The African Storybook initiative works with organizations and individuals to facilitate access to storybooks and create website tools for users to create, translate, and adapt them. So far, the initiative has created storybooks in 94 African languages with the support of 30 partner organizations across Africa.

Multiple projects in multiple countries use the website and/or storybooks with the intervention of the African Storybook project team: schools or community libraries serve as pilot sites; governments use the content on their platforms to print and distribute; and partners add to and use content in their literacy development programmes. In addition, the project serves educators who integrate the website tools and storybooks into their pre-service training programs, as well as lecturers in higher education institutions stimulating their postgraduate students to experiment with and research use of the African Storybook. The remixable content also inspired the Global African Storybook Project, which translates the stories into other languages with few resources for childhood learning.

As of September 2016 the initiative contained 730 storybooks and 2,754 translations/adaptations. In only two years, 636,803 storybooks were downloaded with an average of 4800 visitors per month, of which 2,800 are new visitors. Further, the Global African Storybook Project has produced 460 translations in 26 languages. Between 30 and 400 African Storybook titles have been republished on a variety of academic and commercial sites.

Wikimedia Indonesia has been working since 2013 to digitize and provide free access to cultural documents in Indonesia, but this year’s agreement with Horison is a landmark in their ability to work with cultural institutions and creators to upload their content and preserve modern Indonesian history using Wikimedia and other cultural content aggregators. The CC Indonesia team worked directly with the editorial board and Wikimedia Indonesia in order to teach them how to upload their materials to Wikimedia as well as educated them about the meaning of CC BY-SA, a permissive license that allows a variety of uses, including remix and commercial use of the archive. Going forward, the team will continue working with Horison to preserve their content.

CC Indonesia’s work proves that ongoing relationships with cultural institutions are vital to the growth of the commons, and that a small group of committed volunteers can do their part to preserve a rich history.

Background photo: Editing Wikipedia for medical school credit – 2016 poster by Amin Azzam, Lane Rasberry, James Heilman, Kingsley Otoide, Jack McCue is licensed CC BY SA 4.0

Supported by the Wiki Education Foundation, Azzam created a course for the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program that encourages and supports medical students in their efforts to edit Wikipedia articles on health-related topics. The impact of these students’ work is described in a research article entitled, “Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia: Final-Year Medical Student Contributions to Wikipedia Articles for Academic Credit at One School,” which was published in Academic Medicine, a top academic medical journal.

Medical and health-related articles on Wikipedia are among the top articles viewed by the general public. The articles edited and improved by the medical students in Dr. Azzam’s course were viewed 1.1 million times during the two months that the students were actively editing the articles. The 42 articles have been collectively viewed over 22 million times over the past year.

Azzam’s work established a course based solely on open educational practice, which resulted in new works being added to the commons and existing works being adapted via Wikipedia.

Zankoul’s first book, Amalgam, was published in 2009 under a CC BY-NC license. The book sprung from her popular web comic exploring life, work, and art in Beirut and beyond.

Zankoul’s work touches on the connections between cultures with illustrations shaped by her rich, artistic world. Her newest book, Beirut – New York, was published this autumn.

“I find that my illustrations allow people to see things differently. It allows them to step outside the status quo.” – Maya Zankoul

The Universidad de la República is the main university in Uruguay and is public, free, and open to all students. The Colibri project’s leaders hope that the experience of the benefits of open access will convince the university to move from more restrictive licenses, like CC BY-NC-ND, to more open licenses, like CC BY-SA.

In 2016 alone, the university’s collections have added 6,132 new works, 60 new collections, 3,012,107 searches, and 954,475 downloads.

Background photo: ‘Black’ Pyramid of Amenemhet III by Vincent Brown is licensed CC BY 2.0

In addition to offering CC licensing, 3D content publishing platform Sketchfab makes it easy for the museum to share posts on social media and WordPress with an embeddable widget. The British Museum’s sculpture collection, which ranges from the iconic statue of Ramses II to a model of the museum itself, leads to wider interaction with cultural heritage and 3D modeling and printing. Because the CC BY-NC license enables downloading of the files, the works can be shared in a variety of manners as well.

The museum has uploaded or remixed over 100 discrete works and models to its collection, which has had more than 200,000 views and 20,000 downloads since its inception.

The UNIR is a global, 100% open online university founded in Logroño, Spain in 2009. The Open Educators Factory platform, a new project by the Vice-chancellorship for Knowledge Transfer & Technology, aims at improving the capacity of university educators to use open approaches in their daily teaching work. By filling out a questionnaire, university professors and lecturers can self-assess their “openness capacity” in terms of open design, open content, open pedagogies, and open evaluation practices. They can also receive personalized guidelines (readings, videos, courses) to further adopt openness in all dimensions of their activities. At the same time, university leaders who want to improve the openness capacity of their teaching staff can evaluate how their staff “position” with respect to different openness dimensions, identifying open education champions who can inspire others to adopt open approaches.

In only a few years, UNIR has graduated over 38,900 students from 79 countries and provided over 1,350 hours of online classes. It employs over 1,000 lecturers around the world and 500 administrative and support experts. The university’s success in its mission, which links education to business, is helping global education embrace openness and innovate openly.

Since 2014, DatosElSalvador.org has published more than 500 sources of data that have been reused by entrepreneurs, journalists, and researchers, among others. A project of CC El Salvador and Open Knowledge International El Salvador, DatosElSalvador.org has participated in many conferences and events for co-creation such as Open Knowledge Day in 2014 and 2017 while using open data and open licenses. This year, the project was shortlisted for the Open Data Institute’s Open Data social impact award. In 2016, team members translated the Sunlight Foundation’s documents, presented at PeaceTechLab in Costa Rica, and created a series of visualizations for the City of Xalapa and the OAS virtual campus.

Background photo: Seminar on differential equations and integration theory by Milan Tvrdy is public domain via Public Domain Mark

OpenStax Physics image by Rice University is licensed CC BY 4.0

The textbook and videos of OpenStax Physics not only create a valuable resource for physics courses, they’re available for everyone. Any student using the resources – and of course, anyone at all, no matter what textbook they use – can use the videos as a supplementary resource. In addition, instructors can utilize the College Physics text to create their own educational materials like the video lectures created by Barbara Gilbert at Central New Mexico Community College. In these lectures, freely available on YouTube, Professor Gilbert outlines the physics concepts described in the text, works out sample problems, and helps students practice completing formulas and graphs. Professor Gilbert’s videos have almost 4,000 total views.

CC BY-licensed and costing less than $50 in print and $0 online, College Physics has saved students over $30,000,000 since it was published – nearly $11,000,000 this year alone. It has been used by 110,861 students during the current academic year, and 306,932 students since it was published.