Open or closed?
Open Educational Resources (OER) and their history
Educational resources refer to any material, nowadays mostly digital, which will play a part in education: textbooks, slides, curricula, exams,... They will be open when they can be freely shared with others (but a more exact definition will be given in a moment).Even if education has been open in many aspects in several moments of history, the actual terms were better understoodT. he following definitions of OER and Open License were revised in connection with the Recommendation on November 25, 20193:
1. Open educational resources (OER) are learning, teaching, and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that has been released under an open license and that permit no-cost access, reuse, repurpose, adaptation, and redistribution by others.
2. An open license is a license that respects the intellectual property rights of the copyright owner and provides permissions granting the public the right to access, reuse, repurpose, adapt, and redistribute educational materials.
The terms open content and OER refer to any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms such as open source) that is licensed to grant the following rights (also known as the 5 Rs)1,2:
• to Retain - the right to make, possess, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, reproduce, store, and manage).
• to Reuse - the right to use the content in a variety of ways (e.g., in class, in a study group, on a website, in a video).
• to Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language).
• to Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., to embed the content).
• to Redistribute - the right to distribute copies of the original content, revisions, or their combination to others.
It should be noted that these rights are non trivial: for example, the third right is essential for teachers: to be allowed to take someone's learning material and adapt to one's own purpose, to the duration and level of one's classroom, perhaps to geographic and cultural specificities.
Why AI wants open data
On the other hand, as demonstrated in different parts of this book, and also by the financial investments of the industry, Education can be seen as a market. And as machine learning if the principal force driving Artificial Intelligence, it is fair to deduce that for AI to thrive, AI for Education will need data.The difference between user data and knowledge data
The sort of data AI for education will be needing is of two types.Data about the users. How do they learn? What triggers good learning? What allows to better learn? As Daphne Koller once put it: ‘Let's make education science into a data science!’
This data can only be produced by the users themselves. It is therefore essential for companies to own platforms with which Users will be asked to interact. This has been the key to success of many AI companies and will be the key for success in education.
The second type of data concerns knowledge. In education, courseware represents a large chunk of this knowledge. This data is or isn't shared: in most cases knowledge creators or collectors may know little about licenses and the material they have produced will be hidden in University repositories, on strange blogs, or shared inside specific groups on social networks. Some of this knowledge is of course behind paywalls and some is on sites whose business model involves offering the knowledge for free, but in a setting in which one has to view adverts and unwanted publicity to get or maintain access.
User data has to be protected
In the first case the data -the user data- has to be protected. More so if this data belongs to under age pupils. Which means that the school or the teacher should not share this data with platforms unless they are explicitly allowed to do so. Even when the platform does offer some interesting service. In a similar way, it is never a good idea to register the names and addresses of one's pupils in order to participate in some activity. Please refer to the video about data and reidentification for details.The European Union has provided a robust framework to protect its citizens, their privacy, their digital rights. This is called the GDPR. The GDPR protects by giving the citizens rights that have to be granted by the platforms, whether they are for education or not.
Knowledge data should be shared
On the other hand, knowledge can be shared. And should be shared. Obviously this is only possible when one has the right to do this, which means understanding how licensing works. Creative commons licenses are usually those that work best for OER.Once OER are shared, artificial intelligence can be used by many things, such as those present in project X5-GON.
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1Wiley, D., & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-enabled pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 19(4).
2Wiley, D (2014).The Access Compromise and the 5th R.
3UNESCO. (2019). Recommendation on open educational resources (OER).
