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Get Up To Speed with OER

This is a self-paced tutorial for faculty and staff to learn about Open Educational Resources - what they are, how to find and evaluate them, how to adapt and create them, and how to handle the copyright and technical implications.

The Creative Commons

You might be wondering why Creative Commons was created. The following quote from Professor Lawrence Lessing is a good summary of the reasoning behind it:

 

“The idea motivating the Creative Commons is the reality that copyright law by default gives copyright owners what’s referred to by the slogan “All Rights Reserved.” And for most people on the Internet, that’s more protection than they actually want. But there’s no easy way to signal that I don’t need all this protection and I’m happy to give up some rights. So what we [the Creative Commons organization] did is build a tool, a technology, that makes it easy for authors and artists to signal the kinds of rights they are happy to give away, while signalling the rights that they want actually to keep. So it facilitates sharing and building and remixing on top of content where the authors opt in to this more balanced and rational copyright system that supports the idea of remix or participatory culture.”