Unit 1: Defining open educational resources
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Unit objectives
Upon completing this unit, you should be able to:
- Define open educational resources
- Recognize and distinguish between Creative Commons licenses
- Articulate which Creative Commons licenses are most useful in educational contexts
What are open educational resources?
As we discussed on the course home page, open educational resources (OER) are "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions." [1]
The licensing element is what makes OER different from other learning materials. While teachers have undoubtedly been sharing teaching materials for eons, they may have been doing so in violation of copyright, or without a formal sharing structure in place.
Most "open licenses" are Creative Commons licenses. Let's explore the Creative Commons further.
What is the Creative Commons?
This video provides a brief (~5.5 min.) explanation of the Creative Commons. [2]
Note: The video is captioned.
Why was the Creative Commons created?
The original intent of copyright (in the United States) was to foster creativity. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for a limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." [3]
Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred were among those who felt that current copyright law actually restricts creativity. They formed the Creative Commons in 2001, and created a handful of licenses that one could apply to one's creations. These licenses would grant freedom to others to copy, adapt, and share these creations. The Creative Commons has become a robust collection of books, photographs, music, video, and other works that can be freely used by others. [4]
What are the Creative Commons licenses?
There are several different Creative Commons licenses available. One important characteristic of these licenses is that they are easy for most people to interpret - you don't need a law degree to understand them!
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.
Items come into the public domain in a variety of ways. One option is for creators to "dedicate" their items to the public domain. This simply means they choose to waive their copyrights. The CC0 license refers to items that have been "dedicated" to the public domain.
Note: The definitions above have been quoted verbatim from the Creative Commons site, with permission under a CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution) 4.0 license. All definitions were taken from reference [5], except the public domain information, which was taken from [6].
Which licenses are most commonly applied to OERs?
All of the above licenses are used with OERs, but the two licenses that forbid making derivative works (CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND) are used less often.
Many people feel that the ability to revise, change, update, and combine OER is an important aspect of OER content. For example, David Wiley, a well-known advocate of open content, conceived the 5 R's of Open Content [7]:
Retain: the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse: the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise: the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix: the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
Check your understanding!
Take this brief quiz to check your understanding of the concepts we've discussed above.
Ready to move on?
Yes! Take me to Unit 2!
References & Resources
[1] William and Flora Hewlitt Foundation. (n.d.) Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://www.hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/
[2] Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ. (2011, June 27). Creative Commons Kiwi [Video file]. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/25684782
[3] U.S. Const. art. I, § 8. Retrieved from https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
[4] Creative Commons. (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved December 10, 2017 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
[5] Creative Commons. (n.d.) About The Licenses. Retrieved from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
[6] Creative Commons. (n.d.) CC0. Retrieved from https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/
[7] Wiley, David. (n.d.) Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/definition/
This mini-course was created by Laura Harris. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.