Previously at ProfHacker, I’ve discussed talking about fair use in the classroom and George provided some links regarding intellectual property. All of the ProfHacker content previously found at ProfHacker.com and now here at the Chronicle carries a Creative Commons license, and ProfHacker authors are committed to providing content under such a license whenever possible. For example, on many of our own web sites you can find course material licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license or something similar.
Your mileage may vary. You may want to keep your course content entirely to yourself—after all it is your work product—and that’s just fine, of course. This post isn’t about that, or even about open courseware in general. For Chronicle coverage on such matters, see their articles such as “Students’ Push for Open Education Meets Faculty Ambivalence,” “Free Online Courses Don’t Hurt Paid Enrollment,” and “College 2.0: More Professors Could Share Lectures Online. But Should They?”, among others. Instead, this post simply points to examples of Creative Commons in Education and asks how you as educators use or see yourselves using Creative Commons licensed material as you prepare your own courses.
Whether you’re a graduate student looking for ideas as you design your first course, a veteran faculty member looking to try something new, or a staff member teaching a workshop for the first time or pinch-hitting outside of your area of expertise, the availability of schedules, reading lists, assignments, problem sets, and related materials from institutions such as MIT can help with that process. Specific to computer science, Google Code University provides tutorials and sample course content for such topics as AJAX programming, algorithms, distributed systems, and web security. These are but two of many examples.
Personally, as a graduate student for the last five years, I benefitted from the availability of Creative Commons licensed material. While true that my departments had a physical file cabinet full of photocopied syllabi from years of classes, being able to see and modify/adapt/remix assignments from other instructors at various types of institutions proved incredibly useful. Even if I didn’t explicitly use an assignment from someone else, at least I had a greater sense of what others were doing at other institutions—boundaries being pushed as to subject material, methods, pedagogy, and so on.
How have you integrated Creative Commons-licensed material into your course? Directly, such as using assignments with attribution, or indirectly by just browsing the thousands of courses listed in the Open Courseware Consortium and gathering ideas, or not at all? What would you like to share about your methods of using or integrating open source course materials in your classroom—success stories are always welcome, but so are examples of failure, from which we can all learn. Tell us in the comments!
[Image in this post from Creative Commons in Education.]
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14 Responses to Using Creative Commons Licensed Material in Your Classroom
kkfungc - May 10, 2010 at 4:09 pm
There are a lot of potentially useful course materials out there. The difficulty is knowing what is available and how to customize them for one’s courses.It takes a lot of time to separate the chaff from the grain. And the grain may be too long if it is a video or too un-edited to be useful. For example, most lectures from so-called open courses are pretty hopeless because there are just too much pacing around, fumbling for words and unfocused camera angles.In other words, few materials are modular enough to be easily re-assembled into usable forms. And most content owners seem to prefer reserving all their rights. For example, there may be millions of flickr photos posted, but very few carry CC license. Most requests for permissions to re-use are not even answered.A lot of materials on the Merlot site do not even carry CC licenses.More educational sites carrying only CC materials would be a good start.
george_h_williams - May 10, 2010 at 5:03 pm
@kkfungc: Do you have specific examples from your own experience? As Julie’s post points out, stories of failure are just as helpful in many cases as those of success.”And most content owners seem to prefer reserving all their rights. For example, there may be millions of flickr photos posted, but very few carry CC license.”Actually, there are *tons* of CC-licensed Flickr photos. Just go to http://search.creativecommons.org, click on the “Flickr” tab, and search. You’ll find a huge number of photos.In general, using the http://search.creativecommons.org interface is a pretty good way of finding CC-licensed material.Another search strategy is to use Google’s advanced search features: specify the licensing terms you want, perhaps restrict your search only to *.edu domains, and enter your search terms.And individual assignments are often (usually?) easily re-assembled into usable forms by others.For example, a search for the terms “annotated bibliography assignment” restricted to *.edu domains and returning only materials licensed for re-use — including modifications — gives you 62 results (as of my writing this comment, that is). That’s not an overwhelming number — and some of those results might be false positives or duplicates — but I’d say that’s not bad.
jcmeloni - May 10, 2010 at 5:13 pm
@kkfungc you make a really good point about lecture videos. I admit that when I think about using CC-licensed materials I am mostly into things like assignments and assignment sequences, and not so much entire lecture modules. That probably comes from the fact that I mostly lead discussions and don’t really lecture too much. I think it might be time to do/revist lecturecasting at ProfHacker, and get some best practices up here so that people who want some guidance in that realm can get it (and we can all benefit).
george_h_williams - May 10, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Yeah, I definitely agree wrt lecture videos.The flip side to this particular coin would be learning how best to create CC-licensed materials — of any kind — for one’s own classroom so that they could also be easily reused and repurposed by others for their own courses.Hmm…Maybe a future ProfHacker post?
arrive2__net - May 10, 2010 at 7:44 pm
The CC licensing would presumably make determining the fair use of material clearer. Allowing use of some of your material could benefit you by enabling your material to be used without you completely losing control of it. If you developed some valuable material that becomes widely distributed, your name could still be on it, possibly giving you some name-recognition in your field. Plus there would be some record that the material was originally developed by you.Bernard Schuster
george_h_williams - May 10, 2010 at 8:34 pm
@Bernard: There are several different kinds of Creative Commons licenses for creators to choose from. These licenses are explained on this page at the Creative Commons website.
billso - May 10, 2010 at 9:10 pm
CC licensed material such as assignments would be very helpful. The CC mark and licensing terms can clear up some IP questions. I’ve considered adding CC licenses to my lecture video and audio as well.
tamaleaver - May 10, 2010 at 10:50 pm
I’ve found that Creative Commons licensed material can be amazingly useful for students who are creating digital media (especially those which included audio, photographs and video). Using CC material also encourages a meaningful conversation about copyright, not just a list of things you can’t (afford to) do. Over the last few years, I’ve built up a resource of various tools which easily locate Creative Commons licensed material, which if anyone would find useful is online here: http://bit.ly/tamawiki
jcmeloni - May 10, 2010 at 11:02 pm
@billso you’re certainly right that adding the CC mark reduces IP questions! Hope you share your audio and video.@tamaleaver thanks for the URL – I’ve taken the liberty of editorially hyperlinking it in your comment above
your_rights - May 11, 2010 at 7:07 am
Please excuse my ignorance, but I don’t get it and I have a question. I clicked on the hyperlink from #6 and did not understand any of it, but decided to click an item at random to see what it was about. The material was triple X so I shut it down.My question, however, is:Is it legal for a department to ask for everyone’s lecture notes and power point slides? I said no, but they deposited a nice check in my bank account anyway. I returned the check.
jmeloni - May 11, 2010 at 8:28 am
@your_rights the link in comment #6 goes to the Creative Commons web site.
coachhillary - May 11, 2010 at 8:59 am
Images in CC are extremely useful for PowerPoint presentations of any kind–especially since I think it is better to use images and then discuss what you beleive they represent (ie, bridge, soaring bird, etc. for psychology material) than putting any written words on the slide.
librarylvr - May 11, 2010 at 11:03 am
To your_rights: Ownership of lecture notes and course-related power point slides should be clearly addressed in either your contract with your institution or (if you’re tenured or tenure-stream) in your institution’s copyright policy.
derekbruff - May 15, 2010 at 2:42 pm
I agree with comment #12 above. After reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, I started shifting all my PowerPoint presentations to a much more visual style. Here’s an example. CC-licensed photos on Flickr make this possible!