development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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

George Siemens wrote:

> "What if we simply "rebranded" the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 
> license the "Educational Use license," got a different colored icon, and 
> took advantage of the name and icon change to make marketing inroads 
> with educators?"
>
> I like the idea. Marketing and awareness is the biggest challenge. I feel
> the existing CC licenses cover the needs of most educators.
I agree that marketing and awareness are the main challenges. I also 
think its true that existing licenses cover the needs of most educators. 
As I have read, reread, and pondered both the conversations we've been 
having on the list and my own desires to increase the amount of freely 
available educational materials, I've tried to understand the best path 
forward for this project. The whole goal is to increase the net amount 
of materials available for educational use. This means we need to target 
the largest possible group of people with this new license, if the 
assumption is true that larger numbers of people using the license will 
mean larger amounts of content made available.

> Curious: David, obviously, this is a big change from the original proposal
> (and I think a positive one)...but how does this relate to the posts you've
> made previously about the needs of some educators, due to the nature of
> their work, to be able to limit the license only for educational use. One of
> the main premises of the original proposal was the exclusion of
> non-education uses. Are you dropping that requirement? Intending to include
> in the future? Or how is that need expressed in the "new" version? (I'm
> assuming noncommercial still allows military use, as an example) 
>  
I'm increasingly convinced by this conversation that the group of 
educators who would be willing to use the By-NC-SA as-is, if only they 
knew about it, is larger than the group who don't use it because the 
license is not restrictive enough. (This may seem obvious when stated 
this way, but is the kind of thing that becomes clearer through 
conversation -- who says we don't have a process here?)  If there is 
consensus around this conjecture, then our mission becomes how to 
evangelize some configuration of the current CC to educators. So, giving 
the "By-NC-SA" another, more marketable name, like the "Education 
License," would be the first step toward reaching that broader audience.

"CC Education License" doesn't have to be the only name this particular 
configuration has. Other projects might want to give the By-NC-SA 
another label, and that would be just fine.

Thoughts?

D