Sharing Educational Content

The next session is chaired by Deputy Vice-Chancellor Arun Sharma from QUT. He notes the need to find pathways between commercial and free content - neither can exist simply by itself and both are needed in a fully functional environment. It is therefore important to support the entire continuum of approaches. Further, he also points out that applying creative content or other new licence schemes to new content is one project - but it is also necessary to consider the large amount of existing content and work out whether there are ways to apply such licences retroactively and thereby return older material to circulation.

The first presentation, by Carol Fripp and Dennis Macnamara, is on AEShareNet, a system for the online trading and sharing of learning materials. The project recognises the need for quick access to adaptable learning resources in the educational sector. (This includes workable licence and copyright clearance provisions for such resources.) AEShareNet is owned by the Australian Ministers of Education, and was set up to create a trading marketplace for learning materials, brokering between the different participants in that market.

The system includes a variety of licence protocols for the content it covers, offering different usage restrictions (analogous, but not identical, to the Creative Commons framework). It also involves a consistent metadata scheme which enables efficient online brokering. One of these is the Free for Education (FfE) licence template, which enables providers of educational content to label their material as being available for educational use much in the same way that the CC licence labels operate. Overall, then, the system allows users to search, locate, preview, and purchase educational material.

So in other words, charging for content is possible in this environment; there is a commercial licence in addition to the open content ones (and AEShareNet handles these financial transactions, again as a broker). What's important is to get the balance right between commercial and open content approaches. Overall, the project aims to reduce wasteful duplication in the production of educational resources, and to maximise the use of existing resources while also enabling the customisation of resources for specific contexts.