Academic Integrity in a Digital Age

If we are to prepare Open Educational Resources, there is a need to have platforms in which these materials can be prepared and used. If one is having free materials available online, how will users access materials is an issue to be considered. In this topic we get into a discussion about intellectual property and the open source software. According to William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ‘OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge’. Thus, for OER to work has to have a platform in which its availability is unlimited. The platforms that make OER to be prepared and accessed widely are not other than software. It is a software that will support material's creator to efficiently create the material, it is also a software that will ensure materials are formatted in a way that they can be distributed, used, and reused.

Software is a general term for various kinds of programs used to operate computers and related devices. If someone develops software, then a source code underlying that software is a certain kind of property. In software development, one should always make sure that agreements or contracts specify who will own intellectual property that results from the development of that software. Computer software is also protected by copyright law which gives the owner of the work certain rights over it, and makes it illegal for others to use. In education with the era of OER, it is a challenge there are materials, but one cannot have a software through which one could access the learning resources.

 Open source software refers to software for which the source code (underlying programming code) is made freely available for use, reading the code, changing it, or developing further versions, including adding amendments to it (Lochhaas & Moore, 2010; Daniel, 2006;). According to free software foundation ‘Free software means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis’. Therefore a free software gives permission for users to run at their wish and for the purpose they feel they need it. At the same time, users can develop their own software as do have access to the code and allowed to change the code to suit their needs. Users in a free software can distribute and redistribute to anybody and allowed also to distribute a changed or modified code so that others can benefit from the changed codes. The four characteristics of free software suit well with OER.

Although they are made available for free, the distribution of it is controlled under the license where the most popular ones being General Public License (GPL) and Mozilla Public License (MPL). Despite the fact that open source software is distributed without charge, but it is still protected by copyright law and the author’s and owner’s right are fully protected. If the owner of copyright in software wants to allow others to use and modify it for free, then a number of legal issues may arise.