Part of the COCo team was able to take part at the pre-conference workshop “Getting started with Open Education: Everything you need to know to begin open education projects at your institution”.

It was a very insightful workshop for our project and we report some of the highlights in this post.

The first question that was addressed was the main motivation for opening content and it is simple: we believe that world’s knowledge is a common good.

Some more recent motivation is the increasing importance given to informal learning as well as on-the job and lifelong learning. One important point to pay attention regarding these scenarios is that often students organize their own learning, but to what extend they are skilled to do so and how we can help them is still an open question.

Concerning the movement of opening up, at the moment there is a requirement for clear policy and funding from universities. Other concerns are the heterogeneity (interoperability and accessibility, including being machine readable) of materials and the possibility to evaluate the impact on end-users on using such materials (social network analysis).

Image under a CC0 licence (Public Domain), from Pixabay.

On a more practical level, a few questions to ask before licensing a work:

• Who owns the copyright?
• All material is original?
• What am I allowing?
• Which license suits me?