I’m on my way to the HOME conference in Porto, Portugal tomorrow, so I sat down to read the recently released report to the European Commission on “new modes of learning and teaching in higher education.” Two things struck me about the report. First, it addresses all of the issues that are on the table: faculty development, credit transferability, data and privacy, learning analytics, quality in open and online education, licensing, new pedagogies [!], and even funding. But the second point is about open education and open learning: to be truly transformative, the inefficiencies of the all-rights-reserved regime have to be replaced by the model of open licensing of publicly funded educational resources.
Governments and higher education institutions should work towards full open access of educational resources. In public tenders open licences should be a mandatory condition, so that content can be altered, reproduced and used elsewhere. In publicly (co-)funded educational resources, the drive should be to make materials as widely available as possible.