development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Stephen Downes <stephen AT downes.ca>]

Hiya,

When the CC-Edu proposal was first raised in 2003, the possibility of a 
special 'education' license was discussed at length. As in the case of 
the current round of discussions, such a license was always envisioned 
as applying to educational institutions.

This proposal met with substantial opposition because it would offer for 
free materials to institutions that would charge tuition, but not offer 
for free the same materials for people who were learning on their own. 
It was essentially, therefore, a means of subsidizing institutional 
learning at the expense of personal learning.

Two years later this has not changed.

The By-NC-SA rebranding was a compromise position. It was approached 
because most of what we were trying to capture with an educational 
license was captured by these terms. It allowed persona learning, and it 
allowed educational institutions to use the materials without charge.

It was true then, and is true today, that most educational institutions 
are considered non-commercial. This definition is arrived at not by 
looking at the nature of each transaction, which would be absurd, but by 
looking at the narture of the institution. There is a commonly known and 
widely used distinction between enterprises that are non-commercial and 
those that are commercial, between organizations that exist to provide a 
public service and those that exist in order to generate revenue.

It is true that overtly commercial enterprises are not considered 
'educational' under the proposed rebranding of By-NC-SA. That such 
enterprises are considered 'educational' at all is more marketing than 
matter of fact. They are first and foremost profit-making enterprises, 
and therefore ought to pay their own way. The term 'educational', when 
applied to institutions, ought to apply only to those institutions 
founded for the specific and only purpose of providing an education, and 
not those that use education as a means of making money.

We understand the distinction between the University of North Carolina 
and the DMX Zone CBT provider, between the University of California and 
the University of Phoenix, and it is sophistry to pretend that we do 
not. And this distinction is drawn precisely by the 'non-commercial' 
attribute, and none other.

What we have here is what I warned of in 2003 - the commercialization of 
the proposed CC-Education license. That is what the blurring of 
commercial and non-commercial enterprises under the guise of 'education' 
accomplishes. This to me shows all the more the urgency of ensuring that 
no Creative Commons license exist that allow institutions license to do 
what individuals cannot, indeed, of ensuring that 'educational' content 
means, explicitly, non-commercial content.


-- Stephen



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Stephen Downes ~ Senior Researcher ~ E-Learning Research Group
National Research Council Canada ~ Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada
http://www.downes.ca  ~  stephen AT downes.ca
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