Campus Resources

Copyright Released

There are a number of movements in place to actually limit the amount of copyright restrictions on resources for educators. Some of these include:

OpenCourseWare

OpenCourseWare (OCW), otherwise known as an open learning initiative, is growing in prevalence in the United States as well as globally and is part of a larger open educational resources movement. Institutions involved in OpenCourseWare initiatives in the United States include founder Massachusetts Institute of Technology OCW, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health OCW, Carnegie Mellon OpenLearningInitiative, Tufts Univeristy OCW, University of California - Irvine , University of Norte Dame OCW , Utah Valley University OCW and Utah State Univeristy OCW among others nationally and globally (Opencourseware Consortium , 2006; OpenCourseWare Finder, 2007). There are other initiatives as well that combine resources from various institutions such as Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets (Sofia) and Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (Merlot).

Creative Commons

Creative commons is a means for authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry -- from no restrictions to some rights reserved to all rights reserved. Learn more about Creative Commons.

Creative Commons and CC Learn

Larry Lessig of Stanford is pursuing something called the Creative Commons which frees materials from automatically applied copyright restrictions by providing free, easy-to-use, flexible licenses for creators to place on their digital materials that permit the originator to grant rights as they see fit (Smith & Casserly, 2006). As the Creative Commons Website located at http://creativecommons.org/ notes, “Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from ‘All Rights Reserved’ to ‘Some Rights Reserved’" (Creative Commons, 2007). This holds promise for OER movements because it helps control the costs and legal issues revolving around offering materials freely online. Currently over 30 nations now have creative commons licenses although it has only been in place for four years (Smith & Casserly, 2006).

A development stemming from Creative Commons is ccLearn, which was launched in July of 2007 focuses specifically on open learning and open educational resources.   It emphasizes diminishing legal, technical, and social barriers. A primary goal of ccLearn is to build a comprehensive directory of open educational resources with the assistance of Google with encourages their discovery and subsequent use (Atkins, Brown, & Hammond, 2007; Bissell, 2007; Brantley, 2007).

AEShareNet

AEShareNet located at http://www.aesharenet.com.au/ permits users to incorporate either instant licenses or mediated licenses. Of the instant licenses users can choose from (a) free for education, (b) unlocked content, (c) share and return, or (e) preserve integrity.  The free for education license permits others to use or copy the materials for educational purposes but not others; the unlocked content license means the resource may be freely copies, adapted or used by anyone; the share and return license can be used and enhanced by anyone but rights must be consolidated with the original copyright owner; and preserve integrity says the material may be copied but must remain in its original form with the owners copyright notice (TVET Australia Product Services, 2007). This, as with Creative Commons, also holds promise for OER movements by helping control costs and legal issues when offering materials freely online.

Atkins, D. E., Brown, J. S., & Hammond, A. L. (2007). A review of the open educational resources (OER) movement (Report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, pp. 1-80) [Electronic version]. San Francisco: William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Bissell, A. (2007). Announcing ccLearn - the education division of Creative Commons. Retrieved April 16, 2008, from Creative Commons CC News Web site: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7583

Brantley, P. (2007). Open Education Search. Retrieved April 17, 2008, from O'Reilly Radar Web site: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/open-education-search.html

Creative Commons. (2007). Retrieved August 8, 2007, from Creative Commons Web site: http://creativecommons.org/

Smith, M. S., & Casserly, C. M. (2006). The promise of open educational resources. Change, 38(5), 8-18.

TVET Australia product services. (2007). TVET Australia welcomes you to the AEShareNet licensing system. Retrieved December 8, 2007, from TVET Australia Product Services AEShareNet Licensing System Web site: http://www.aesharenet.com.au/