More About Creative Commons

Why Share Resources Under an Open License?

How Open Practice Supports Teacher Professional Growth

What is Creative Commons?

Sources

Creative Commons. (2024). Creative Commons Certificate Course for Educators, Academic Librarians, and Open Culture. Unit 1: What is Creative Commons?. https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/

Science and Media Museum. (2020, December 3). A Short History of The Internet. Retrieved Feb. 2, 2024 from https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/short-history-internet

"The Story Behind the Licenses" by Beth Cormier was created with Knight Lab's Timeline JS and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0.

Creative Commons is More Than a Set of Licenses

Founded in 2001, it is a non-profit organization that actively supports equitable access to a shared commons of knowledge and culture.
It has led to a global movement of individuals, organizations, and policy makers who use and advocate for Creative Commons licenses.
Anyone interested in sharing and collaboration can become part of the Creative Commons Global Network. There are Chapters in many countries and three platforms of interest (Open Education, Open Culture, Copyright).

The Creative Commons Certificate Course is an ideal way to gain expertise in open licenses while experiencing open pedagogy.

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) "describe any copyrightable work that is either

In the public domain or
licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute.

(Excerpt from Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources,

written by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license

at http://opencontent.org/definition/.)

Image by BCOER Librarians from Key Things to Know About Open Educational Resources (Poster). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license .

Why Share Resources Under an Open License?

David Wiley and Cable Green are prominent scholars in Open Education. The points below are excerpted directly from their 2012 chapter on Openness. They present Open Education as an innovative, responsive, and transformative practice:

Open educational resources allow the full technical power of the Internet to be brought to bear on education. OER allow exactly what the Internet enables: free sharing of educational resources with the world.
Open educational resources provide an immediate, proven way to make education significantly more affordable and accessible for students.
OER provide instructors with free and legal permissions to engage in continuous quality-improvement processes such as incremental adaptation and revision, empowering instructors to take ownership and control over their courses and textbooks in a manner not previously possible.
Because the bulk of education and research funding comes from taxpayer dollars...Every taxpayer has a reasonable expectation of access to educational materials and research products whose creation tax dollars supported.

Ch. 6 Why Openness in Education, by David Wiley and Cable Green Gamechangers. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Open Education

The OpenSource.com project (Red Hat, 2022), which raises awareness and builds community around open practices across many areas of life, offers this introduction to Open Education:

Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal. Such barriers might include high monetary costs, outdated or obsolete materials, and legal mechanisms that prevent collaboration among scholars and educators.

Promoting collaboration is central to open education. As the Open Education Consortium says: "sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built."

What is Open Education? by Red Hat, Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

How Open Practice Supports Teacher Professional Growth

Open Education practices benefit students through increased availability of quality learning materials, but they also significantly benefit and demonstrate teacher professional growth:

Teachers can test and refine specific strategies or approaches and then easily share that knowledge throughout the profession.
Teachers can build their own capacity through ready access to customizable content that reflects a variety of contexts.
The valuable professional knowledge teachers apply to create, implement, and reflect on learning experiences is more visible through increased mechanisms for contributing to curriculum development.
Informed participation in open practice builds greater understanding for ethical use of specific types of material in teaching, specifically: copyrighted, openly licensed, and public domain.

How Open Practice Connects to the Alberta Teaching Quality Standard:

#2 Engaging in Career-Long Learning

a-collaborating with other teachers to build personal and collective professional capacities and expertise;

f- maintaining an awareness of emerging technologies to enhance knowledge and inform practice.

#3 Demonstrating a Professional Body of Knowledge

A teacher applies a current and comprehensive repertoire of effective planning, instruction, and assessment practices to meet the learning needs of every student.

# 6 Adhering to Legal Frameworks and Policies

a. maintaining an awareness of, and responding in accordance with, requirements authorized under the Education Act and other relevant legislation.

b. engaging in practices consistent with policies and procedures established by the school authority

What Opportunities Does K-12 OER Offer in Alberta?

Leverage Communities of Practice

Innovation through collaboration is evident throughout the province. Open licensing may be the first step in connecting high quality, teacher-created lesson material to more AB teachers for the benefit of all students.

Claim a Greater Role in Curriculum Development and Implementation

Thousands of Alberta teachers enact the same provincially mandated standards daily, and their collective expertise is formidable. A shared effort to evaluate, develop and distribute accessible, flexible, teaching/learning resources is in the interest of a strong public education system where teacher voice and expertise is valued.

Build Professional Capacity

The OER emphasis on collaborative, continuous improvement aligns with the Alberta Teaching Quality Standard Competency #2: Engaging in Career-Long Learning. Supporting Teachers in accessing and developing OERs also aligns with the Alberta Leadership Quality Standards (LQS) #4 Leading a Learning Community and #6 Providing Instructional Leadership.

OER are situated within the broader construct of Open Pedagogy. Attributes of open pedagogy (as described by Bronwyn Hegarty, 2015) align with the way many communities of educators already work.

Eight Attributes of Open Pedagogy-PDF is from Ontario Colleges OER Toolkit and is their adaptation of Eight attributes of Open Pedagogy, by Bronwyn Hegarty, based on Conole (2013), and licensed under CC-BY-3.0.

References

Alberta Education. (2020). Teaching quality standard. Alberta Education. Edmonton, AB. https://open.alberta.ca/publications/teaching-quality-standard-2020#summary

Hegarty, B. (2015). Attributes of Open Pedagogy: A Model for Using Open Educational Resources. Educational Technology. July– August. 3 - 13.

Ret Hat Inc. (2022). What is open source? OpenSource.com. https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source

Wiley, D. & Green, C. (2012). Why openess in education? In Oblinger, D.G., (Ed). Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies (pp. 81-90) . Educause.

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