development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[David Wiley <david AT wiley.ed.usu.edu>]

Alexander, Bryan wrote:

>   For one example, with admitted personal interest, is the Arab 
> Culture and Civilization site we've created 
> (_http://www.nitle.org/arabworld/_).  It's not tied to any school, but 
> to an umbrella group representing 81 colleges and universities, 
> NITLE.  Furthermore, most of the content was produced outside our 
> group.  The resource is sound, in terms of content and pedagogical 
> design, we feel.  Would this license be capable of application?
You could certainly license the material in this way. Remember the 
license requirement to be tied to an institution is for the end user, 
not the creator(s). In order to use the material legally, the end user 
(faculty, TA, student, whatever) must be attached to an institution and 
must be using the material in realtion to "the teaching and learning 
activities" of the insitution.

> For another example, this month's widely-read Wired piece on 
> OpenCourseWare 
> (_http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit_pr.html_) draws our 
> attention to non-institutionally-bound learning communities.  Their 
> initial materials are traditional, being MIT curricula.  But what 
> about materials they generate themselves? 
Anyone can license material with cc.edu - individuals, faculty, 
organizations, even corporations. The requirement to be attached to an 
institution is placed on the end user of the material.

> And they are likely to swarm into communities of practice for 
> learning. Would these instances have to consider themselves 
> institutions in some way, in order to qualify?
No. Individuals users would simply have to be attached to a qualifying 
institutions in order to use the materials legally.

This makes it very positive that OCW is licensed under the traditional 
CC and not the cc.edu. Remember, (in my opinion) the goal of people who 
want to increase access to educational opportunity is to have people 
dedicate their educational materials to the public domain. If they won't 
do that, it would be great if they would they would broadly license 
their materials under the traditional cc. If they won't do that, it 
would be great if they would license their material under cc.edu. cc.edu 
is about reaching that next tier of people and increasing the amount of 
overall materials available to support teaching and learning.

D