Providing free learning with pathways to formal credit, the OERu officially launched on Friday November 1, 2013 at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops British Columbia. “In basing your learning and teaching on OER, you have an excellent opportunity to treat the minds of your students primarily as fires to be set alight rather than as vessels to be filled with the knowledge of just one teacher,” said Sir John Daniel, former UNESCO Assistant Director General of Education and open learning visionary.

Coordinated by the Open Education Resource Foundation, headquartered in New Zealand, the OERu is an independent, not-for-profit network that offers free online university courses for students worldwide using open educational resources (OER). As a designated project of the UNESCO-COL OER Chair network and with over thirty-two partners from five continents, the OERu is using OER to provide more affordable ways for learners to gain academic credit towards qualifications from recognized, accredited institutions.

“The OERu makes affordable education accessible to everyone,” said Open Education Resource Foundation Director Dr. Wayne Mackintosh. “All you need is an internet connection and you can study independently from home, with access to world-class courses from recognized institutions around the world. It’s about sharing knowledge and the sustainability of education.”

Research from the Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO predicts that an additional one hundred million post-secondary learners will be entering into the tertiary education system over the next fifteen years. “The key challenge we are trying to address is how to provide spaces for the additional one hundred million students – that’s the equivalent of building four sizeable universities with roughly 30,000 students each, every week for the next 15 years,” said Mackintosh. The OERu aims to provide students excluded from the formal education sector with learning pathways to credible credentials.

Coming at a time of dramatically rising higher education cost and high youth unemployment, the OERu provides a parallel learning universe based solely on OER, quality assurance, and institutional accreditation. The OERu sees OER as a key means of expanding and sustaining higher education and aims to see OER and open education practices integrated into every institution in the world.

The distinctively open aspects of the OERu, including its use of open-source software, open peer review, open public input, open file formats and open educational resources are key differentiators from MOOCs. Another major difference is the OERu’s commitment to providing students with the option of getting formal credit for their study for a small fee.

“The OERu will reduce the cost of higher education dramatically,” says Sir John Daniel. “I believe that radical innovations in higher education must be accompanied by particularly robust frameworks of accreditation and credentialing in order to reassure the public. It’s all very well for evangelists to promote do-it-yourself accreditation from the personal safety of CVs replete with reputable qualifications, but ordinary people want the ‘beef’ of proper recognition too.”

The OERu launch at Thompson Rivers University coincided with the second meeting of the OERu open network of partners including post-secondary institutions, nonprofits, government, and international agencies who all engaged in an intensive two-day implementation planning meeting. I was delighted to attend and contribute to the planning, including a summary of a two-week-long discussion exploring OERu’s unique differentiators, operations, micro-credentials, potential use of textbook zero, and quality assurance processes. Livestream recordings of the OERu launch and plenary meetings are available from the Thompson Rivers University live streaming channel.

At the time of launch, the OERu is offering two credentials – one undergraduate and one post-graduate and is experimenting with micro Open Online Courses – mOOCs. As an open network the OERu is expanding the courses and credentials it is offering and its partners. Organizations choose to join the OERu for three main reasons:

1. to be part of a global network of “like-minded” institutions
2. to participate in the philanthropic mission of widening access to more affordable education, especially for learners excluded from the formal higher education sector
3. to learn new business models and retain a competitive advantage as open education approaches become more mainstream

As Estrella Patrick Moller First Nations Elder for the Secwepemc Nation put it in her OERu launch blessing, “I thank all of you for having big dreams… Help us to reach hundreds and hundreds and millions of people so that mother earth will be covered with people on an equal footing with education.”

Related links:

• Free Open Learning University Launches at TRU, CFJC TV, Kamloops, 1 November 2013.
• TRU joins free education movement. Online university combines resources from around the world. The Daily New, Kamloops, 1 November 2013.
• Open Educational Resource university is launched, University World News, 1 November 2013.
• The free university launching in NZ. TVNZ Breakfast, 2013
• The launch of OERu: Towards free learning opportunities for all students worldwide, BCcampus, 31 October 2013.
• Mooc rival OERu puts accreditation on menu, Times Higher Education, 31 October 2013.
• Polytech opens a door to the world, Otago Daily Times, 26 October 2013.
• Open Educational Resource university to be launched worldwide, 25 October, 2013.

Finally the Arabic translation… / Muhammad Basheer / CC BY

Following a multi-year process and the dedication of several Creative Commons Arab regional teams and communities, Creative Commons is very proud to announce that its 3.0 license suite is now available in Arabic. The Egypt 3.0 licenses were completed by our CC Egypt team, hosted by the Access To Knowledge initiative at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria. The porting effort was led by copyright expert Hala Essalmawi, with the support of Hani Sawiress.

The process of porting the 3.0 licenses endured a lengthy and eventful journey spanning the changing cultural and political climate in the Arab world. Although CC is on the cusp of publishing the 4.0 license suite, an international suite that we do not expect to port but instead translate, the Egypt 3.0 licenses are being published to recognize and celebrate the tireless effort of all of the affiliates and community members in the Arab world who cooperated to make their publication a reality after more than half a decade of effort.

Localization efforts in the Arab world began in earnest more than six years ago with affiliates in Jordan and, thereafter, in Egypt. Jordanian copyright law experts Rami Olwan and Ziad Maraqa worked early on to raise awareness of CC licenses and their potential for bolstering the existing culture of sharing found throughout the Arab world. The CC Egypt porting team leveraged those drafting efforts as a starting point for the Egypt licenses.

One of the biggest challenges of the process involved translation. Arabic is the official language of the 22 members of the Arab League, and is spoken by more than 300 million people in many different dialects. The Egyptian effort required attention to pan-regional considerations knowing that the licenses would be adopted by users outside of Egypt.

The CC Egypt team partnered with many others to complete the licences, including a group of passionate lawyers and activists from other Arabic-speaking countries. Among other important work, this group considered options for translating CC’s English legal code into modern standard Arabic while ensuring that the license names and elements (Attribution, ShareAlike, NonCommercial, and NoDerivatives) would be understood by Arabic-speakers across the region and embraced by end-users, not just lawyers. An important milestone in the localization effort came during the 2nd Arab Regional Meeting in Doha, Qatar, in October 2010. There, legal experts and community members from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and UAE, together with CC HQ, forged agreement on those terms. For those interested in more details, see the minutes (PDF) and a summary of the translation discussion in Arabic.

Worth noting is the pivotal role played by Bassel Safadi aka Khartabil, free internet pioneer and CC’s lead in Syria. Bassel has been one of the most active members of the CC Arab community, adeptly facilitating dialogue between the legal community and content creators community to produce outcomes useful to both. Bassel has been greatly missed by the Arab and global CC community since his detainment by Syrian authorities in March 2012.

We also acknowledge the dedication of the CC Egypt team and the broader Arab CC community to concluding the licenses and advancing Creative Commons adoption and community building during the many recent turbulent years in the region. The dire political and economic situation of several countries in the Arab world and the uprisings since late 2010 have brought insecurity and challenges to people’s daily lives; yet, they have managed to push forward with a wealth of user-generated, youth-driven creativity. CC communities in the Arab world have paid a tribute to this phenomenon by dedicating the past two regional meetings (2011, Tunis; 2012, Cairo) to supporting the creation of original content in Arabic, whether music or visual art or texts.

With all this in mind, the launch of the Egyptian licenses, our first set of licenses in the Arabic language, may be counted among one of the most significant recent achievements of the global CC community. Congratulations to Hala and her team at Bibliotheca Alexandrina for this masterful accomplishment during especially challenging times. Additionally, special thanks to CC Lebanon’s Mohamed Darwish and Pierre el Khoury whose multi-year contributions to the licenses proved critical, the Egyptian community and the Arab communities who commented and discussed the licenses, and CC’s coordinator for the Arab Region, Donatella della Ratta, for her dedicated efforts coordinating and supporting the many convenings necessary to complete the licenses.

Hundreds more could be thanked for their participation in this long but fruitful effort, but above all, a warm and sincere expression of gratitude to the passionate Arab people who believe in a culture of openness, transparency and sharing, and fight for it, sometimes paying with their lives. Shukran.

Our friends at SoundCloud just told us about a contest they’re running with the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian publishes audio from its archives on SoundCloud under CC BY-NC. Now, it wants to show off all the possibilities for remixing open content by holding a remix competition:

Now the Smithsonian is calling on you to sample, chop and remix selected recordings from their entire collection of sounds, including recordings of frogs and insects from Encyclopedia of Life, Astrophysical Observatory sounds, Smithsonian Jazz masterworks, and Smithsonian Folkways.

The rules are simple. Submissions may be any length, but must incorporate at least two Smithsonian tracks.

Prizes include free SoundCloud Pro accounts and tickets to a special event at the Smithsonian in November.

Hurry! Entries are due November 8.

It’s been a long time since we last wrote about the ongoing discussion of the NonCommercial and NoDerivatives licenses. Recall that last year CC heard suggestions that it should stop offering NC and ND licenses in future versions of our license suite because these licenses do not create a true commons of open content that everyone is free to use, redistribute, remix, and repurpose.

The CC community agreed to not make such a radical change as to stop offering the NC or ND licenses in the soon-to-be-released 4.0 licenses, or to spin off those licenses to another host organization. However, as promised, we have been working on several projects to help explain and clarify these issues to license users.

• We’ve improved information about which CC licenses align with definitions of “Free licenses.”
• We’ve reinstated a color-coded license spectrum graphic and provided descriptive examples of adopters of both Free and non-free licenses.
• We gathered feedback about changing the name of “NonCommercial” to “Commercial Rights Reserved” and decided that the name will stay at “NonCommercial.”

Our friend Gautam John of Indian children’s book publisher Pratham Books emailed us this morning to tell us that Pratham is a finalist for a Google Impact Award. What’s even more exciting is what Gautam’s team wants to do with the award. I’ll let him explain:

Pratham Books will use this award to amplify its existing work by creating an open-source platform that will encourage the creation of new stories, remixing of our openly licensed content and translation of all these stories in local languages. Every creation, new or remixed, will be shared, resulting in a large repository of stories available in various digital formats for free use. All content will be released under Creative Commons licenses.

Pratham Books has been a front-runner in adopting a Creative Commons licensing framework and in the last 5 years we have released over 400 stories and hundreds of illustrations under a CC BY or CC BY-SA license.

Pratham Books now hopes to build a collaborative platform which will scale our existing production of 1600 books across 12 languages to 20,000 books across 25 languages over 3 years! Millions of children across the globe will benefit from this platform.

We’ve been fans of Pratham Books’ work for a long time. The company was featured in The Power of Open as a great example of how open licensing can play a crucial role in a sustainable business model. Last year, Gautam wrote a guest blog for CC about how sharing books under CC has led to the community creating numerous translations, audiobooks, DAISY and braille versions, and even smartphone apps, resulting in far greater reach than the company could have achieved without open licensing.

We’re excited to see Pratham Books undertaking this project. Vote for Pratham!