In 2017, there were over 1.4 billion Creative Commons licensed works worldwide. As this number continues to grow, it is vital that open content publishers realize the importance of their technical choices when publishing and sharing their works. When creators license their work with a Creative Commons license that gives users permission to reuse, retain, remix, revise, and redistribute and it does not give them a straightforward way to engage in all of those activities, it makes the work much less open. If an open educational resource is in a file format that interferes with a user’s ability to engage in the 5R activities of OER, is that resource really “open?”
While many open licenses legally permit anyone to engage in those 5R activities, there are certain technical choices being made by open content creators that are preventing or making it difficult for others to use their work in the ways they’ve allowed with the open license. One of the ways we often make open content less open is choosing a file format that requires an expensive proprietary software to open and/or edit. Many educators in K-12 and higher education are used to working with software, like Microsoft Office and Adobe Suite, because it is often freely available to students and faculty through the institution. We must keep in mind, however, that not everyone has institutional access or the funds to purchase such software – a simple PDF file can be opened and viewed on almost any operating system and device, but cannot be modified unless a person has Adobe Acrobat (there are now a few other for-cost software options for editing PDFs, as well).
There are both open and closed file formats; closed file formats, like .docx (Microsoft Word) and .pdf (Adobe) are formats born out of proprietary software while open file formats can be utilized by various different software. Visit the Open File Formats Wikipedia page to see a list of all of the open file formats. Though file formats belonging to the Microsoft Office family (e.g. .docx, .ppt. .xlsx) are technically closed file formats, there are several free software, like Google Docs and OpenOffice, that can open, edit, and save files with these file extensions. However, opening a closed file format, like .docx, using something other than Microsoft Word can lead to formatting issues.
The next time you are designing open materials that you want others to be able to modify for their own use, consider using an open file format or creating the work using free software that allows others to make a copy and edit the file. Be aware that there is software for creating graphics, like Adobe Spark, that, while free and easy-to-use, do not allow others to take your file and edit it. If you would like to permit others to modify your openly licensed work, be sure to give them a straightforward way to do so! Here is a great example of a graphic created by BC Campus explaining the benefits of OER in light of COVID-19 that was shared to the CCCOER email group in multiple file formats, which allows more editing options for those that would like to adapt this work.
Here are several free options for creating openly licensed graphics:
- Apache OpenOffice Draw
- Easel.ly
- Canva (you can transfer one design to another account for editing)
- Google Draw
- Inkscape
- Gravit
- Vectr
- Google Slides (choose a custom slide size and create infographics that can be edited by anyone with a Google account)
Featured Image: “Open Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry” by cogdogblog is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
.jpg){kind=link}