Creative Commons 4 Educators

Expectations / Should I take this course?

Content Overview

This course is designed to help educators and people working in education-related fields learn more about the Creative Commons open content licensing system. It aims to provide participants with the skills they need to find and reuse copyright material legally, without having to become copyright experts.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that provides legal and technical tools to help creators share their materials with others. This helps creators to make their material more flexible for the digital environment, while at the same time creating a pool of material that can be used and distributed without breaching copyright law. There are more than 300 million movies, songs, books, pictures, class outlines etc available on the internet under Creative Commons licences, all of which can be legally reused as long as the licence the author has chosen is obeyed. Creative Commons replaces the 'all rights reserved' system of default copyright law with a voluntary 'some rights reserved' system.

For more information on Creative Commons, see http://creativecommons.org.

Creative Commons is often described as an alternative copyright system. However, Creative Commons in fact relies on copyright. As such, some basic knowledge of copyright will be required to complete the course. The course Background Texts and Resources provides you with reading designed to help with this basic knowledge; however, this course won't provide you with detailed information on the limits of copyright law. If you would like to learn more about copyright, we suggest you take one of the Copyright 4 Educators courses also offered by p2pu.

How is the course delivered?

The Copyright 4 Educators course is not taught, it is facilitated by the course leader, Jessica Coates.

The course is student participation focused. Students are divided into small groups of four, with each group organising their own online communications/discussions (via email, Google docs, Skype, tokbox etc) and jointly submitting answers to the case scenarios and assignments. You are also encouraged to respond to and comment on other groups answers.
 
The course leader reviews and marks the student group work (pass/fail) that has been posted to the blog, provides comments, and is available to answer questions. However, they do not 'teach' in the normal sense of the term. Instead, participants teach themselves and each other.

What is required from me?

The course runs for 6 weeks, during which time you are expected to submit and comment on three group assignments (see below). This will take around 4 hours per week. This is a serious commitment - but it will be rewarding.

As is discussed above, this course is a peer to peer learning experience designed to enable learning by  participants sharing their experiences and understandings with others. For that reason, all participants are expected to collaborate and share their answers to questions, and to comment on other students' answers.

Participants retain copyright to their answers and can re-use them how they like. However, we would also like to use student contributions to inform future iterations of the course. We therefore request that you license your answers under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike licence. If you would like more information on what this means, or are not happy with this licence, please contact Jessica before the course commences.