!