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Sharing your work

Are you interested in sharing your material back out to the commons? Do you have a good course activity, image, assessment item, reading list of open sources, or video? Can you share your entire redesigned course so that the next Oregon community college faculty member can use it as a starting point to adapt rather than reinventing the wheel?

Then consider releasing your work under a Creative Commons license or in the public domain.

  • By releasing your work under a Creative Commons license you retain ownership while allowing others to use your work (as long as they attribute it to you) without needing to ask permission of you directly. 
  • By releasing your work in the public domain, your copyright ownership is waived. It is as if you are GIVING your work to the public as a gift. Users may still cite you when adopting your work, but they are not required to do so.

Why would you release your work into the public domain? The best use-case I've heard (from David Wiley) is for quiz question test banks. Students don't need the cognitive overload of seeing attributions when they're taking a test. If you release questions into the public domain, anyone is free to reuse them without the obligation of attributing you. 

Faculty contracts

Each college has different policies and different language in faculty contracts regarding ownership of content created on college time. You can only put an open license on content that you hold the copyright to - so if your college owns the copyright to work created on college time, then you'll have to approach your administration for permission to add an open license to your work. 

Since you're redesigning your course for a stipend by taking this training, you can argue that putting an open license on your work is a requirement of the funding. 

License check

Be sure your work is eligible to be shared. In order to release your work with a CC license or in the public domain, your work should be cleared from all copyright issues. Your open course can include:

  1. Content that you created yourself that has an open license on it; and
  2. Content that someone else created that has an open license on it (or is in the public domain).

Where you are using other content, is your use allowed? Did you include an attribution back to the original? For a very brief presentation on this topic, visit Attributions Step By Step Links to an external site.. 

Did you add an open license to all of your own content? Do you know how to do that? The section below will discuss how to openly license your own work. For a very brief presentation on this topic, visit Open Licenses Step By Step Links to an external site..

How to use the CC License Chooser

You can easily add a CC license notice to your website by visiting the CC license chooser. At the chooser, simply answer a few questions, fill in the fields you need, and receive an already formatted HTML code.

CC license chooser v2.png

At this point, all you have to do is:

  1. Copy and paste the HTML code into your webpage or website. The specifics of inserting the code depend on how you edit your website. The block of code should be inserted into the page HTML - most desktop website tools like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or GoLive offer a "code view" that lets you see the code that makes up your page. Near the end of the page before you see </body></html>, paste the HTML code in directly. If all of the resources you are publishing on a single website are licensed under the same CC license, it makes sense to paste the HTML code into your website’s template (e.g., in a footer or sidebar area). After saving the template, the chosen license information should appear everywhere on your site. Whether you add license information to a single page or an entire site, once live on the Internet, the license information will be displayed and the machines will be able to detect the license status automatically.
  2. Edit the descriptive text to suit your needs. For example, if you select CC BY in the chooser, the default text you receive in the second line of html code is:
    This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License</a>.
    The bolded text is descriptive, and you can edit it without affecting the code. For example, you might specify what 'work' you're talking about, or let users know that the entire site is available under the license unless noted otherwise. You could edit the bolded part as follows:
    Except where otherwise noted, this website is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License</a>.

For examples of different formats marked with Creative Commons open license statements, visit Marking your work with a CC license Links to an external site. on the CC Wiki. 

Getting permission to use copyrighted work

If you must use items that are not openly licensed, and you plan to widely share your course beyond your classroom or the LMS, you must obtain permission from the author or copyright holder for the specific use that you intend.

The good news is that many educators who post their work online want it to be reused. I've had very good luck asking people to add an open license to their copyright statement so that anyone else can reuse their work without asking permission first in the future. I've also had good experiences getting permission to reuse content in a remix that will be shared with a CC-BY license even when the original is under copyright or a No Derivatives open license. The important point is to consider downstream users of your course - will they be able to make the same use of the copyrighted content, or will they have to hunt down a replacement that is open or in the public domain before they can adopt your course? 

Below is a sample permission request email.

Dear Dr. Dumbledore,

I am a faculty member with the ____ project. The purpose of this project is to design openly licensed Science and Technology courses that can be taught face-to-face, hybrid and/or online. These courses will be freely available on the internet for anyone to copy, modify and use. One of the purposes of this project is to offer educational resources to regions where formal educational opportunities are scarce or expensive.

I am creating a course entitled “Advanced Potion” and I would like to use a post from your blog entitled “Why polyjuice potion?” from February 2005.

I am seeking your permission to distribute this material as part of our course, which will be shared with a CC-BY Creative Commons license. You will maintain your copyright but will be giving us permission to distribute this material for reuse as part of the teaching of this course. We will mostly likely copy the text of your post into a Google document and attribute you. A full citation for the work will accompany it, as will a statement of copyright ownership.

Please contact me at xxxx@hogwarts.edu or by telephone at 253-xxx-xxxx with information about this request. Thank you for your time and attention.

Regards,
Your name

Implications of putting an open license on your work

Creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. This means that you cannot stop someone who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license from using the work according to that license. You can stop offering your work under a Creative Commons license at any time you wish, but this will not affect the rights associated with any copies of your work already in circulation under a Creative Commons license.

So you need to think carefully when choosing a Creative Commons license to make sure that you are comfortable with your work being used in ways that are consistent with the terms of the license. This means that derivatives of your work created during the time the license was in effect may continue to circulate even after you have changed the terms of your copyright.

To learn more, read Considerations for licensors and licensees Links to an external site. on the CC Wiki.

Where to share

Where you share your open content depends on what format it's in - just as when you search for open content. Most importantly, if you are going to share your entire course, please make it available on the Open Oregon Resources page Links to an external site. by submitting a brief form to share your materials Links to an external site.. That way other Oregon community college faculty can see how you've designed your course and won't have to reinvent the wheel. 

Attributions

Content on this page was adapted from the following sources:

"Module 6: Sharing OER" Links to an external site. by Boyoung Chae Links to an external site., Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges Links to an external site. is licensed under CC BY 4.0 Links to an external site.

"How to use the CC License Chooser" Links to an external site. by CC Wiki Links to an external site. is licensed under CC BY 4.0 Links to an external site.

"Creative Commons Licenses" Links to an external site. by Boyoung Chae Links to an external site., Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges Links to an external site. is licensed under CC BY 4.0 Links to an external site.