Excellence Gateway
As the education system is constantly changing in the UK with new and more varied courses being offered almost daily, there is a constant challenge to find suitable resources to assist with teaching and learning. Much online content is covered by restrictive copyright licences and is not available to download, reuse or repurpose even for non-commercial educational purposes. By licensing work under Creative Commons you will inevitably expand the bank of teaching and learning resources that can be used without restriction by all educators and learners in the UK and internationally.
Creative Commons licensing aims to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information. Creative Commons provides a set of free public licences to enable authors to share their work with others. These licences enable creative works to be easily marked with the freedoms (and restrictions) the authors want to impose without needing to be a lawyer.
Creative Commons is "a non-profit organisation founded on the notion that some authors may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights the law affords them."
CCLearn is a division of Creative Commons, which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources. An immediate goal for CCLearn is to encourage and facilitate the adoption of practices that will enable the fullest realization of the potential for and open educational resources to transform education in all sectors.
A Creative Commons licence enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining other rights.
The original set of licences grant the following "baseline rights":
Attribution (abbreviated to: by): Licencees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.
Noncommercial or NonCommercial (abbreviated to: nc): Licencees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for noncommercial purposes.
No Derivative Works or NoDerivs (abbreviated to: nd): Licencees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it.
ShareAlike (abbreviated to: sa): Licencees may distribute derivative works only under a licence identical to the licence that governs the original work.
Mixing and matching these licences produces sixteen possible combinations, of which there are six regularly used licences:
Attribution (by)
This licence lets others distribute, repurpose, and add to your work, including commercially, as long as they credit you as the original author.
Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)
This licence lets others repurpose, and add to your work including for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and licence their new creations under the identical terms. Any derivative work produced from yours must carry the same licence.
Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)
This licence allows for redistribution of your work including for commercial purposes provided it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)
This licence lets others repurpose and add to your work for non-commercial purposes provided you are acknowledged. Any derivative work produced does not however have to be licenced on the same terms.
Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)
This licence allows others to repurpose and add to your work for non-commercial purposes, provided you are acknowledged. Any new creations must be licenced under the identical terms.
Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)
This licence allows others to download your works and share them provided they mention you and link back to you, but they can?t change them in any way or use them commercially.
To licence your work, access the Creative Commons (UK) website.
Then select either Creative Commons licences for England and Wales or Creative Commons licences for Scotland.
The Creative Commons System allows you to select what restrictions, attributes or modifications you wish to assign to your work. The system will then produce a Creative Commons licence for your work and instructions for displaying the licence on your own website, or for hosting your licenced files in the public domain. The CC licence will provide a commons deed clearly stating the licensing rights in plain English, a legal code for the licence, and a digital licence code. The digital code can be embedded into websites and search engines. The Creative Commons site also provides a website icon that clearly marks the creative work as Some Rights Reserved or No Rights Reserved.
There are many different ways to find work licensed under Creative Commons. Its search page allows for direct searching from the CC website. You can also stipulate within some of the major search engines that you are looking for CC licensed content only. The Yahoo Creative Commons search facility specifically searches for content that has a Creative Commons license. Searches can even be conducted for different types of licences.
Open Education Search
CCLearn is working with the Hewlett Foundation and Google to build an "open education web-scale search", part of a larger effort to offer web users simple, overarching mechanisms for discovering open education resources.
Ideas
CCLearn has also created a list of ideas to demonstrate how the creation of open education resources and communities of practice surrounding their use may enhance the teaching and learning process.
How to use acrylic paints
Learning Spanish online
Now you are convinced of the benefits of Creative Commons, read more about it.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons UK
CCLearn
Source: Quality Improvement Agency
You can find this page and download any referenced resources from the Excellence Gateway at http://excellence.org.uk/ferl.aclearn.resource.id43075.
