December 2007

Perspective

Moving Towards a Model For Open

Content Provision Through ccLearn

Insight

Bridging the Digital Content Divide

Cover Story ‐ Insight

Case Study
BRIDGING THE DIGITAL CONTENT DIVIDE Bridging the Digital Divide for
By Derek E. Baird, M.A. Humanitarian Purposes

Digital Inclusion: Content, Community and Technology Opinion

Reaching Out Through Mobile

In the 1990s, as the digital age began to bloom,
Technology with the Humble SMS
educators w e r e a m o n g t h e f i r s t t o e m b r a c e t h e
internet and first generation Web 1.0 technologies,
Interview
finding creative and innovative ways to integrate the
internet into their classrooms. Along with the promise A Common Certification Bridging
of e ‐learning came many challenges, including the issue the IT Literacy Divide
of what is commonly known as the “digital divide.”

Features
While the digital divide is being addressed by the global
community through such projects as OLPC and other
One Laptop per Child A
programmes, there are still many schools around the
Commitment to Technology
world stuck in the divide without access to computers
Provision
and/or the internet. This is effectively shutting them
out of the opportunity to connect with the rest of the
Beyond Access From Consuming to
world, engage and participate as a digital citizen and
Producing
lifelong student.

Letters
Following the lead from the open source software and
Web 2 . 0 m o v e m e n t , m e m b e r s o f t h e e d u c a t i o n
Call for letters
community are embracing the user ‐generated content
model and applying it to many different aspects of the education ecosystem.

The open learning approach has resulted in an explosion of a new and burgeoning library of Open Educational
Resources (OER), open source Course Management Systems (CMS), and open learning mashups that have
allowed educators to easily take community‐generated content and remix, adapt, and reuse them to support
teaching and learning in a variety of contexts.

Despite enormous strides towards digital inclusion, technology is only part of the solution. Another vital
component of the digital divide that gets less attention, but is nearly as important is lack of quality, free, and
open content on the web.The key aim of the open learning movement is to have quality educational content
available for students once they cross the digital divide.

The solution to the digital divide is threefold ‐ open source technology (access to computers, CMS, and
internet access), OER community (a global community of practice,pedagogical approaches and peer support),
and availability of open content (OER, OpenCourseWare, user ‐generated content) repositories of educational
materials.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open educational resources (OER) have received attention for their ability to serve as an equitable and
accessible alternative to the rising costs and increased commercialization and privatization of education. For
educators and students, the proliferation of OER collections and repositories has meant centralised access to
materials and the possibility of collaborating and sharing with others.

Educational scholars and members of new OER communities have suggested several new models —ranging from
“educational mashup ” sites, which though common understanding and interfacing allow content to flow from
place to place so that users can easily pull and integrate content across multiple collections, to “micro‐sites”
that serve as a single point of entry across multiple collections and allow educators and learners to impact
educational resources with their own vocabulary, content, and metadata experience.

OPEN EDUCATION RESOURCES (OER)

Educational scholars and members of new OER communities have suggested several new models —ranging from
“educational mashup ” sites, which though common understanding and interfacing allow content to flow from
place to place so that users can easily pull and integrate content across multiple collections, to “micro‐sites”
that serve as a single point of entry across multiple collections and allow educators and learners to impact
educational resources with their own vocabulary, content, and metadata experience.

OPEN EDUCATION RESOURCES (OER)

ORGNISATION RESOURCES
Archive of multimedia and other content from several leading institutions across
BBC Open Archive
the U.K., most notably the BBC and BFI.
COSL Community of practice built around open source education.
OER Commons Teaching and learning network, from K‐12 lesson plans.
Open video content for educators across the U.K. Includes footage for classroom
Teachers TV
use as well as on demand professional development courses.
Kitzu Create multi‐media content for your classroom.
Bookyards Thousands of online books, video, eBooks, links and access to online libraries.
Google has digitised many books from library collections, including hundreds of
Google Books
books related to Old English literature: editions, & translations.
Features children's books from around the world, Children ’s Library selected by
International Digital
kids and adults.
This Australian site celebrates online curriculum projects and the world of unique
The Oz Project
learning opportunities.
Smithsonian.TV Live and archived events and multimedia at the Smithsonian Institution.
A w e b ‐based collection of approximately 1,800 books & pamphlets, 6,000
Harvard Open
photographs, 200 maps, & 13,000 pages from manuscript & archival collections from
Collections Programme
Harvard's library, archives & museums.
iTunesU Thousands of audio and video files from top universities around the world.
Wikiversity Create and share open content multimedia.
Wikibooks Open content textbooks.
Founded by Rice University, this site is a place to share and create open
Connextions
educational resources (OER).
Digital library of free public domain audio books that are read and recorded by
Librivox
volunteers.
The Open Source Teaching Project is a volunteer collaborative focused on
Open Source Teaching
creating meaningful educational bridges among traditionally disconnected
Project
networks.

Creative Commons & ccLearn

Creative Commons, an orgnisation that provides alternative

c o p y r i g h t t o o l s f o r u s e o n w e b ‐based materials, recently
announced the creation of a new initiative specifically designed
for use with OERs. The ccLearn initiative is designed to protect
the intellectual copyright of educators, authors and publishers
while providing content c r e a t o r s w i t h m o r e f r e e d o m t o
distribute educational content with peers, OER repositories and
communities and OpenCourseWare (OCW) platforms. ccLearn is
dedicated to supporting the development of open education
and OER on the internet. Building on the power of Creative Commons, and the generosity and support of the
educational community, ccLearn aims to be a leader in helping the world bridge the content gap.

CREATIVE COMMONS
ORGNISATION RESOURCES
Creative Commons provides licensing tools that let authors, scientists,
Creative Commons artists, and educators mark their work with the remix/reuse freedoms they want it to
carry.
Flickr + Creative
View and use thousands of images by Creative Commons license.
Commons
The Yahoo!+Creative Commons Search can be used to find open content & copyright
Yahoo! Search + free materials for lesson plans or handouts. This is also a powerful search tool for
Creative Commons students looking for open content resources they can use in projects, research, or
reports.

OpenCourseWare

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement has helped some of the world ’s best universities offer teaching,
learning and research resources by publishing their faculty ’s course materials online and making them available
free of charge. Despite the fact that most OCW projects are not technology projects, all of the OCW rely on
web‐based technologies to facilitate the open sharing of knowledge.

Educators are embracing new types of social media to take OCW to the next level and build a community
around their virtual classroom.In addition, a large amount of OCW is being updated to include new multimedia
capabilities and enhanced functionality. The purpose is to replicate class and lab experiences interactively
online using visual technologies.

MIT’s recent evaluation report of its OCW collection revealed that

educators were accessing OERs to support their course planning
and preparation and to enhance their personal knowledge
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006). According to the
MIT report, 96 percent of these educators indicated that MIT ’s
open courseware (OCW) collection has or will help to improve
capabilities and enhanced functionality. The purpose is to replicate class and lab experiences interactively
online using visual technologies.

MIT’s recent evaluation report of its OCW collection revealed that

educators were accessing OERs to support their course planning
and preparation and to enhance their personal knowledge
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006). According to the
MIT report, 96 percent of these educators indicated that MIT ’s
open courseware (OCW) collection has or will help to improve
their courses. Students and self ‐learners, representing the largest
number of OCW users, accessed the collection for various
reasons, including planning future studies, complementing their
existing courses, or improving their personal knowledge.

Utah State University is another one of several universities

providing free and open content course materials for educators,
students, and self ‐learners around the world through the OCW initiative as well as connecting educators, OCW
content providers and learning communities with each other through the Center for Open Sustanable Learning
(COSL) think tank and annual conference.

OPENCOURSEWARE (OCW)

ORGNISATION RESOURCES
Utah State
Provides courses from across all disciplines at Utah State University curriculum.
University OCW
China Open
CORE is committed to providing Chinese universities with free and easy access
Resources For
to global open educational resources.
Education (CORE)
Budapest Open
Spearheading the development of EU Open Course Ware in the EU.
Access Initiative
The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of
Open Content cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental orgnisations from around the
Alliance (OCA) world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitised text and
multimedia content.
MIT OCW Contains 1700 courses from across the MIT curriculum.

OPEN SOURCE COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMS)

ORGNISATION RESOURCES
Moodle Open source CMS for educators who want to create online courses.
Plone Open source CMS platform and collaboration tool.
Open source Virtual Learning Environment to support teaching, learning and
Boddington
research.
Elgg Open source CMS/ social platform.
Online tool for educators to create, publish and share lessons using search
Yahoo! For Teachers
widget called “Gobbler.”
Leonardo Da Vinci Project EU initiative for lifelong learning.
Université C a t h o l i q u e d e This software is a web ‐based course management system that allows
Louvain > Caroline students to download course materials onto smart phones.
Docebo Open source CMS with community features (forums, chat).

It’s About People, Not Technology

In the end, the solution to the issue of digital inclusion is one built around a symbiotic relationship between
those who back the initiative, working together to empower educators to optimise global open education and,
in the process, bridging the technological, community and content divide.

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