Technology considerations
While the Creative Commons license that you adopt may provide legal permission for users of your OER to engage in the 5R activities (Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute), inappropriate technology choices may interfere with a user’s ability to engage in one or more of these activities.
ALMS
Wiley’s ALMS Framework is a tool for accessing the degree to which technical choices support the degree of openness of a content license.
Access to Editing Tools
- Is the open content published in a format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that are extremely expensive?
- Is the open content published in an exotic format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that run on an obscure or discontinued platform? Is the open content published in a format that can be revised or remixed using tools that are freely available and run on all major platforms (e.g., OpenOffice)?
Level of Expertise Required
- Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount of technical expertise to revise or remix?
- Is the open content published in a format that requires a minimum level of technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Word)?
Meaningfully Editable
- Is the open content published in a manner that makes its content essentially impossible to revise or remix (e.g., a scanned image of a handwritten document)?
- Is the open content published in a manner making its content easy to revise or remix (e.g., a text file)?
Self-Sourced
- To truly make your OER open, you must provide the source file so that others will be able to edit the material.
- Sometimes the source file is in a different format than the version shared. Provide a link to the source file.
This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.