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What is Open Education/Free for Education?
'Open Education' is an international movement about making educational resources freely and openly available for educators and students to use, modify and share for teaching and learning. This movement is quite popular in America, the UK and South Africa and is slowly expanding in Australia.
For more information on the 'open education' movement, see the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.
'Free for education' is part of the 'open education' movement, but is not as broad. 'Free for education' resources allow educators and students to freely copy and use resources for educational purposes, but do not permit the resources to be modified and shared.
Many Australian institutions which produce resources for the education sector specifically select to permit the free use and copying of their material for educational purposes. This is stated either in the terms and conditions or copyright statement on their website. They do this to ensure that teachers and students are able to copy and use the material without charge.
A website will be 'free for education' if its terms and conditions or copyright statement permit copying for any of the following uses:
- Educational use
- Non-commercial use
- Use in your organisation
- Personal or non-commercial use
- Free copying
A website will not be 'free for education' if the terms and conditions or copyright statement state that copying is permitted for:
- Personal use
- Personal and non-commercial use
- Personal, non-commercial
- Copying not permitted
Alternatively, a website, or material on the website, may be made available under a Creative Commons licence. For further information on Creative Commons, see information sheet, 'Creative Commons Resources for Schools'.
