As part of an Open Education class last year, David Wiley, Jared Stein, Aaron Johnson and I worked together to write an article explaining different levels of “openness” in “open educational resources.” As I blogged about early, this article was recently published by Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning. A version of this article is now available here through BYU’s repository.

Citation for article:

Hilton, J. Wiley, D. Stein, J., Johnson, A. (2010). “The four R’s of openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources.” Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, Volume 25: No. 1: pp. 37-44. The official published version is available here.

Abstract:

A significant movement in education concerns the use of open educational resources. By “open” it is generally meant that the resource is available at no cost to others for adaptation and reuse in different contexts. However “open” is not a simple dichotomy; rather, there is a continuum of openness. We discuss four separate aspects of reuse and demonstrate how these describe different levels of openness. We discuss how the licensing and technical aspects of open educational resources affect the relative openness of an OER. Implications for those creating open educational resources are discussed.