While the debate over more restrictive copyright laws in Canada continues, there is an international movement of educators who believe passionately that learning materials should be free, open and accessible to all.

Launched about three years ago, WikiEducator is a global community resource conceived and developed by the Commonwealth of Learning and the Open Education Resource Foundation. The goal is to provide ever wider access to quality material that is easily reproduced online. WikiEducator is working with schools and community colleges throughout the commonwealth to put their material on its site.

As a member of the Open Education Resource Foundation, Athabasca University was asked to host the WikiEducator servers. The partnership is a good fit because of AU's support of the open access movement, said Rory McGreal, associate vice-president research at AU and a member of the board of the Open Education Resource Foundation.

"The key is that WikiEducator is free and available," he said. "Faculty have course development responsibilities that can be alleviated using open education resources. There is a huge body of open educational resources freely available to use in development, design and integration of courses. Educators could assemble much of their courses from material that is already out there."

McGreal believes the major issue confronting course developers using proprietary content is the proposed new copyright laws. "The Canadian government is currently considering very stringent copyright laws based on a United States model. This could create significant difficulties, particularly for open and online institutions, in making use of proprietary content. We have to look for alternatives. One is open access where we share what we create with others and avoid copyright issues altogether."

Issues around copyright are very complex. One small example of the difficulties created by the proposed laws is that academic institutions would be required to destroy online proprietary material within one week of a final exam. For a university such as AU, where exams are taken year-round, it is an absurd law, McGreal said. The new laws are encouraging people to develop a parallel system of open software and open educational material that bypasses the proprietary system. "As the laws get more stringent and restrictive, people won't use proprietary material."