OER1166a Short Paper (Part of Symposium OER1166) ppt

Consent Commons: a proposed model for recognising the rights of people to refuse or withdraw from participation in open educational resources.

Suzanne Hardy, Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine, Newcastle University
Jane Williams, Centre for Medical Education, University of Bristol
Megan Quentin-Baxter, Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine, Newcastle University

Conference Theme: Collaboration and communities

Abstract: What if a teacher appearing in OER passes away, and their family requests the resources are withdrawn? Copyright and data protection laws fails to safeguard OER users and contributors from the moral risks associated with the depiction of people in, for example, video, podcasts, images, stories, patient histories, etc. Health is particularly aware of the ethical issues that are also relevant to the whole OER community. A new 'Consent Commons' licensing framework clarifying the permissions for using and reusing digital recordings of people for educational purposes was proposed at Open Ed 20101. Consent Commons (like Creative Commons) recognises the rights of patients, carers, their families, teachers, clinicians, actors, students and members of the public to have some say in how digital recordings of them are used (including refusing or withdrawing their consent), and is necessary in order to ensure the long term sustainability of OER.

Consent Commons:

• Complements Creative Commons to identify the consent status of recordings of people appearing in educational resources;
• Is a set of principles reflecting ethical best practice, not an automatic right (like copyright);
• Accepts a basic human right for people to refuse digital recordings of themselves appearing and, where they have previously consented, their right to withdraw that consent;
• Works like Creative Commons in that educational resources would be hallmarked with a licence illustrating the consent status, and when consent needed to be reviewed or has been withdrawn;
• Has levels of release (e.g. closed, 'restricted', open but review [date]; fully open, etc.);
• Requires new technologies to enable data subjects to review recordings, and OER to be able to ‘check for updates/status’ and warn users if resources have been withdrawn or updated/replaced (OOER, 2010).

Progress will be reported, together with illustrative scenarios when Consent Commons could ameliorate uncertainty about the status of educational resources depicting people, protect institutions from legal risk by facilitating the development of robust and sophisticated policies and promoting best practice in managing their information. Participants will be invited to feed in experiences and advice.

Keywords: consent; data protection; healthcare; clinical recordings; medicine; dentistry; veterinary medicine; elearning ukoer; creative commons; rights; patients; copyright

 References:

Williams, J.E. Hardy, S. Quentin-Baxter, M. (2010). Proposing a ‘Consent Commons’ in open education – balancing the desire for openness with the rights of people to refuse or withdraw from participation, OpenEd2010. Available from http://www.medev.ac.uk/static/uploads/Open_Ed_2010_Williams_Hardy_Baxter_v4_clean_final.doc accessed 30 November 2010.