Creative Commons for Educators
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Introduction
Much of this course focused on how to create openly licensed materials, by sharing the legal perspective and the practical steps needed. In this unit we will explore and practice how to create OER so they can have the biggest impact and be used without any legal or technical barriers.
Learning Objectives
- Imagine how your OER will work in practice.
- Understand how to select a CC license(s) for your resources.
- Examine your open license decision for compatibility (i.e., can it be remixed) with other OER.
- Identify needs and challenges to improving OER accessibility for everyone.
Big Question – Why it Matters
A big part of any educator’s work is preparing, updating, and combining learning materials. Making those materials open requires just a few additional steps, and it’s easier than you think. What are those steps? What should you consider and expect when you want to create and publish your resources in the open?
When we share our education resources as OER, we share our best practices, our expertise, our challenges and solutions. Education is about sharing. When we share our work with more people – we become better educators.
Personal Reflection – Why it Matters to You
What kind of learning resources do you create now? Do you publish or share these resources with other people for feedback? Which of your resources do you think could benefit fellow educators, learners, libraries or scientists? If you choose to share, how much freedom do you want to give to others; what permissions will you allow for others to reuse your work?
Acquiring Essential Knowledge
Why share?
For an introduction on why it is important to share your work as OER, watch this video:
Open Education Matters: Why is it important to share content? (time 03:51)
Because educators and librarians can share OER with everyone for near zero cost, we should. After all, education is fundamentally about sharing knowledge and ideas. Libraries are about archiving, sharing and helping learners find the knowledge they seek. When we CC license our work, we are sharing that work with the public under simple, legal permissions. Sharing your work is a gift to the world.
Choosing a CC license for OER
As you may remember, not all education materials available under a CC license are OER. Review this chart that details which CC licenses work well for education resources and which do not.
The two CC NoDerivatives (ND) licenses are not OER-compatible licenses because they do not allow the public to revise or remix the education resource. Because the ND licenses do not meet the 5Rs or any of the major OER definitions, the open education movement does not consider ND-licensed education resources “OER.”
Choosing the right license for your OER requires you to think about which permissions you want to give to other users – and which permissions you want to retain for yourself. Read the “Open Textbook Community Advocates CC BY License for Open Textbooks” and th