[cc-education] A new hope for cc.edu
Stephen Downes
stephen at downes.ca
Mon Apr 4 23:53:16 EDT 2005
Hiya,
When the CC-Edu proposal was first raised in 2003, the possibility of a
special 'education' license was discussed at length. As in the case of
the current round of discussions, such a license was always envisioned
as applying to educational institutions.
This proposal met with substantial opposition because it would offer for
free materials to institutions that would charge tuition, but not offer
for free the same materials for people who were learning on their own.
It was essentially, therefore, a means of subsidizing institutional
learning at the expense of personal learning.
Two years later this has not changed.
The By-NC-SA rebranding was a compromise position. It was approached
because most of what we were trying to capture with an educational
license was captured by these terms. It allowed persona learning, and it
allowed educational institutions to use the materials without charge.
It was true then, and is true today, that most educational institutions
are considered non-commercial. This definition is arrived at not by
looking at the nature of each transaction, which would be absurd, but by
looking at the narture of the institution. There is a commonly known and
widely used distinction between enterprises that are non-commercial and
those that are commercial, between organizations that exist to provide a
public service and those that exist in order to generate revenue.
It is true that overtly commercial enterprises are not considered
'educational' under the proposed rebranding of By-NC-SA. That such
enterprises are considered 'educational' at all is more marketing than
matter of fact. They are first and foremost profit-making enterprises,
and therefore ought to pay their own way. The term 'educational', when
applied to institutions, ought to apply only to those institutions
founded for the specific and only purpose of providing an education, and
not those that use education as a means of making money.
We understand the distinction between the University of North Carolina
and the DMX Zone CBT provider, between the University of California and
the University of Phoenix, and it is sophistry to pretend that we do
not. And this distinction is drawn precisely by the 'non-commercial'
attribute, and none other.
What we have here is what I warned of in 2003 - the commercialization of
the proposed CC-Education license. That is what the blurring of
commercial and non-commercial enterprises under the guise of 'education'
accomplishes. This to me shows all the more the urgency of ensuring that
no Creative Commons license exist that allow institutions license to do
what individuals cannot, indeed, of ensuring that 'educational' content
means, explicitly, non-commercial content.
-- Stephen
--
__________________________________________________________________
Stephen Downes ~ Senior Researcher ~ E-Learning Research Group
National Research Council Canada ~ Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada
http://www.downes.ca ~ stephen at downes.ca
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