[okfn-discuss] Is OpenCourseWare really open?

Wed Feb 27 17:44:44 UTC 2013

Dear all,

While searching for interesting content we could publish and enrich on
SlideWiki (SlideWiki.org) I found the OpenCourseWare Consortium and
their courses:

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/en/courses

I dug a little, but did not find many courses really openly licensed
according to the open definition. Most of them are CC-NC-SA or even
CC-NC-ND, which (according to my understanding) do not conform to the
open definition.

I find the restriction to non-commercial quite unnatural and do not
think that there are really benefits for the authors/publishers by
limiting commercial reuse - they do not seem to offer commercial
licenses anyway. On the other hand, allowing (small) educational
business (e.g. in developing countries) to reuse their content could
increase the impact of OpenCourseWare a lot.

Does anyone know whether this topic was discussed somewhere already? or
Do you think something (advocating truly open licenses for OCW) should
be done in this regard?

Best,

Sören

-- 
Working on LOD2 - from Linked Data 2 Knowledge: http://lod2.eu

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Sören Auer, AKSW/Computer Science Dept., University of Leipzig
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer,  Skype: soerenauer