Open Education Resources

Learning about Creative Commons licenses and how to apply them.

(an excerpt from a larger project)

Introduction: Your university is in the process of rebuilding its online course offerings. That means rebuilding existing courses and adding new ones.

Faculty are hard-pressed for time and must utilize existing resources that will both maintain the integrity of the programs and not run afoul of intellectual property laws.

In this unit you will learn about the six creative commons licenses that are used in open education resource libraries and how to apply them.

Situation:

You are an engineering instructor, newly assigned to an upper division class in thermography. You are asked to create a unit on the use of thermography in civil engineering applications, but you don't have any materials or any content of your own. You want the license to use another person's work, free of charge, to use in your own class -- but also to share with another instructor who will teach a similar class in a different discipline. You will first explore and understand creative commons licenses and then seek resources through various open education repositories.

Preparation: What are the various types of creative commons licenses?

At the bottom of the page you will see six tiles, each of which represents one of the Creative Commons licenses. You can consult this resource at any time -- before, during and after the challenge that is to come.

Apply what you have learned

Instructions:

In the next activity we will only show you the first of a series of questions that challenge your understanding and help you apply creative commons licenses to different situations.

In this next question we are asking about the most restrictive license that you can use. Several licenses will work for the described situation, but we are asking for the most restrictive.

Find a resource that you will build upon and then share with your colleague in another university. When you search for content, what is the most restrictive creative commons license that you can accept?

CC BY-ND

CC BY

CC BY-NC-SA

Out in the wild

Instructions:

Given that you are trying to find open resources that you can build upon and share with others, let us send you out into the wild in search of those resources.

Recall that your subject of interest is thermography. You need resources that allow you to create and share derivative works.

Open Education Resource Repository

OpenStax

Hosted at Rice University, OpenStax offers free, digital textbooks and content modules designed to deliver personalized lessons to students.

Conduct a search on Thermography. Make note of the copyright license attached to the content. Determine if it will suit your purpose.

http://legacy.cnx.org/content?legacy=true

Open Education Resource Repository

OER Commons

Hosted by the Institute of Knowledge Management in Education, OER Commons offers educators open educational resources under a number of license types.

Again, conduct a search on Thermography. Make note of the copyright license attached to the content. Determine if it will suit your purpose.

https://www.oercommons.org/

Credits

Description of Creative Commons licenses by Creative Commons Corporation is licensed under CC-BY

Image of Francis Xavier University, Brendan Riley, licensed under CC-BY-SA

Attribution
CC BY

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.

Attribution-ShareAlike
CC BY-SA

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.

Attribution-NoDerivs
CC BY-ND

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC

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.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA

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.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND

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.