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MicroBiology ToDAy

sharing educational resources can Photos.com / Thinkstock be a great time-saver for busy academics. While its unlikely that you will find an entire microbiology course that exactly fits your local needs (and would you get any credit from your institution if you did reuse someone elses course?), valuable course components that have been developed elsewhere can and should be reused. Martin Weller at the Open University makes the distinction between big and little open educational resources (OERs) institutionally generated courses with explicit teaching aims versus individually produced, lowcost resources. Big OERs would include projects such as the MIT Open Courseware project and Apples iTunes U, while little OERs are generally distributed via the internet and can be discovered by simple tools such as Google searches. Aside from the issue of institutional credit, many people are put off using OERs because of concerns about copyright and other legal issues. Items which carry conventional copyright cannot legally be reused without explicit permission from the copyright holder (which is usually not the original author), and this is often difficult, slow and sometimes costly to obtain. In recent years, new types of intellectual property protection have appeared. These are intended to promote reuse where the author wishes this to happen. The best known of these is the Creative Commons Licence, which comes in a variety of forms, each of which specifies what can be done with the attached content anything ranging from a single image to an entire course. CC-BY: Attribution-only licence users can do what they want with the content as long as credit is attached for the original creator. CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike allows reuse as long as credit is given and derivatives are licensed under identical terms. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects. CC BY-ND: Attribution-NoDerivs reuse permitted, but no derivative works allowed. CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial forbids commercial exploitation. This is not as simple as it seems. Educational institutions (which charge fees) are generally regarded as non-commercial, but this is open to challenge, so the confusion around CC BY-NC licences inhibits reuse and means they are best avoided (likewise CC BYNC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND). The problems surrounding reuse of intellectual property means that in spite of considerable investment in the UK (and worldwide), uptake and reuse of teaching materials has been generally disappointing. There is also the issue of quality just

open educational resources should be made use of why re-invent the wheel? but how does one deal with copyright and assess quality? a new project oerbital has been set up to overcome these issues.

alan cann

AUg 2011

because an item has been labelled for reuse does not mean that it is any good! To try to counteract these problems, the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have funded a series of projects aimed at promoting reuse. For bioscientists, the UK Centre for Bioscience is currently running the OeRBITAL (Open Educational Resources for Bioscientists Involved in Teaching and Learning) project, which aims to discover, collate, annotate and release OERs covering a range of disciplines within the biosciences, including microbiology. Ten discipline consultants have been recruited from across the biosciences to handle their own specialist subject specialties. I am the microbiology consultant for the project. The carefully selected, fully annotated outputs of the OeRBITAL project are available online, including the microbiology collection: http:// heabiowiki.leeds.ac.uk/oerbital/index.php/Microbiology We encourage you and your colleagues to explore and exploit the full range of resources highlighted on the OeRBITAL website, and if you or your colleagues have or know of resources that might usefully be added to this collection, please email me at alan.cann@le.ac.uk

aLan Cann Department of biology, University of leicester

further reading and resOurCes apple itunes U: www.apple.com/education/itunes-u
creative commons: http://creativecommons.org Mit open courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu oerbital project: http://heabiowiki.leeds.ac.uk/oerbital/index.php/Main_Page UK centre for bioscience: www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk Weller, Martin (2010). big and little oEr. in open Ed 2010 Proceedings. http://openaccess.uoc.edu/webapps/o2/bitstream/10609/4851/6/Weller.pdf
Please note that views expressed in comment do not necessarily reflect official policy of the SGM council.

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Open educational resources