The first annual Open Education Week runs from 5 – 10 March 2012.  It’s a global event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially Open Educational Resources (OER).

Find out what is happening in Open Education Week here. A great initiative is the Why Open Education Matters video competition, which will award cash prizes for the best short videos that explain the use and promise of free, high-quality OER and describe the benefits and opportunities these materials create for teachers, students and schools. All entries must be shared under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. You can read more about it here.

If you’d like to join the OER movement, you could start by licensing some of your own materials under a Creative Commons licence which will enable others to use it in the educational environment.  Or, you can readily locate and use existing materials that have been released under a Creative Commons licence.

Creative Commons Australia has produced several guides on copyright and how Creative Commons licences can be used on educational and research materials to ensure that they can be easily located, openly accessed and reused.

Our Educators Resources page (http://creativecommons.org.au/learn-more/educators-resources) includes a series of fact sheets for teachers and students on what CC is, how to find CC material and the best way to attribute CC material.  These fact sheets were developed by the Ministerial Council on Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs.

See also the following publications:

Our CC and Government page (http://creativecommons.org.au/sectors/government) also has a guide which explains how CC licences can be used to achieve open access to government material and provides practical step-by-step guidance for potential licensors:

The following publications, the full-text of which may be accessed online, may also be of interest: