development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Heather Ford <heather AT gn.apc.org>]

Hi all,

Some really great points here - and very timely, since I have been thinking 
of how you would implement the cc license for educational materials in 
South Africa.

> David: "1. Are members of this list interested in seeing more educational
> content
> released under cc licenses?"
>
> GS: I'm interested in seeing more content sharing in education. CC is the
> current incarnation of this...but my commitment is to the concept of open
> education...not limited to only a type of license. The distinction may be
> small...but my commitment to CC only extends to the degree that it fosters
> the greater view - namely an environment where educators freely share
> resources.

HF: I agree with George, but I also think that, in order for more people to 
share content in an open forum, the process of sharing needs to be made 
easier and more intuitive to the teacher's needs. If, for example, I need 
to develop some lessons on how to build a website, I want to be able to go 
to a place on the site where I can search for similar materials that I 
could adapt for my own use and then give back to the cc community. I've 
made this point before, but perhaps I wasn't been clear enough: the fact is 
that, for educators (and I've been in this position myself), cc does a 
really great job of telling you how to donate your materials to the 
commons, but doesn't do a good job of helping you to find materials in the 
first place. I think that it is *essential* for the portal to look at a way 
of doing this before we can begin to talk about the need to get more works 
licensed.

One way of doing this would be, along with the 'click on this link if 
you're an educator' on the home page, there would be two options as 
follows: 1. license educational content 2. find educational content. You 
would then have to have a page where you could actually search for 
available resources. This is a website with open educational content that 
makes a good go at it: http://www.itrainonline.org - but I'm sure there are 
other/better ways.


> David: "2. Do members of this list think that in order to get more
> educational
> content licensed by a cc license we need more educators to understand the
> cc message  and how it relates to education?"
>
> GS: I think the main message that should be presented to educators is how
> sharing resources benefits the learner, educator, and institution. The CC
> license is a subset of that discussion. Promoting CC without promoting open
> sharing of content first seems backwards. Licensing under CC is a message
> that is largely geared to the end content creator. In education, for many,
> the challenge will be to get administration to by into the concept of
> sharing (instructors often do not own the copyright to their work - it's the
> institution). CC is an enabler of the process...not the process itself.

George is spot on here - there needs to be a process of buying in to the 
philosophy of open content and the benefits that this holds for education, 
since the people who actually handle the technicalities of putting the 
materials online and inserting the code for the license etc, will not 
always be the people who go through the tutorials on the website. I think 
that one of the major things that cc needs to do in this regard is to do a 
lot of community-building - i.e. building a community of educators that 
share the beliefs and that take the message to others. Feedback will be 
really critical in this next stage, and it's important to have a set of 
users on hand that can steer the development of the tool.


> David: "3. Do members of this list think that someone has to purposefully
> intervene in order to efficiently and effectively help a significant
> number of educators understand the cc message and how it relates to
> education?"
>
> GS: I'm a little unsure of how you mean intervene. Could you please detail
> what that would look like?
> Again, understanding the CC message is secondary to understanding the value
> of sharing content. It's cultural. Promoting CC assumes people understand
> the "Internet age" (the value of networking, sharing, collaborating). I
> don't think we are there yet. We have work to do before we are even at a
> point to promote CC. To promote CC without having first advocating for open
> education/content will be a huge challenge (I'm sure the message can be
> packaged to pitch both concepts at the same time...just as long as the CC
> part of the conversation comes after the conversion...:)).

HF: Yes, it is important to look at the particular cultural context. 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure it would be pretty safe to assume 
that educators are generally not too technologically savvy - or at least, 
they haven't grasped the very new concepts that open source and sharing 
over the Internet has initiated. Again, I think that the growing of a truly 
interactive community of educators would be essential for the growing of 
the movement.


> David: "4. Do members of this list think that a branding of a cc license
> configuration as an "Education License" and an awareness campaign are a
> good way to bring about this understanding, and hence, more cc-licensed
> educational materials?"
>
> GS: As stated, I think the awareness campaign should focus on the openness
> of content creation, sharing, collaborating. CC is a subset. There are many
> more components and aspects to openness than simply a license format (though
> that is certainly needed). If we end up thinking that creating and marketing
> a license is the next needed step, I think we could well position ourselves
> for failure. Our message has to be on openness. What if someone, somewhere
> comes up with a far better concept than CC (unlikely, the way it looks
> now...but, you never know...)? If our focus is CC, our success rises and
> falls with CC adoption. If it's openness...we can respond to trends and
> occurrences beyond our current views.

HF: I would tend to disagree here - I think that the different audiences 
that cc attempts to address is *VAST*. The openness factor is definitely 
important in all types of content creation, but it is really important to 
adapt the use of different types of content to the experience of particular 
users. In terms of the cc website, the introductory video introduces the 
concepts really well *in general* - but there are not too many references 
to *educational* uses here. I think that it would be really useful to look 
at developing more specific-to-education materials that give examples of 
how the license could be useful in the educational context. Educators may 
not, for example, be able to associate themselves with the examples of the 
musicians and the rock bands on the cc website, but if you developed 
instructional materials that presented 'Mr Mafuti, the social science 
teacher' or 'Dedlila Doolittle, the Zoology lecturer' and set them up with 
particular examples, then educators may be able to relate better to the 
concepts.

For me, the most interesting question is around the issue of *motivation*. 
What would motivate the educator to share their materials and comment on 
what has come before?

Heather.