development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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

That's long enough of a wait. I'll put in my $0.02 now.

Laura Lynch wrote:

> I think the idea of branding the license as educational rather than 
> creating an entirely new license makes good sense.  It seems clear 
> that with proper marketing the education license will appeal to 
> educators and increase the number of licensors.  The works that are 
> education friendly will be highlighted by some kind of education logo 
> or addition to the license URL and therefore searchable.  This will 
> certainly be useful to educators, students, researchers, etc. who can 
> make use of the material in their own work.  I'm wondering if this 
> newly licensed material could  become even more useful to educators. 
> What if the licensor was given the option to include a lesson plan or 
> project idea with their work?

I think content bundling is a separate issue. We would definitely want 
to encourage it, and there are all kinds of standards for how it might 
be done (IMS Content Packaging, for example - 
http://www.imsglobal.org/content/packaging/index.cfm).

> So far the team has expressed curiosity about the implementation of 
> this option/license. Would works licensed as education friendly be 
> highlighted by a new logo?  If so, what would it look like?  Where 
> would the option to license your work as education friendly come into 
> the licensing process?  From David Wiley's last email it might make 
> sense for this option to be added to "Step 2-Review Your Choices." If 
> you choose a BY-NC-SA license, you would be given the option to make 
> your license education friendly.

About the logo and then the process:

I think it should look like the normal forest green CC logo, but be navy 
blue and feature the word education. Maybe something like the attached 
gif (although I am by NO means set on having this particular graphic 
become the logo, it is for illustration purposes only).

As for the process, my first thought was that it should happen right in 
Step One: Choose Your License. I thought CC might want to explore this 
more broadly, and put specialty licenses with psuedo-interpretable names 
right up front. (Maybe the Attibution License, the Education License, 
etc.) Of course people would need support to understand exactly how they 
were configured. Then offer the current infrastructure to the real geeks 
who want to "roll their own" license. I think this could increase the 
use of CC licenses by cutting down on the scariness of "assemble your 
own license" fear many must have upon seeing step one of the process. 
However, this would constitute a major change for CC and would take time 
to implement. So a better proposal is probably:

Make the Education License available from the Educators' and Scholars' 
Corner.  Provide this license by name right on the page (surely the 
sampling license will be linked to from the Musicians' Page?). Links to 
the roll your own license mechanism should still be available from the 
page. It might mean some rewriting of that specific page (which I would 
be happy to help with if needed).

Thoughts anyone?

I'm at an instructional tech meeting now with folks from MIT, CMU, the 
Hewlett Foundation, etc., and everyone's asking me: "when will the 
education license be available? We want to use it!!" This is good news 
for our project if we can reach agreement about what should happen next. 
I think this proposal is great.

D