Open Educational Resources and Artificial Intelligence-Generated Material

 https://affordablelearninggeorgia.org/resources/opengenai

I share this link because it leads to information about The University System of Georgia's policy statement on AI use in Open Educational Resources (OERs). 

For those who don't know, OERs are not just homemade textbooks. They are designed for wide distribution digitally and should be well researched and designed to be at parity with publishers' text. If done correctly, they use no material that is under copyright or that needs permission (and therefore perhaps payment), including images or text. They can utilize links to open access material on the Internet. The goal is to not breach copyright law and to keep them zero cost. Actually, the goal is to provide a better to or equal than option to traditional textbooks, which can extremely expensive. 

OERs use Creative Commons licensing to protect the integrity of their use and to keep the author's work from being "stolen" and sold. I am not sure how viable that is, but neither is copyright, really. (Copyright is well misunderstood; Stanford University has the best webpages on it.)

I've been part of this movement since 2015 and am the editor/primary author of one of the world's most used textbooks, Exploring Public Speaking. 

So, could an OER just be created by AI?

In short: don't, or at least, tread very carefully. No, forget the "at least." Just don't. There are so many reasons.... 

AI generators are mega borrowers without attribution. So we know what that means.  

AI-generators can make pretty good multiple-choice questions if you upload some text and specify exactly what you want. It is amazing, like a magic toy. I tell the users of Exploring to do that for more questions; however, I would not recommend it globally (that is, to take an OER or publisher's text and upload questions). Some lines might be crossed.

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