As part of the drafting committee, Creative Commons (CC) fully supports the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER), which the member states will vote on at the 40th session of the UNESCO General Conference in November. We laud the multitude of national governments and open education experts engaged in the development of this international agreement. We look forward to collaborating with these governments and our NGO colleagues in the coming months and years to help Ministries/Departments of Education implement this Recommendation. 

The UNESCO Recommendation on OER* sets out a transformative vision of open education, contributing to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

Below are the five objectives from the draft Recommendation. You can also view the entire document here.

1. Capacity building: developing the capacity of all key education stakeholders to create, access, use, adapt, and redistribute OER, as well as to use and apply open licenses in a manner consistent with national copyright legislation and international obligations;

2. Developing supportive policy: encouraging governments, and education authorities and institutions to adopt regulatory frameworks to support open licensing of publicly funded educational materials, develop strategies to enable use and adaptation of OER in support of high quality, inclusive education and lifelong learning for all, and adopt integrated mechanisms to recognize the learning outcomes of OER-based programmes of study;

3. Effective inclusive and equitable access to quality OER: supporting the adoption of strategies and programmes, including through relevant technology solutions that ensure OER in any medium are shared in open formats and standards to maximize equitable access, co-creation, curation, and search ability, including for those from vulnerable groups and persons with disabilities;

4. Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER: supporting and encouraging the creation of sustainability models for OER at national and institutional levels, and the planning and pilot test of new sustainable forms of education and learning;

5. Facilitating international cooperation: supporting international cooperation between stakeholders to minimize unnecessary duplication in OER development investments and to develop a global pool of culturally diverse, locally relevant, gender-sensitive, accessible, educational materials in multiple languages.

Here’s a brief timeline of the efforts leading up to the UNESCO Recommendation on OER and CC’s continued engagement:

• 2019: Member states and observer organizations, including Creative Commons, provided multiple edits to the Recommendation draft including an improved open license definition; calling on member states to support the linguistic translation of open licenses; adopting high standards for privacy in OER, platforms, and services; and a call to facilitate open procurement.
• 2017: The 2nd World Congress unanimously adopted the 2017 Ljubljana OER Action Plan. The Congress hosted 30 ministers of education and participants from over 100 countries, with the goal of mainstreaming open education to meet the education targets in the United Nations SDG4.
• 2015: UNESCO announced a new Open Access Repository making more than 300 digital reports, books, and articles available to the world under CC licenses, in line with the 2013 UNESCO Open Access Policy.
• 2012: The groundwork for the current OER Recommendation was laid in the 2012 Paris OER Declaration.

In partnership with our open education colleagues, CC will provide a suite of professional development, policy, networking, and consulting services to national governments as they engage in national and regional efforts to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendation in 2020. Stay tuned!

 

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The 2020 Creative Commons (CC) Global Summit is returning to Lisbon, Portugal on 14-16 May!

We’ve grown the CC Global Summit every year as hundreds of leading activists, advocates, librarians, educators, lawyers, technologists, and more have joined us for discussion, debate, workshops, planning, talks, and community building.

Whether you’re new to the community or a long-time contributor, the CC Global Summit has lots to offer. It’s a can’t-miss event for anyone interested in the global movement for the commons.

Your Participant Pass includes:

• Access to all conference programming including workshops, talks, and keynotes
• Breakfast, lunch, and snacks served onsite every day
• Evening events showcasing local Lisbon artists

Register today using the discount code: SEEYOUSOON20 for 10% off your registration!

For the latest updates on the 2020 CC Summit, please join our mailing list and check out our website!

Missed last year’s CC Summit? Be sure to check out this blog wrap-up and watch all seven of the keynotes that cover a range of important topics—from decolonizing archives in Palestine to the barriers of copyright reform in Europe.

The post Early Bird Registration is Open for the CC Global Summit! appeared first on Creative Commons.

The 2020 Creative Commons (CC) Global Summit is returning to Lisbon, Portugal on 14-16 May, co-hosted by CC Portugal.

You can help bring the CC Summit to life for our participants by volunteering for a role on one of our planning committees. Please note: These are remote positions; you do not need to be located in Portugal.

Volunteer opportunities available:

Program Committee—as a part of this committee, you’ll work collaboratively to develop the theme and tracks of the CC Global Summit, as well as curate the program submissions. This committee will require weekly or-biweekly conference calls from November 2019 to March 2020, as well as asynchronous communication by email and in Slack.

Scholarship Evaluation Committee—as a part of this committee, made up of CC staff and members, you’ll use funding guidelines provided by CC to evaluate scholarship applications. This committee will require around 3-5 hours per week, from November 2019 until February 2020.

Learn more and apply by November 1, 2019.

Missed last year’s CC Summit? Be sure to check out this blog wrap-up and watch all seven of the keynotes that cover a range of important topics—from decolonizing archives in Palestine to the barriers of copyright reform in Europe.

The post How to Get Involved With the 2020 CC Global Summit appeared first on Creative Commons.

At the 2017 Creative Commons Global Summit, we hosted a special session with filmmaker Robin McKenna that featured an early look at her then-in-progress documentary GIFT. McKenna’s film is now completed and opens today in select cities in the US.

Inspired by The Gift, Lewis Hyde’s influential 1983 book about creativity and sharing (and an early inspiration for Creative Commons), GIFT explores gift-based cultures around the world and looks to understand how sharing makes us human. It follows the journeys of several people and their diverse creative pursuits, and chronicles how the acts of creating and sharing are currencies in their own right.

Watch the trailer for GIFT below, and check out our interview with McKenna from 2017 to learn more about her filmmaking process and what moved her to make this lovely documentary. Bonus material: Back in 2010, we interviewed Lewis Hyde—it’s an insightful read!

The post Robin McKenna’s GIFT Documentary Opens Today appeared first on Creative Commons.

The Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) is a passionate community that lights up our vibrant, collaborative, global commons. The CC Network is also critical to our mission of sharing. To support CC Network members, we launched a scholarship program for CC Certificate courses. 

Today, we are proud to highlight our first 10 CC Certificate Scholarship recipients. The CC Certificate provides an-in depth study of Creative Commons licenses and open practices, uniquely developing participants’ open licensing proficiency and understanding of the broader context for open advocacy.

After launching the official CC Certificate courses in July of 2018, we offered 18 scholarships a year later. We’re thrilled to enroll our first scholarship recipients in the September 2019 and January 2020 classes! They join the ranks of 507 other participants from 42 countries or territories who have enrolled in  CC Certificate courses. These initial scholarships are just the start. We aim to increase the number of scholarships we offer by 50% next year, and further increase the number in subsequent years. 

Although we will share more about our scholarship recipients on the CC Certificate website in the coming weeks, we are delighted to name them here:

September 2019 courses:
Alice Joseph Mihayo
Brian Ssennoga
Fitriayu Penyalai
Margaret Lopez

January 2020 courses:
Juliana Monteiro
Margorie Merel
Jorge Gemetto
Nurunnaby Chowdhury
Raphel Berchie
Roshan Kumar Karn

How does the scholarship program work?

It’s simple. Creative Commons offers as many scholarship tickets as we can to CC Network Chapters. As leaders in the field with regular connection to local community members, Chapter leads and representatives determine the recommended scholarship recipients. They send scholarship recommendations and contact information to CC, and we help recipients register in the Librarian or Educator Certificate courses. 

The Scholarship program covers 80% of the recipient’s ticket, requiring scholarship recipients to contribute the remaining US $100. 

In this initial round, we’ve prioritized scholarships for CC network members in Global South countries who want to use Certificate knowledge to fuel their own community efforts and “pay it forward” to their communities. Once we are able to offer all interested CC Country Chapters in the Global South at least one scholarship, we will provide scholarships to other CC Country Teams until, one day, we’ll have at least one community member trained in every interested CC Network country.

 

The post Meet Our First CC Certificate Scholarship Recipients! appeared first on Creative Commons.