How to Openly Share Your Faculty Created Materials Using Creative Commons
1. How to Openly Share Your
Faculty-Created Materials
Using Creative Commons
Presented by:
Sarah Romeo, Adjunct Librarian
Brenda Hazard, Library Director
HVCC Faculty Workshop Day – February 24, 2021
This presentation uses portions of Creative Commons: The Basics by Valerie Lang Waldin, J.D., M.L.S. and
Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians, both licensed under CC BY 4.0.
This presentation is licensed by Sarah Romeo and Brenda Hazard under CC BY 4.0.
2. Today’s presentation will cover:
Background: The Open Movement
What is a Creative Commons License?
How does Creative Commons licensing work?
Why choose a Creative Commons license?
The six different Creative Commons licenses
How to select and affix a Creative Commons license to
your work
How to share your Creative Commons-licensed work
3. What is the Open Movement?
Terms you may have heard:
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open Pedagogy
Open Access
Open …
is access oriented, learner driven, and allows educators and learners
to shape and customize knowledge
better serves all students
focuses on sharing
Creative Commons is the key to making “Open” happen.
4. What is Creative Commons (CC)?
The idea behind CC licensing was to create an easy way for
creators to share their works in ways consistent with existing
copyright law.
Goal: build a globally-accessible public commons of
knowledge and culture
Goal: make it easier for people to share their creative and
academic work
Goal: access and build upon the work of others
Goal: equity, accessibility, and innovation
Source: https://creativecommons.org/faq/
5. What is Creative Commons (CC)?
“Creative Commons is a set of legal tools, a
nonprofit organization, a global network and a
movement – all inspired by people’s willingness to
share their creativity and knowledge, and enabled
by a set of open copyright licenses.”
Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians
7. How does CC licensing work?
CC licensing allows creators to keep their copyright while sharing
their work on more flexible terms than the default “all rights
reserved.”
AKA “Some rights reserved”
You must own the copyright to apply a CC license
CC applies where copyright applies, for the same length of time
(unless license terms are violated)
It is simple, free, standardized, guarantees proper attribution, and
specifically designed to work with the web.
Some Rights
Reserved
8. How does CC licensing work?
You do not need to register with
Creative Commons to apply a CC
license to your material.
It is legally valid as soon as you apply
it to any material you have the legal
right to license.
Source: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-i-need-to-
register-with-creative-commons-before-i-obtain-a-license
9. Are Creative Commons licenses legally enforceable?
CC licenses are
drafted to be legally
enforceable around
the world.
To CC’s knowledge,
the licenses have
never been held
unenforceable or
invalid.
Source: https://creativecommons.org/faq/
10. Today…
CC licenses are now the
global standard for open
copyright licensing.
More than 1.6 billion CC-
licensed works exist on
over 9 million websites.
12. The six licenses
are comprised
of a mixture of
symbols, each
representing a
key “right”
within the
license.
CC Licensing Symbols
13. It is important to
identify which of
the 6 licenses you
are applying to
your material,
and/or which of
the six licenses
has been applied
to material that
you intend to use.
All require
attribution at a
minimum.
The Six CC Licenses
15. Other CC-Related Symbols
Creative Commons also offers a
way to release material worldwide
into the public domain.
CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as
many rights as legally possible.
Public Domain mark is a symbol
used to indicate that a work is
free of known copyright
restrictions.
Never had copyright to begin with
or the copyright expired.
CC0
Public Domain
16. Considerations
CC licenses are irrevocable and
cannot be cancelled. They apply
until the copyright expires (life of
the author + 70 years).
You can, however, decide to
reoffer the work under a
different license or regular
copyright. However, anyone who
finds the work with the original
license is legally allowed to use it
under the original terms.
18. HVCC Open Access Policy
Hudson Valley Community College formally acknowledges the use of open
educational resources (OERs) as an innovative solution to the escalating cost of
higher education. HVCC recognizes the well-established correlation between
textbook costs and student success and retention, and encourages implementation
of open educational resources, thereby affording students reputable and
sustainable options to highly priced textbooks. In addition to greatly reduced
costs, further advantages to OERs include equalization of access, as well as use,
adaptation or revision by others as permitted by the original author primarily via
Creative Commons licensing of digital resources. To encourage open access
progress and respond to SUNY’s vision of open access learning environments,
HVCC permits faculty and staff to assign Creative Commons licensing to the
academic materials they develop including but not limited to textbooks,
lecture notes and websites. Faculty are encouraged to identify, develop, and
adopt, wherever possible, the use of open educational resources as an integral
part of the HVCC teaching and learning mission.
Approved by Academic Senate, February 2019
Approved by President, March 2019
https://libguides.hvcc.edu/oer/open-access-resolution
To encourage open access progress and respond to
SUNY’s vision of open access learning environments,
HVCC permits faculty and staff to assign Creative
Commons licensing to the academic materials they
develop including but not limited to textbooks,
lecture notes and websites. Faculty are encouraged
to identify, develop, and adopt, wherever possible,
the use of open educational resources as an integral
part of the HVCC teaching and learning mission.
19. FOUR EXAMPLES
A handout you frequently use in your class
An exemplary teaching material you created. You typically distribute
it in paper format to your students.
You want others to be able to find it and use it.
[We’ll get to that later.]
A presentation of content you consider especially effective. You
distribute it online.
A YouTube video you created.
20. EXAMPLE 1
A handout you frequently use in your class
21. EXAMPLE 1
A handout you frequently use in your class
22. EXAMPLE 2
An exemplary teaching material you created. You typically distribute
it in paper format to your students.
You want others to be able to find it and use it.
27. EXAMPLE 4
A YouTube video you created.
Go to YouTube and log in to your account.
Create a post and upload your video file.
Complete the Details section
License and Distribution section
Change license from “Standard YouTube License” to “Creative Commons Attribution”
There’s NO logo!
Did you know you can search for only Youtube content with
Creative Commons attribution?
28. EXAMPLE 2 How to share
An exemplary teaching material you created. You typically distribute
it in paper format to your students.
You want others to be able to find it and use it.
29. EXAMPLE 2 again How to share
An exemplary teaching material you created. You typically distribute
it in paper format to your students.
You want others to be able to find/reuse/revise it.
Post your CC materials to an open repository!
For this example, we’ll use MERLOT
30. Recommended Reading & Key Source
Creative Commons for Educators and
Librarians (2020), published by the American
Library Association (ALA) and Creative
Commons.
Available for free from Creative Commons or
download a copy from:
https://libguides.hvcc.edu/oer/cc_licensing
31. Questions?
Sarah Romeo, Adjunct Librarian
s.romeo@hvcc.edu
Brenda Hazard, Library Director
b.hazard@hvcc.edu
Slide deck & additional CC-info:
https://libguides.hvcc.edu/oer/cc_licensing
Notes de l'éditeur
Open ensures everyone can actively participate and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.
This shift will generate more equitable economic opportunities and social benefits globally without sacrificing the quality of educational content.
As you can see this is an ethos that has been gaining ground in many areas, particularly technology and education, in the last few decades.
“A commons arises whenever a given community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use, and sustainability.”
- Economist David Bollier
CC began as a rejection of the expansion of copyright in the late 1990’s.
The founders recognized the mismatch between what technology enables and what copyright restricts.
Fellows and students at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society helped get the project off the ground.
I know everyone in this room is familiar with copyright on some level – perhaps you’ve even contacted someone to ask permission to use their copyrighted work.
First licenses appeared in 2002.
They function on a “some rights reserved approach rather than an “all rights reserved” approach. I’m sure many of us, regardless of our familiarity with copyright law, have seen those words somewhere. I like to think of it in terms of copyright law being a set of tightly sewn stitches – they’re keeping everything together. What Creative Commons does, is loosen that seam, and it becomes less restrictive.
This means that CC does not have special knowledge of who uses the licenses and for what purposes, nor does CC have a way to contact creators beyond means generally available to the public. CC has no authority to grant permission on behalf of those persons, nor does CC manage those rights on behalf of others.
The answer to the question above is: YES. The licenses have in fact gone to court in several instances, and have always, to CC’s knowledge, been upheld as legally valid.
CC is not going anywhere, and in fact, it’s everywhere!
At this point, you might be asking yourself this question. Or have I ever seen a CC-licensed work?
Well, you’re looking at one. If you recall our opening slide, you’ll see that we’ve marked our work as Creative Commons with a set of wording and an icon which incorporates the now-familiar CC symbol.
Next, we’ll explore these licenses, as there are actually six of them.
Each license, as you’ll see in the upcoming slides, has a set of symbols and letters, which are mixed and matched to form the licenses.
Each license is comprised of the mix of rights and elements indicated on the previous slides.
You may want to follow along with me on that gray card, if you’re so inclined, that we’ve given as a handout.
CC BY – the attribution license, can be used for any purposes, even commercial, so long as credit is given to the creator
CC BY SA – Attribution Share Alike – any purpose, even commercial, give credit to the creator AND any modifications and adaptations they share must be shared under the SAME license
CC BY NC – Attribution Non-Commercial - noncommercial purposes only, with attribution to creator
CC BY ND Attribution no Derivatives - use unadapted work for any purpose, even commercial, with attribution to creator, but cannot use any adaptations or derivatives (DESCRIPTION)
CC BY NC SA – Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike – noncommercial purposes, must attribute the author, and must share any adaptations under the same license
CC BY NC ND – Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives – unadapated work for noncommercial purposes only, with credit to creative. No adaptations or derivatives are allowed.
Try not to get too hung up on details – this will make more sense as we work through the examples later on
I also wanted to discuss a few more symbols that you may encounter while dealing with open material.
These marks are very similar and essentially do the same thing. CC0 is something a creator can do as a legal maneuver to release copyright restrictions. Which means, for some reason it never had copyright to begin with (existed prior to copyright law), or the copyright has expired.
Essentially either of these marks mean the item is free from ALL restrictions and can be used in any way, including without attribution (not that this is ethically something we would do!)
As we’ll show you shortly, it’s very easy to apply a CC license to your work, but you need to remember that you are actually giving up some of your rights as a creator, which is never something you’ll want to take lightly. You’ll need to take into consideration the work and how it could potentially be used.
Some points to remember:
Before we move on to Brenda’s examples, you maybe wondering, where does the college stand on this? How will they feel about me putting my teaching materials or other work out there?
Last year, HVCC approved an Open Access Policy, which you’ll see in full here, but I’ll read one section to you….
As you can see, the college supports this practice, and sees it as a key part of putting our instructor’s work out there and showcasing HVCC faculty excellence.
