development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

[Robert Stephenson <rstephe AT sun.science.wayne.edu>]

Hi, folks, I'm new to this list.  My background is that I have spent the last seven years developing open course collaborations: communities of practice where educators, professionals and students collaborate to create and share open, reusable learning assets.  The Harvey Project (http://harveyproject.org and http://opencourse.org/Collaboratories/harveyproject), founded in 1998, is an open course collaboration for physiology.  OpenCourse.org (http://opencourse.org) is a platform to support the creation of open course collaborations, like SourceForge for academic course developers.  Both projects received funding from NSF.

The reason I am here is that I would like to suggest a new license clause (in addition to attribution, share-alike, etc.) for open content: giveback.  In my experience developing open course content, I have found that lack of feedback and participation by most faculty teaching with my online materials -- not to mention their students -- is a severe limitation.  It limits the review and improvement of such resources (the many eyeballs = shallow bugs phenomenon).  It limits the credit that academic developers can claim from skeptical colleagues ("how do you know anyone is actually using your online tutorial?").  And it limits the anonymous adopters themselves, making their learning curve more  arduous.  At this rate, open content will never impact mainstream educators in my lifetime.

I am convinced, based on my experience with academic online collaborations, two changes are sorely needed:

1. low-threshold, low-friction ways for adopters to participate in and contribute to the open course collaboration, and
2. a license clause that makes the need for such "giveback" explicit.

I have spoken with Mia Garlick and David Wiley about the giveback notion and they suggested I post it to this list.  So here I am!  I have attached a short document that describes what I have in mind in more detail.  My questions for you are two:

• Would you consider adding such a giveback clause to your present license framework?  That would be my preference, since I am not eager to see the sort of licence proliferation that has happened in open source occur in the open content domain as well.
• Whether or not you think giveback has a place in the Creative Commons framework (now or later), would you be willing to help me frame a working license so we can start putting it into practice?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

- Rob

-- 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*  Dr. Robert S. Stephenson, Assoc. Prof.
*  E-learning Architect
*  rstephe AT sun.science.wayne.edu
*  (313) 577-2869
*  Assoc. Prof., Biological Sciences
*  Wayne State University, Detroit MI 48202
*  http://sun.science.wayne.edu/~rstephe
*
*  The Harvey Project
*  Open Course Physiology on the Web
*  http://HarveyProject.org
*  http://OpenCourse.org
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Attachment: Giveback.doc
Description: MS-Word document