In 2010, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) instituted the nation's first statewide Open Licensing Policy as an explicit measure to support that planning principle and to begin to use SBCTC-sponsored or managed initiatives to create momentum and competency around OER throughout the system. This policy is focused strongly on educational access, specifying that "All digital software, educational resources and knowledge produced through competitive grants, offered through or managed by SBCTC, will carry a Creative Commons Attributions license."
SBCTC has recently revised the Open Policy implementation model to provide the greater support and education needed in order to ensure this model could be applied agency wide without too much disruption of the workflow. In 2014-15, SBCTC gave out over 120 competitive awards totaling more than $17,500,000 and this model has been applied to each of them. This new model requires that each unit in the Education division is responsible for releasing the grant works that flow through the division under a CC BY license. While the SBCTC eLearning & Open Education department provides support (training, consultation, and troubleshooting) throughout the entire process, each divisional unit makes the customized decision about resources' terms of use based on individual unit's own context and needs. Specifically, this model recommends that all divisional units designate staff responsible for the open licensing of grant-funded work. This model has been successfully applied to several grant projects, such as Project I-DEA (a curriculum design project that develops 34 flipped and blended instructional modules to increase digital, career, and college-readiness skills of adult English learners), the Competency-Based Learning Project(a project that develops a completely online, openly licensed, competency-based business transfer degree), and Faculty Learning Community (a professional learning project that funds faculty learning communities). The project managers reported that this implementation model helped the participants properly mark their works under a CC BY License, thus significantly increasing the awareness of open licensing and OER in general.
However, this policy continues to undergo modification. SBCTC considers this policy as a beginning point of more extended Open Policy that will eventually support not only the SBCTC managed grant works, but also all resources produced by the SBCTC and fellow state government agencies in the field of Education. This session will discuss the process involved in the development and application of the Open Policy Implementation Model, and the vision for the future application of the policy.
