I Don't Want To Make Too Much Out Of This, But...
2 min read
At the outset, I want to make it clear that this blog post is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of all things related to Open Educational Resources at the US Federal level.
But with that said, from a high level, it's interesting seeing the move toward Open Educational Resources, and how they are referenced more frequently as both criteria for grants and as a deliverable of these grants.
At the Federal Department of Education is helping with outreach to articulate why OER's work.
In 2011, in a joint program between the Departments of Labor and Education, 2 Billion dollars were put toward a program that explicitly required materials produced be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. In February, 2012, a second wave of funding was announced for the program.
And, in a related note, the inclusion of OERs is now listed as a priority for the Discretionary Grant Programs - broadly speaking, this means that Federal grant applications that explicitly reference OERs as part of the grant deliverables mayhave a better chance than other proposals.
Given this general trend at the Federal level, I wonder if/when this will translate into changes at the local level. For example, given the amount of public money being given each year to textbook companies to get proprietary content, why shouldn't there be a directive stating that public money should be spent on acquiring openly licensed content?
At the very least, the trend toward a broader support and use of OER should diminish support for school districts trying to claim copyright over teacher's work.
