1.3 Licensing and sharing Open Educational Resources

Figure 3. Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons Licenses by JoKalliauer; foter is licensed under a Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0

 Thanks to the affordances of the open (Creative Commons) license, anyone can share their work freely, under certain conditions, authoring Open Educational Resources in the process. Active learning assignments become open pedagogy through the affordances of open licensing. Students will be invited to put a Creative Commons license on their work--an open license that operates as copyright within the United States and internationally. This license was created in the early 2000s to automatically give authors the public permission, as well as the legal right, to share their work openly under certain terms. Rather than having a proprietary copyright, the materials before you were made to be shared—with you, other instructors and your students, under certain conditions set by the creators.

Students should be invited to choose and put their desired Creative Commons license on the results of their active learning activity, thereby making it an open educational resource and a work of open pedagogy. The following pages, derived from Creative Commons documentation, explain in detail what these licenses entail. Also see this resource on best practices for attribution with CC licenses.

Creative Commons Licensing Elements:

 BY  – Credit must be given to the creator

 SA  – Adaptations must be shared under the same terms

 NC  – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted

 ND  – No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted

Creative Commons License Terms (About The Licenses - Creative Commons, n.d.)

Attribution CC BY This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.CC BY includes the following elements:

BY  – Credit must be given to the creator

  View License Deed | View Legal Code

Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.CC BY-SA includes the following elements:

     BY  – Credit must be given to the creator

      SA  – Adaptations must be shared under the same terms

                                  View License Deed | View Legal Code

Attribution-NoDerivatives CC BY-ND This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.CC BY-ND includes the following elements:

 BY  – Credit must be given to the creator

 ND  – No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted

                            View License Deed | View Legal Code

Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.CC BY-NC include the following elements:

BY  – Credit must be given to the creator

NC  – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted

                                  View License Deed | View Legal Code

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.CC BY-NC-SA includes the following elements:

BY  – Credit must be given to the creator

NC  – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted

                                 SA  – Adaptations must be shared under the same terms

                                  View License Deed | View Legal Code

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:

  BY  – Credit must be given to the creator.

  NC  – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted

                                  ND  – No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted

                                    View License Deed | View Legal Code

With one of the above licenses, students’ work can be shared with future learners.

By Katherine Tsan