An Evaluation of Open Educational Resources with the Digital Repositories of the Indira Gandhi National Open University, India

Increased availability of quality multi-media learning resources in the web has led to the possibility of Institutions and learners using them for their course provision and learning. This has facilitated in improving quality of curriculum materials and transaction. But this potential can be best utilized only if a substantial pool of quality assured resources are available which people can use, modify, reuse and distribute without terms and conditions enforced by the nature of copyright. Today one of the major problems being faced by users of online digital resources is that they cannot even print or reproduce in any forms most of the materials available because of the copy right laws. It was in this context that the origin and emergence of Open Educational Resources (OER) is being considered as a major movement in education. These resources are available as freeware or with varied degrees of freedom of use and distribution copyrighted under the Creative commons public License drafted based on the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works as amended in 1979, the Rome Convention of 1961, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) copyright treaty of 1996, the WIPO Performances and Phonograms treaty of 1996 and the Universal Copy Right Convention (as revised in 1971). Even though OER is gaining wide popularity in many countries such as India, attempts to create and share multimedia learning resources in the web has not considered all degrees of freedom possible with OER under the creative commons copyright. One of the major resources of multimedia digital resources in higher education available in India is created by the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in its digital repositories the major one being ‘E-Gyankosh’. The present paper reports a study of these repositories mainly from the point of view of use, share, reuse and edit by other institutions and learners. The authors use the creative commons copyright criteria for this purpose.