This is a set of training materials designed to support instructional faculty as they begin working with OER, including a set of learning objectives for each area that describe what is accomplished at the conclusion of each chapter. The topics include:

1. Open Education Resources (OER) 101
2. Copyright and Creative Commons for OER
3. OER Adaptation and Creation

Chapters and lessons have been designed to provide a fundamental understanding of each area related to OER, and are not meant to be a comprehensive. Consider this a start with the basic skills and knowledge needed to confidently work with OER.

No part of this content should be considered legal advice.

*The majority of this material was piloted with faculty and staff at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa during the 2017-2018 academic year, with support from the UH system-wide OER committees. We welcome forking and reuse of this content that conforms to the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International License.*

This work by Billy Meinke and University of Hawai’i Outreach College and collaborators is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International License. It has been adapted by the OER Taskforce for use by Johnson County Community College.

Introduction

Open Educational Resources (OER) rely on bending copyright law with tools such as Creative Commons (CC) licenses to enable frictionless sharing and collaboration that would otherwise be difficult to manage from an intellectual property perspective. Open licenses tell others how they can use your work by explicitly granting them copyright permissions to share and adapt your work, with CC licenses being the gold standard in interoperable open licenses for content. This lesson explains essential aspects of copyright, Creative Commons licenses, and reusing openly licensed content that are helpful in supporting faculty who are adopting or authoring OER.

Why is this important?

The copyright status of a work will (along with other factors) determine what you can and cannot do with the creative work of someone else. U.S. Copyright law has changed over time, creative works are usually put into three buckets in terms of their copyright status. Knowing how to identify and differentiate between common types of copyright status will be useful when determining which content you may reuse, and how.

As you search for OER, you will become familiar with the markings of each copyright type, and that there often is no marking that indicates the copyright status of a work.

Copyright

The rights to fully copyrighted works a.k.a. All Rights Reserved (ARR) are held by the creator(s) of the work. It can be unlawful to use copyrighted works of others without their permission, and no permissions are granted in the case of ARR works. Activities such as copying, modifying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and distributing copies of ARR work may be illegal unless legal permission is granted by the creator.

Copyright in the U.S. is automatically assigned to creators of work, with no registration necessary. You may have seen copyright marks or statements at the beginning of books or in the credits of a film, often in the format of “Copyright [creator name] [year]”. Due to the automatic nature of copyright, work that has no marking should be seen as having all rights reserved — no permissions granted until you are granted them specifically from the owner of the rights.

More Resources

• Copyright Law in the U.S. (Wikipedia)
• Copyright and Fair Use (Stanford University Libraries)

Public Domain (PD)

Work in the public domain can be reused freely for any purpose by anyone, without giving credit or attribution to the author or creator. With few exceptions such as being unable to claim the PD work of others as your own, works in this category can be used with great confidence as copyright has either expired or the works were produced by the U.S. Federal Government, and so entered the U.S. PD immediately after creation or publication.

Currently in the U.S. creative works will enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the creator. Creative Commons (the organization) created a legal tool called CC0 (see-see-zero) to help creators place their work as close as possible to the public domain by releasing all rights to it.

More Resources

• Public Domain (Wikipedia)
• The Public Domain (Stanford University Libraries)
• Improving Access to the Public Domain: the Public Domain Mark (Creative Commons blog)

Creative Commons (CC)

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization that offers free legal tools to make creative work more shareable. There are six different CC license that explicitly grant permission for others to use your work in certain ways, forming a spectrum of openness. The most open CC licenses requires only attribution (giving credit) but otherwise permits nearly any use imaginable. The less open licenses include components that limit or prevent commercial reuse and modification.

CC license marks are visibly symbols telling others that work can be reused, not requiring direct contact or permission from the creator. Properly applied to digital content, a CC license contains a link to a human readable description of the license with a further link to the legal deed behind the license.

More Resources

• About The Licenses (Creative Commons)
• Share Your Work (Creative Commons)

Fair Use

Fair use is not a copyright status, but is actually a copyright principle that suggests that the public can make certain uses of copyrighted works without permission. Whether or not a specific use falls under Fair Use is determined by four factors:

1. the purpose and character of your use
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.

There are additional exceptions and limitations to Copyright, but for the purpose of streamlining sharing and remixing, explicit permission to reuse and adapt work (such as through a CC license) is preferable to seeking defense under Fair Use or related exceptions.

More Resources

• Fair use (Wikipedia)
• Fair Use (Stanford University Libraries)
• Limitations and Exceptions (World Intellectual Property Organization – WIPO)

Introduction

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any learning, teaching, or research resources that are both free of cost and come with reuse rights. This includes a wide variety of resources such as textbooks, full courses, journal articles, datasets, and interactive learning content. OER are separated from other “free” content by the reuse rights that have been granted through an open copyright license such as Creative Commons (CC). With these rights, or permissions, we are able to adapt OER content for various contexts without worrying that we are running afoul of copyright law. Without an open license, free content is probably not OER.

Hewlett Definition

A long-time philanthropic supporter of the Open Education movement, the Hewlett Foundation’s definition of OER is widely referenced around the globe:

Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

More Resources

• OER Defined (Hewlett Foundation)
• Open Educational Resources (Wikipedia)

Introduction

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer a number of advantages to closed or fully-copyrighted content, but each person will find their own reason for adopting or promoting OER use. *The two primary motivators for the JCCC OER initiative are:

1. to save students money on course materials, and
2. to facilitate academic innovation*

There are many factors at play when discussing these reasons, so we will begin to unpack them below. The hope here is that you will be able to discuss various motivations behind OER with a sense of depth beyond the basic argument — which is more likely to lead to action.

Cost Savings

Quite possibly the easiest motivating factor to understand is the cost savings associated with switching to an OER text. With textbook and homework codes for a single course reaching $300-400 per student, significant cost savings can be achieved with the adoption of an OER textbook.

More detailed aspects of the cost savings motivation are:

• The extreme rise in the cost of textbooks and materials
  • The cost of these materials has risen at 3-4 times the rate of inflation since 2006
  • Digital textbooks are nearly free to copy, yet are often compared in price to print textbooks
  • Textbook rentals typically limit when and how students access materials, keeping nothing at the end of the course
• The cost of textbooks driving students to make poor academic decisions[footnote]U.S. PIRG (2016). Covering the Cost. Retrieved from http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/covering-cost[/footnote]
  • Students regularly skip buying the required book for a course
  • Students take fewer courses or delay taking a course due to the textbook cost
  • Students obtain required texts through whatever means necessary, with potential legal consequences

Academic Innovation

OER come with a set of permissions that allow instructors to engage with content in unique and valuable ways which are not allowed with traditional content. From simple things such as correcting typos or grammatical errors to more involved activities like updating the content with the latest research, OER allow faculty to have full control over the material.

This shift in the relationship between faculty and content takes time and careful guidance, but here are some of the interesting and innovative ways OER is already being used at JCCC:

• Localizing content with relevant local or regional examples
• Reorganizing and aligning OER content with an existing course structure
• Working with students in the upkeep and growth of the OER
• Incorporating practice or assessment items directly into the content

Remember, the above are things that OER enable based on their reuse rights —  if there is no open license, we are very limited in what we are allowed to do.

Introduction

Open licenses such as Creative Commons (CC) support knowledge sharing and collaboration by granting copyright permissions in an easy-to-understand, interoperable way. Without open licenses, a great deal of time and resources would be required to create one-off copyright agreements between creators and those would wish to collaborate or build on existing work. CC licenses were created to make it easy for anyone to grant copyright permissions broadly, for others to use without having to ask each time. Open licenses help grease the gears of collaboration by making it clear what you can and cannot do with the creative work of others.

Attribution

A foundation aspect of open licenses like CC is that attribution, or credit, is required for any reuse. This means that anyone reusing your work will need to make reasonable effort to provide full attribution to you if they reuse your work. This is often displayed in the caption of an image, the credits of a film, the footer of a webpage. What creators often care about most is that they receive credit for their work, and all CC licenses require attribution.

Conditions

Creative Commons (CC) licenses come in six flavors, ranging from the most open Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to the least open (CC BY-NC-ND). At the core of every license is the Attribution (BY) requirement, and these additional terms have been combined into licenses that share you work with different conditions for reuse:

• Share-Alike (SA): All derivative work(s) must be shared with the same license
• Non-Commercial (NC): Commercial use rights are not given
• No-Derivatives (ND): The work can be shared, but only if it remains unchanged

Note: The ND Creative Commons licenses are not considered “OER licenses” because they do not allow customization or modification.

Permissions

Copyright restricts use of our creative work without expressed permission from the creator or copyright owner, and there hasn’t always been an easy way to grant permissions to others. Open licenses take care of this for us, telling others how they can used our work in terms that are easy to understand — and that are interoperable with OER that carry similar licenses. David Wiley is well known for having coined the “5 R Activities[footnote]http://www.opencontent.org/definition/[/footnote],” which are an easy way to understand the permissions associated with content that is OER.

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

If you are working with content that cannot be involved in the 5 R activities, you may not be working with OER.

Interoperability

CC licenses were designed in a way to allow straight-forward mixing of content that carry different licenses. The important thing to note here is that standardized licenses such as Creative Commons makes content easier to combine and remix legally, whereas custom agreement and contracts have very limited interoperability and would require a great deal of effort to customize to each potential sharing or collaborative arrangement.

Introduction

Locating useful OER is both critical for OER adoptions and is a common stumbling block when first engaging with OER. According to the 2015-2016 Babson OER Survey[footnote]https://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthetextbook2016.pdf Retrieved September 27, 2017. [/footnote], the top three barriers to OER adoption are related to discovering and selecting appropriate OER. This lesson will help you focus on the use case for the OER, and take a look at a variety of locations and methods for finding OER.

Knowing What to Look For

Perhaps the most important first step when searching for OER is knowing what you are looking for. Are you seeking OER video lectures that discuss Microeconomics? Or are you looking for a full 100-level OER course on Psychology? If you are able to narrow down your search to a particular field of study and have an idea of the types of OER content you are seeking, your searching will be much easier. The syllabus for a course is often a great place to see what content is already being used.

OER Repositories

Institutional Repositories (IR)

*Like many higher education institutions, the University of Hawai’i has a system-level OER repository meant to store OER created and adapted by UH faculty and staff.* Repositories like this have OER organized into collections and communities, usually following a subject-focused organizational structure, or one that represents OER from the different colleges and departments within the institution. IRs like this can be very useful in terms of finding OER that have been curated by librarians and educational staff. Full downloads of OER content are typically hosted here.

Examples of Institutional Repositories for OER:

• University of Hawai’i OER Repository
• SUNY OER Repository
• MIT Open Courseware

Open Repositories

Open repositories provide free hosting for OER content, and typically offer services that make it easy to find and curate OER on their platform. These repositories may or may not be associated with educational institutions, and OER content from all over the world can be found in them. Full downloads of OER content are typically hosted here, as well.

Examples of Open Repositories:

• OER Commons
• Wikimedia Commons
• The Internet Archive

Referatories

Referatories are websites that curate reviews and collections of OER, but send visitors to other website to access the full, downloadable content and files. In some cases, Open Repositories can also act as referatories, storing some OER content collections, and referring visitors to other websites for some OER downloads.

Examples of Referatories for OER:

• The Open Textbook Library
• MERLOT
• The Learning Registry

Search Tools

Google Advanced Search

Google’s Advanced Search allows you to filter results by usage rights, but they do not offer a list of licenses to search by. Instead, they give their own descriptions of the licenses:

• not filtered by license (default)
• free to use or share (CC BY-NC-ND)
• free to use or share, even commercially (CC BY-ND)
• free to use, share, or modify (CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-SA)
• free to use, share, or modify, even commercially (CC BY or CC BY-SA)

To find content that you can modify, select one of the two last options in the dropdown menu.

CC Search

Creative Commons has its own search tool called CC Search, which makes it easy to activate filters for CC-licensed content on multiple search tools and platforms at once.

These search tools rely on license metadata being detected on the source webpage(s), but it is wise to confirm the CC license on the content you want to reuse before doing so.

JCCC has created a libguide to help you navigate the many sources of OER content on the web. You can find links to larger repositories, specific types of resources, and easy ways to integrate them into your classroom and Canvas.

Introduction

Now that we have a basic understanding of what OER are and where or how we might find them, let’s put this knowledge to practice. Before you begin, select both a specific area of learning or research (eg Geography, Biology, Economics, etc) and a type of content you wish to find. The OER artifact (content) you are seeking can be as small as a single image or as large as an entire course. Whichever you choose, be sure you know what you are looking for before you begin.

*Share your Exploration

For benchmark completion of this chapter, please tell us about your OER exploration by filling out this form:

https://goo.gl/forms/vZwvnyTByd4c9ZgP2

By submitting your OER to this form, you agree to license your response under a CC BY license and have it included in this book for others to view.*

Introduction

There are six different Creative Commons (CC) licenses that are useful combinations of conditions, all including the primary condition of Attribution. Understanding the meaning of each condition can be useful when deciding which CC license to use.

CC license conditions in short form are pronounced:

• BY (bye)
• SA (es-say)
• NC (en-see)
• ND (en-dee)

Attribution (BY)

The Attribution (BY) condition is fundamental to all CC licenses. What many creators care about most is receiving credit for their creative work, and so when reusing CC-licensed work, proper attribution must be given to the original creator — and to other contributors on the work, if any.

Share-Alike (SA)

The Share-Alike condition adds a requirement for anyone reusing your work to also license their own creation (based on your work) under the same license. Both the CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA licenses include this condition, effectively making them ‘copyleft’ or ‘viral’ licenses. While this condition effectively “locks open” the content, remixing SA content with non-SA or other-SA licensed work may not be straightforward or allowed at all.

Non-Commercial (NC)

The Non-Commercial condition allows for reuse and sharing, but reserves commercial rights for the creator. The meaning of the NC condition itself and its ability to prevent commercial reuse is not always clear, but the license condition does clearly indicate that commercial reuse rights are not being granted.

No-Derivatives (ND)

The No-Derivatives condition allows sharing and reuse but only if the content is left unchanged. This presents an issue when searching for OER, as no customization or adaptation is allowed by the license. For this reason, ND content is not considered OER and should be considered for reuse only in situations where no adaptations are needed.

Combining the Conditions

The BY condition is a part of all the licenses, but not all of them work together. For example, the SA and ND conditions do not appear in the same license because there is no reason to include the share-alike condition when no derivatives are being allowed. Together, the conditions form the six CC licenses:

• CC BY
• CC BY-SA
• CC BY-NC
• CC BY-NC-SA
• CC BY-ND
• CC BY-NC-ND

Knowledge Check

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Introduction

A Creative Commons (CC) license can be placed on a wide range of content, indicating to potential reusers what they are allowed to do with your work. Many content sharing platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and more have tools for marking content as you upload them. In other cases, you may wish to individually mark content that will be shared in places other than a public platform. This lesson will cover the basics of marking your content with a CC license.

What’s in a license?

When we “get” a CC license, all we are doing is placing a license icon or statement on our work, and linking back to the legal documents for the license we chose. For example, a CC BY 4.0 license is seen below:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This license was generated by the CC license chooser, and the HTML code from the license chooser was pasted into this webpage. While not a requirement of the license, using the HTML code for the license is the ideal way to mark individual pieces of content with a CC license because it is machine-readable and allows CC-licensed content to be found more easily. As you will see below, using the CC license chooser is not necessary if you provide complete attribution in other forms.

Attribution (TASL)

According to CC best practices, proper attribution includes:

• Title
• Author
• Source (link back to creator, if applicable)
• License (name of license and version)

The above is an example of a basic attribution for a single piece of content.

CC License Chooser

The CC license chooser can make short work of marking your work with a CC license. To begin, go to https://creativecommons.org/choose/.

You will be prompted to select conditions for sharing your work, as mentioned earlier in this chapter.

Once you have chosen the conditions you wish to share under, the chooser will show you which license fits your terms:

If this is the license you wish to use, you are almost done. If not, revise the conditions from the earlier step to match the license you wish to share under.

Then, you will have the option of adding descriptive metadata to the license.

Last, you will have the option of having the chooser give you a CC license mark in a format that fits your content well.

At this point, you can copy and paste the license badge and text, or grab the HTML code for use on the Web.

Webpages

Webpages are often marked with a CC license in the footer or sidebar of the website. The example below is from the Pressbook (website) containing this lesson:

Video

It is simple to use a CC license bumper frame at the beginning or end of a video, or wherever the credits appear. CC license bumpers appear like so:

Offline Materials

Materials intended for print or other non-digital use can be marked with a CC license as well. This is often displayed in the footer of a document, or wherever the copyright statement usually exists. Offline CC license marking does not carry links back to the original work or the license, but it does make it clear how the content is being shared.

Knowledge Check

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Introduction

In many cases, you will be creating new work based on the work of others. The Creative Commons (CC) license on each piece of content will determine if, and how, you are able to combine work that has been shared under different licenses. This is a very important step before any adaptation, or combining of work is done.

License Compatibility

Most of the CC licenses have good compatibility when remixing work under different licenses, but some of the licenses restrict our ability to do so. CC has shared a license compatibility chart that shows which licenses work together, and which ones do not allow content to be combined.

You will notice two things:

• Content under an ND license cannot be combined with any other content (because it cannot be adapted)
• Content under an SA license can only be combined with content under the same license

With those things in mind, there is still great remixing potential among content licensed under the more permissive CC licenses.

Collections and Curations

In specific use cases, it may be possible to combine content that has been licensed under a more restrictive license (SA and ND) that would not normally allow free remixing. For example, if you were to collect chapters from various OER books into one, these chapters may be able to carry their own licenses separate from the overall license on the book itself. If most of the content in the book were under a specific license, say CC BY, and there were a small number of chapters under a CC BY-SA license, it may be possible to license the entire book at CC BY so long as the license on those BY-SA chapters remained.

The details and nuances of this are beyond the scope of this training, but it is useful to know which licenses explicitly allow combination and remixing, and which licenses require more care when considering their reuse.

Knowledge Check

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