development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Stephen Downes <stephen AT downes.ca>]

Hiya Folks,

Not to be a broken record, but I reiterate my opposition to a license -
especially one under the Creative Commons banner - that restricts the
use of materials to institutions, particularly given that one must be
of certain means to attend such institutions and hence to benefit from
the license. It's kind of like a 'Creative Commons for the rich'.

I moreover restate the objection on the ground that the expectation has
been created that when you see a Creative Commons license, that you
have the permission, within broad parameters, to use the material, no
matter who you are, has been eroded. The introduction of an
institution-specific (or even an education-specific) license
reintroduces the sort of ambiguity that before Creative Commons
required the use of a lawyer to sort out.

-- Stephen Downes

David Wiley wrote:

Hello all. There have only been a handful of responses to the last
email. I hope people won't feel offended or that I'm jumping the gun by
offering draft language with so few responses, but we are working on a
schedule.

As context for the draft below, please take a moment to look at the
format of CC's new Sampling License -
http://creativecommons.org/license/sampling - I've made a conscious
effort to make our draft similar in structure and style. There is some
discussion below the draft.

<DRAFT LANGUAGE>

If you make your work available under the Education License, you require
that users of your work:

  - Cite you as the source of the work per standard academic practices,

  - Make only noncommercial uses of your work which primarily and
purposively facilitate learning, and

  - Distribute any modified versions of your work

     + under this same license, and
     + include in the distribution a copy of the original work which
allows users to determine what changes you made to the derived work
(inclusion by link / reference is sufficient)

Do you want to:

Allow teachers, students, and others directly associated with a formal
educational institution, as well as mentors, tutors, self-learners, and
others who may not be directly associated with a formal educational
institution, to make permitted uses of your work?

  - Yes

  - No, I want to restrict use of my work to only teachers, students,
and others directly associated with a formal educational institution.

</DRAFT>

This license is sort of a "By-NC-SA Plus" license. The three pluses are
(1) noncommercial uses are not sufficient - uses must be noncommercial
AND primarily facilitate learning, (2) a mechanism is imposed that
establishes accountability for for the creation of derivative works.

(3) is the big one. Rather than decide for the user whether to stick to
formal educational institutions or not, the draft language passes the
decision on to the user. This choice in effect creates two education
licenses. You will see at http://creativecommons.org/projects/sampling
that the Sampling licence takes two forms because of a similar option,
with two distinct license names and two separate icons. I propose that
we call one license the Open Education license, and the other the Formal
Education License, and that we also use two separate icons to keep clear
in users minds' which is which.

So, feedback please. Remember we're trying to arrive at a draft by next
Wednesday. Thanks for your blood, sweat, and tears on this,

David
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