Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ MOOCs trend towards open enrollment, not licensing

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

According to Timothy Vollment, "An OER cannot be freely available or openly licensed—it must be both freely available andopenly licensed (or in the public domain) to be an OER." The earlier MOOCs such as CCK08 were both (and for good measure, ran on open source software), but the later MOOCs have drifted away from that ideal. "As MOOCs continue to develop course content and experiment with various business models," he writes, "we think it's crucial that they consider adopting open licenses as a default on their digital education offerings." Why? It increases the reach of their materials, it serves even more learners, and it streamlines reuse. The MOOCs we designed made use of open educational materials wherever they were on the web; we did not centralize all content in our own system. This distributed approach - plus open licensing - allows the same content to be used in multiple MOOCs, and assists learners in making connections between subjects across domains. (Image by Giulia Forsythe)

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 25, 2024 7:30 p.m.

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