Joint Workshop on Open Educational Resources and Intellectual Property Rights

A study of the state-of-the-art of OER in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Brazil, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Belarus, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan completed by the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education revealed that:

• Most of these countries are at a very early stage of OER movement;
• The concept of OER is not widely recognized in most of these countries;
• The majority of faculty and management staff in higher education institutions remains unfamiliar with OER and related activities.

While there are educational resources openly accessible via Internet, very few of those meet the UNESCO definition of OER. One of the major barriers to the promotion of OER in these countries is uncertainty about intellectual property rights (IPR) with respect to OER.

Objectives:

The UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE), UNESCO Moscow Office, and the UNESCO Communication and Information (CI) Sector in cooperation with the National Research University – Higher School of Economics (HSE, Moscow) are organizing the Joint Workshop on Open Educational Resources to bring together experts in open education and IPR:

• to share experiences in the use of OER in CIS and other non-English speaking countries;
• to upgrade the capacity of UNESCO Member States in production of local content and repurposing of available resources;
• to discuss where and how policies and practices in education need to change in order to harness the potential of OER;
• to raise awareness about UNESCO and UNESCO IITE OER initiatives, tools and products;
• to introduce the open licensing frameworks, discuss ways of harmonizing national IPR regulations with Creative Commons licenses;
• to define and prioritize strategies for next steps and to elaborate appropriate guidelines and recommendations to encourage OER sharing and use.

The Workshop will contribute to a wider strategy “Fostering ICT-enhanced learning through knowledge sharing, Open Educational Resources (OER), networking and cooperation” by promoting OER movement in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and other non-English speaking countries through elaboration of guidelines for the production and use of OER and recommendations for the application of open licenses.

Topics to be discussed:

• Global tendencies in OER
• OER in CIS, China and other non-English speaking countries
• IITE gateway to OER in CIS
• IITE online course on Open Educational Resources
• UNESCO CI Sector OER Community and OER Platform
• Open licenses and Creative Commons under different jurisdictions
• Russian/CIS legislation and Creative Commons licenses
• Strategies for the promotion of open licenses

Expected outcomes:

• Guidelines on the production and use of OER
• Recommendations on open licensing and IPR-related issues

Organizers:

• UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education
• UNESCO Moscow Office
• UNESCO Communication and Information Sector
• National Research University – Higher School of Economics

Workshop venue:

National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow

Target Audience:

Academic staff, researchers, experts in open education, OER and IPR, as well as policy-makers, interested in OER are invited to participate in the Workshop.

Contacts:

Svetlana Knyazeva, UNESCO Moscow Office (s.knyazeva@unesco.org)

Abel Caine, UNESCO Communication and Information (CI) Sector (a.caine@unesco.org)