The Creative Commons Open Education Platform community completed our latest round of Lightning Talks, or seven-minute presentations on specific updates or stories in open education. Learn more about the presentations in the recording links and summaries below. 

And, we hope you will consider presenting in our next round, coming up in October. Sign up here.

Our Lightning Talks presentations include:

“Open Syllabus: UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science” by Jennifer Miller 

• Summary: An open syllabus, assignments–including interactive multiple choice self-check questions–and rubrics for a semester-long course teaching open science through the lens of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. The syllabus and materials were created as part of the Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) program. The course is suitable for PIs to teach as a special topics course to early career researchers in their lab or department, for a Maymester or summer session offering to prospective or incoming STEM graduate students, or in a lifelong learning context for practicing and retired STEM practitioners and educators. The syllabus has been presented and well received at OEGlobal, OE4BW Eduscope, OERcamp, and the First UNESCO Working Group Meeting on Capacity Building in Open Science. The openly-licensed materials are available on Wikiversity and Zenodo. A train-the-trainer session is offered July 26-28 at FSCI2022 and a workshop is offered August 6 at the Scholar.Social Summer School.
• Presenter: Jennifer has 10+ years experience teaching and doing research in public policy and public management. She is a civic technologist and open knowledge advocate.
• Presentation

 

“More OER for Free!” by Jonathan Poritz

• Summary: In jurisdictions with a strong works-made-for-hire doctrine in their copyright laws, there is often a policy decision to be made about educational materials produced by employees (instructors and other staff) of educational institutions.  In the US, at least, the result tends to be that copyrights for such materials are owned by the employer, excepting only tenure-line faculty in higher ed who keep their individual copyrights.  A policy which automatically applied to those institutionally owned materials an OER-compatible CC license would instantly free enormous quantities of existing material, and open up future materials, for much wider use and public benefit. Jonathan discussed some of the details of how versions of this policy might work, what obstacles there could be in their way, and how they are or are not consistent with other policies and efforts.
• Presenter: Jonathan is a former mathematics faculty member and OER Coordinator at a public university in Colorado, USA; former member of the Colorado state OER Council; volunteer in many open ed orgs; and ongoing facilitator for the CC Certificate course.  He currently lives in a Schroedinger’s Cat-like state somewhere between Colorado, USA, and Pietrasanta, Italy.

 

“Open Climate Campaign” by Dr. Cable Green and Dr. Monica Granados

• Summary: Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. The complexity of the climate crisis requires global, national, and local actions informed by multidisciplinary research. The goal of this multi-year campaign is to promote open access to research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. If we are going to solve these global challenges, the knowledge (research, data, educational resources, software) about them must be open.
• Presenters: Dr. Cable Green works with open education, science and research communities to leverage open licensing, content, practices and policies to expand equitable access and contributions to open knowledge. His work is focused on identifying complex problems (e.g., UN SDGs) where open knowledge is a critical part of the solution, and then opening that knowledge to help solve the problem. Cable is also a leading advocate for open licensing and procurement policies that ensure publicly funded education, science and research resources are freely and openly available to the public. 
• Dr. Monica Granados is the Open Climate Campaign Manager for a multi-year campaign to open knowledge about the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. If we are going to solve these global challenges, the knowledge (research, data, educational resources, software) about them must be open.
  Link to presentation: The Open Climate Campaign: opening access to climate and biodiversity knowledge (CC Open Education Lightning Talk)

“Building OER into Capstone Courses” by Carolyn Stevenson

• Summary: Integrating OER into undergraduate and graduate capstone courses offers the opportunity to serve learners across disciplines. The Professional Studies degrees are competency-based, allow learners to craft their own individualized learning plan, and use OER as a cost-effective means for providing learning resources.
• Presenter: Carolyn has 20+ plus years experience in online learning and is currently University Faculty for Purdue University Global, USA.
  • PPT
  • PPT with Audio recording

“Improve It Challenge” by Jamison Miller

• Summary: Lumen Learning’s Improve It Challenge grant program invites anyone and everyone to engage in the continuous improvement of open educational resources. First, Jamison shared how Lumen uses data to identify learning outcomes in Lumen courses where students across the U.S. are struggling. He then explained the Lumen grant program, beginning with how people can apply. Small grants are awarded to individuals with compelling proposals to revise / remix / create new learning activities aligned with these difficult outcomes. If A/B testing demonstrates that the updated learning activities significantly improve student learning, grantees receive a 10x bonus award!
• Presenter: Jamison is the Director, Research Communication at Lumen Learning. 
• Slides
• Blog post

Would you like to present in the next round of Lightning Talks, which will take place in October 2022? Sign up here >>

Keep track of what CC Open Education Platform is doing by subscribing to our calendar and learn more about the CC Open Education Platform on our website. 

 

The post CC Open Education Platform Lightning Talks: Recordings and Request for Speakers! appeared first on Creative Commons.

What are the barriers to open culture? What challenges do cultural heritage institutions — such as galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) — face in making their collections openly accessible online? How could Creative Commons support institutions in addressing these challenges and taking part in better sharing of cultural heritage? 

In search of answers, we looked at past research, notably Andrea Wallace’s Barriers to Open Access · Open GLAM, and asked more than 30 experts in the open culture movement. You can watch what they told us in our CC Open Culture VOICES vlog series. Here’s a small sample of what we heard:

“A number of imbalances related to power, priority, interests, and resources can facilitate or impede participation in digitization and open access initiatives…” — Andrea Wallace

“…we need to consider what openness online really means and who the audiences are. Are they mostly privileged audiences? Are they mostly people who have access to very expensive laptops and mobile phones? Or is this truly an open culture that can be accessed anywhere, anytime by all people around the world?” — Temi Odumosu

“Another perceived barrier is that [GLAMs] are missing out on opportunities to generate income from the collections.” — Dafydd Tudur

“Open GLAM requires resources, expertise, and investment in rights management and copyright, which are complex.” — Douglas McCarthy

We identified three main clusters of barriers: 

• Money: lack of resources and fear of losing revenue from licensing; 
• People: lack of appropriate knowledge and skills, together with a host of apprehensions and risk aversion;
• Policy: a complex and outdated copyright system, and the absence of a positive policy framework encouraging openness. 

Read the full report. 

Do you face these or other barriers? Do you have ideas about how CC could help GLAMs overcome these barriers to opening up culture? Reach out and let us know: Fill out this short form or write to us at info@creativecommons.org and share your ideas and opportunities to overcome these barriers. 

The post What are the barriers to open culture? Here’s what the CC community has to say appeared first on Creative Commons.

As part of Creative Commons’ key strategic goal of Better Sharing, we have taken a firm stance against mandatory content filtering on the internet. In new proposed legislation, the U.S. Congress is now raising mandatory content filtering again as a tool to eliminate infringement of copyrighted works. For those who are new to the discussion, mandatory filtering would require that all information providers enable software that prevents the distribution of materials claimed by rightsholders. If you’ve ever uploaded videos to YouTube, you’ve seen content filters at work: videos are scanned for copyrighted audio like popular music before they are published, and sometimes videos are blocked even when they are legal to share. Policy that forces every digital publisher, platform, and service provider to adopt similar filters would make this broken model universal. CC has long stated that the effects of mandatory filtering are devastating to free speech, as well as the sharing of culture and knowledge. CC has also spoken out against filtering mandates and opposed their introduction in the European Union.

Earlier this year, we explained why we are strongly opposed to the proposed “Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Copyright Act of 2022”. A few weeks ago, we submitted a Comment to the U.S. Copyright Office in response to its Notice of Inquiry; in it, we continue to advocate that no internet services should be forced to adopt Standard Technical Measures (STMs), or any other mandatory filtering systems, imposed by the government.

Specifically, we stated in our Comment that we did not believe the law mandated STMs, and that the law must continue not to require them. While service providers should be free to choose to use filtering as a tool to aid in compliance for a first-level review, filters should never be the final say in what materials are shared with the public.

In June, Creative Commons was invited to present its position on mandatory filtering at a workshop organized by the Internet Archive entitled “Libraries and the Digital Information Ecosystem: Towards an Affirmative Policy Agenda for a Better Internet.” (The workshop is a continuation of the Better Internet initiative.)

Our lightning talk presentation centered on the damaging effects of mandatory copyright filtering for library communities; mainly, that such policy was at odds with providing the public with access to information. We reiterated that mandatory filtering, by design, does not respect limitations and exceptions to authors’ exclusive rights, but respects only the interests of the largest rightsholders. These simplistic technical tools unfortunately do not account for the context of uses such as education, research, preservation, or critical commentary; they see only matches for content, and many cannot even do that well. Even the most sophisticated systems available today give too many false positives to legally authorized material uploaded by users. (Examples include public domain recordings of classical music mistakenly flagged as major label recordings of those pieces, and an hour long loop of a cat purring being misidentified as a song.)

The post CC still opposes mandatory filtering and so should you appeared first on Creative Commons.

Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a motion for summary judgment calling to reject the lawsuit against the Internet Archive (IA) brought by four big publishers that threatens IA’s controlled digital lending (CDL) program. Creative Commons fully supports this motion. Here’s why. 

The Internet Archive is an American non-profit library preserving and giving access to millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more, with the mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”

As we mention in our Open Culture Policy Paper, with CDL, libraries can lend one copy of digitized material from their collection to one borrower at a time, for two weeks or less, just like they would a physical book. Unlike eLending, CDL is about digitized works, not born-digital material. CDL maximizes a library’s ability to loan works, thereby making the entire lending system more efficient and equitable. 

At CC, we believe libraries — and cultural heritage institutions in general — should be empowered to serve as a meaningful access point for publicly funded collections. Free and open access to knowledge stimulates creativity, is essential for research and learning, and constitutes a bedrock principle of free and democratic societies. 

Copyright must encourage CDL and ensure that legal mechanisms are in place to allow this fair practice. As clearly articulated by EFF: “CDL helps ensure that the public can make full use of the books that libraries have bought and paid for. This activity is fundamentally the same as traditional library lending, and poses no new harm to authors or the publishing industry.” 

Books, in all their forms, are a public good. Libraries, whether brick-and-mortar or digital, pursue a public-interest mission. Guided by our strong belief in better sharing, CC will continue to support the IA’s crucial efforts to ensure the public can access knowledge and culture on a global level.

The post CC Supports Internet Archive’s Efforts to Ensure Public Access to Books appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons Open Education Platform community will offer our next round of Lightning Talks, or seven-minute presentations on specific updates or stories in open education. Join the sessions on Tuesday 12 July at 6:00pm UTC. We can’t wait to learn with you!

Location: Join us from wherever you are based! We’ll be using Zoom to host the event. If you haven’t installed Zoom, download it here.

 

 

Our Lightning Talks presentations include: 

“Open Syllabus: UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science” by Jennifer Miller 

• Summary: An open syllabus, assignments–including interactive multiple choice self-check questions–and rubrics for a semester-long course teaching open science through the lens of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. The syllabus and materials were created as part of the Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) program. The course is suitable for PIs to teach as a special topics course to early career researchers in their lab or department, for a Maymester or summer session offering to prospective or incoming STEM graduate students, or in a lifelong learning context for practicing and retired STEM practitioners and educators. The syllabus has been presented and well received at OEGlobal, OE4BW Eduscope, OERcamp, and the First UNESCO Working Group Meeting on Capacity Building in Open Science. The openly-licensed materials are available on Wikiversity and Zenodo, and a train-the-trainer session is offered July 26-28 at FSCI2022.
• Presenter: Jennifer has 10+ years experience teaching and doing research in public policy and public management. She is a civic technologist and open knowledge advocate.

“More OER for Free!” by Jonathan Poritz

• Summary: In jurisdictions with a strong works-made-for-hire doctrine in their copyright laws, there is often a policy decision to be made about educational materials produced by employees (instructors and other staff) of educational institutions.  In the US, at least, the result tends to be that copyrights for such materials are owned by the employer, excepting only tenure-line faculty in higher ed who keep their individual copyrights.  A policy which automatically applied to those institutionally owned materials an OER-compatible CC license would instantly free enormous quantities of existing material, and open up future materials, for much wider use and public benefit. Jonathan will discuss some of the details of how versions of this policy might work, what obstacles there could be in their way, and how they are or are not consistent with other policies and efforts.
• Presenter: Jonathan is a former mathematics faculty member and OER Coordinator at a public university in Colorado, USA; former member of the Colorado State OER Council; volunteer in many open ed orgs; and ongoing facilitator for the CC Certificate course.  He currently lives in a Schroedinger’s Cat-like state somewhere between Colorado, USA, and Pietrasanta, Italy.

“Open Climate Campaign” by Dr. Cable Green and Dr. Monica Granados

• Summary: Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. The complexity of the climate crisis requires global, national, and local actions informed by multidisciplinary research. The goal of this multi-year campaign is to promote open access to research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. If we are going to solve these global challenges, the knowledge (research, data, educational resources, software) about them must be open.
• Presenters: Dr. Cable Green works with open education, science and research communities to leverage open licensing, content, practices and policies to expand equitable access and contributions to open knowledge. His work is focused on identifying complex problems (e.g., UN SDGs) where open knowledge is a critical part of the solution, and then opening that knowledge to help solve the problem. Cable is also a leading advocate for open licensing and procurement policies that ensure publicly funded education, science and research resources are freely and openly available to the public.
• Dr. Monica Granados is the Open Climate Campaign Manager for a multi-year campaign to open knowledge about the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. If we are going to solve these global challenges, the knowledge (research, data, educational resources, software) about them must be open.

“Building OER into Capstone Courses” by Carolyn Stevenson

• Summary: Integrating OER into undergraduate and graduate capstone courses offers the opportunity to serve learners across disciplines. The Professional Studies degrees are competency-based, allow learners to craft their own individualized learning plan, and use OER as a cost-effective means for providing learning resources.
• Presenter: Carolyn has 20+ plus years experience in online learning and is currently University Faculty for Purdue University Global, USA.

“Improve It Challenge” by Jamison Miller

• Summary: Lumen Learning’s Improve It Challenge grant program invites anyone and everyone to engage in the continuous improvement of open educational resources. First, Jamison will share how Lumen uses data to identify learning outcomes in Lumen courses where students across the U.S. are struggling. Next, he will explain the Lumen grant program, beginning with how people can apply. Small grants are awarded to individuals with compelling proposals to revise / remix / create new learning activities aligned with these difficult outcomes. If A/B testing demonstrates that the updated learning activities significantly improve student learning, grantees receive a 10x bonus award!
• Presenter: Jamison is the Director, Research Communication at Lumen Learning.

Watch our last round of Open Education Lightning Talks here >>

The post Join us for our next round of CC Open Education Platform Lightning Talks! appeared first on Creative Commons.