development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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

Greg London wrote:

For every hour that her class spends using open course content,
the teacher and/or her students owe an hour’s time
(contributing to the project)
    

well, you say this is a "moral" obligation, not a "legal"
obligation, which begs the question as to why you would
then put it in a legal license?

I have a hard time seeing how it would be legally enforcable,
so it might be made null and void anyway.

If it isn't a legally binding clause, then you could simply
slap it on the work as a "moral" clause that contains no
legal bearing, and still say the work is CC licensed.
  

This is probably naive, but I would look to the license to tell me the conditions of use for the licensed item, and I wouldn't care a lot about the distinction between moral and legal clauses.

I think that wikipedia has shown that you need to make
the tools so that editing a single word is extremely easy,
which will then encourage the many small additions you speak of.
Wikipedia could have attempted a moral clause, but it didn't.
instead it used a simple GPL license and pasted a "moral"
clause throughout saying: "Anyone may edit this page".
  

Good point.  There are two important differences, though:
1- The  license  I am suggesting is directed at educators in a particular discipline, physiologists let us say.  They are several orders of magnitude less numerous than the audience for a typical Wikipedia article (and, perhaps, busier).
2- Good, reusable material for teaching generally requires many different skills and results from a collaboration of  several individuals.  In contrast, many (most?) wikipedia articles have only one principal author.
So the participation (giveback) rate for a project developing educational materials has to be orders of magnitude higher than for wikipedia if that project is to be self-sustaining.  That's why giveback need to be, not an  opportunity, not an invitation, but an obligation.

This is borne out by experience.  The Merlot digital library has, since its inception, offered educators the opportunity to comment on the usefulness of any of its learning materials.  Fewer than 2% of their materials have _EVER_ received a comment.  My own experience with the Harvey Project is similar.

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