it is critical that faculty members be given the time, resources, and support they need in order to create and adopt open education content and undertake a shift to open education practices and pedagogy. For an example of this sort of endeavor, see the open textbook Clinical Procedures for Safer Patient Care that was written by faculty from British Columbia (licensed CC BY 4.0 at https://opentextbc.ca/clinicalskills/).
In general, primary and secondary (K–12) teachers are less likely to:
- have the time, resources, and support to produce and revise educational resources;
- own the copyright to the content they create (though this depends on their contract with the school or district); and
- make unilateral decisions regarding what content is used in their curriculum.
As such, OER adoption in primary and secondary schools tends to occur at the district or school level, rather than at the level of individual teachers. For an example of this, see the blog post Creative Commons policies grow in New Zealand schools (https://creativecommons.org/2014/10/06/creative-commons-policies-grow-in-new-zealand-schools/).
Open Educational Resources (a very brief timeline)
While there isn’t enough space in this section to give a comprehensive overview of the “History of Open Education,” here are several of the pivotal events that contributed to the growth of the Open Education movement.
- 1969: UK Open University opens
- 1983: Free software movement founded with launch of GNU
- 1991: World Wide Web becomes publicly available
- 1997: MERLOT project begins
- 1998: U. S. Copyright Term Extension Act
- 1998: The term open content is coined, and the Open Content License is released
- 1999: Open Publication License is released
- 1999: Connexions launches (renamed OpenStax in 2012)
- 2001: Wikipedia is founded
- 2001: Creative Commons is founded
- 2001: MIT Open CourseWare is established
