You’ve looked at a range of OEP, locating and attributing an OER, and using and curating and reusing others’ materials to create a new OER but what about when you have material that you’ve created and you want to openly license it? Earlier the course looked at reasons educators might openly license their resources. The following sections of the course will look at how to openly license your work. However, beforehand, there are a few key questions to consider before you give a resource an open licence.
Depending on what type of material you are thinking about openly licensing, you need to consider whether it is appropriate to apply an open licence to a resource you’ve created. Issues of confidentiality and lack of control over reuse might be a concern, particularly if you are encouraging students to work in the ‘open’ or are involved in research. Or perhaps you are concerned about how your resource or material might be reused: what happens if someone reuses your work within a context that you find offensive? Have you any grounds for redress?
As mentioned earlier, once a resource is ‘in the wild’ and available for download/reuse under open licence terms, it is very difficult to track its reuse, as people may retain copies of the material. This is why you cannot retract an open licence; your only recourse is to remove the original resource so that nobody else can reuse it.
With regard to reusing material in contexts that the creator does not support, CC has a number of guidelines and suggestions on how to approach this issue, should it arise, as you are not necessarily endorsing reuse of your material. Read the Creative Commons guidelines ‘Considerations for licensors and licensees’ and ‘Frequently asked questions’ for more on these questions and more general considerations before openly licensing material.
Copyright or Intellectual Property
Once you have decided that you want to openly license a resource it is important to first ascertain whether the resource(s) or materials you intend to license actually belong to you or whether you need to seek permission to openly license the resource you want to include. For example, if you create material at work is it considered to belong to your place of work or you? In other words, who owns the intellectual property (IP)?
Ultimately, and because of the different and varied rules at different organisations and institutions, the best approach is to seek expert advice and consult with an appropriate person at your institution or place of work regarding the rights and intellectual property (IP) of materials you create at work. See the further reading section of the OEPS course for resources on these topics and Section 2.4 for examples of institutional open licensing policies.
Are you happy to go ahead and openly license that resource and sure that you hold the copyright? That is great! However, before you start thinking about what kind of licence you want to apply to your material, it’s worth taking time to think about how best you can facilitate reuse of the resource. To create a resource that can be easily found, reused and remixed can involve more than just openly licensing the material and ensuring that the open licence will ‘travel’ with the resource.
David Wiley’s 5Rs which highlighted characteristics of OER (see also Section 2.5) are useful to consider when thinking about best practice for sharing OER and how one can best facilitate ‘openness’ and make it easier for people to use OER. For example, how can you help facilitate the redistribution of the resource you create? Or how do you ensure that an OER can be remixed or reused? Moreover, how can you facilitate ‘ownership’ of a resource (the ‘retain’ of the 5Rs)? Take a look back at the matrix in Section 4.2 to consider how the material you choose to remix impacts on this.
In part this depends on what type of material you are openly licensing. If you share material online, how can you make it visible so that others can find it and easily determine that it meets their needs? For larger resources (e.g. courses) you will also need to make it easy for others to find specific content within the resource that they might want to reuse by providing an overview or summary. Think about how you can make your resource accessible to others, for example by providing it in different formats or by adding a transcript to a video?
It is useful, and often saves time, to address this type of question at the time of producing a resource (if you are making a resource from scratch or remixing/including OER in a new resource). To help make your resource visible and to facilitate reuse, here are some things to consider:
Ideally, in order to fulfil the practice of 5Rs, you want to make sure your resource is easy to find and use, has clear instructions on how to reuse it and its copyright (the open licence), in addition to giving some kind of overview and tagging to indicate what the resource includes (if appropriate). If possible, providing your resource in a few formats will also help facilitate reuse.
Reflect on the following questions and write down your thoughts in your reflective log:
OpenLearn - 4 How to create and share open educational resources Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.