Larry Lessig and guest toast CC10 / David Kindler / CC BY

This month marks the end of Creative Commons’ annual fundraising campaign. Thank you so much to everyone who donated or helped spread the word about the campaign.

The past few months have really been a whirlwind for the CC community. We celebrated CC’s tenth anniversary around the world, even in Antarctica (!). We’ve seen major open legislation introduced in Congress, and a White House directive to get more serious about open access. The community built a new online school where anyone can learn about open. We’ve entered the final stretch in developing Version 4.0 of the CC licenses. We’ve mourned the loss of a friend, and are calling for the release of another. And we’ve done it all hand-in-hand with the global community of commoners.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your support. Thank you for being a diverse, engaged community. Full steam ahead into the second decade.

PS: If you haven’t gotten your “Create Share Remix” T-shirt yet, there are still a few left.

This Friday, 15 March, is the one-year anniversary of the detainment of CC Syria lead Bassel Khartibil by the Syrian government. It’s also the second anniversary of the start of the conflict in Syria.

Bassel is a software engineer who has been an important open web advocate and a big part of the CC community for many years. For the past year, CC has been supporting the FREEBASSEL project, which aims to draw attention to his detainment and ultimately secure Bassel’s release.

This Friday, FREEBASSEL is planning a day of global solidarity, inviting everyone to host events, demonstrations, and parties in honor of Bassel. You can do anything – make posters, release software, translate his Wikipedia entry, throw a party at a local bar. Have a cheers for #FREEBASSEL and tweet the picture of your group in your local language. It’s a day to remember Bassel and spread the word.

You can find out about events already being organised for Free Bassel Day, or post about your own, at freebasselday.org. Some of the great events already being organised by the CC community include:

• CC France and OKFN are organising a Syrian dinner in Paris;
• CC Netherlands and Kennisland have created a poster with information and are placing it behind metal bars throughout Amsterdam, to mimic Bassel’s incarceration;
• CC HQ is teaming with Wikimedia and EFF to hold a FreeBassel event in San Francisco, with activities and a FREEBASSEL photo shoot.

Or, most simple of all, show your support by sharing this video with your friends and sign the letter.

Today California (CA) Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (author of the CA open textbook legislation) announced that SB 520 (fact sheet) will be amended to provide open, online college courses for credit. In short, the bill will allow CA students, enrolled in CA public colleges and universities, to take online courses from a pool of 50 high enrollment, introductory courses, offered by 3rd parties, in which CA students cannot currently gain access from their public CA university or community college. Students must already be enrolled in the CA college or university in which they want to receive credit. The 50 courses and plans for their assessment will be reviewed and approved (or not) by a faculty committee prior to being admitted into this new online course marketplace.

See these articles for details about the initiative:

• New York Times
• Chronicle of Higher Education (#2)
• Inside Higher Education (#2)
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Los Angeles Times
• Market Watch

Why is this important?

1. 400,000+ California students cannot get a space (in-class or online) in the general education courses they need to progress in their academic career. That’s a major problem. This is one part of the solution.
2. Creative Commons (CC) has been actively working with all of the major Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) providers, encouraging them to adopt CC licenses on their courses. These conversations continue, but they have been slowed by the MOOCs’ need to explore revenue models. MOOCs licensing content to education institutions has been floated as one possible revenue model, which has slowed MOOCs’ willingness to make it easy for contributing colleges and universities to CC license their courses.
3. CC has learned that this new CA online marketplace will require open licenses on all courses and textbooks as a condition for participation. That is, if Udacity, Coursera, edX, StraighterLine, Future Learn, or anyone else wants its courses to be considered for use in this initiative, the courses and textbooks will first need to be openly licensed. CC is pleased that Senator Steinberg plans to leverage California’s existing open textbook investment (all textbooks will be licensed under CC BY).

CC has recommended the marketplace only allow courses and textbooks openly licensed with any of the CC licenses that allow derivatives (or CC0) or similar open copyright licenses. Specifically, CC recommended that these licenses be allowed:

• BY
• BY SA
• BY NC
• BY NC-SA

Conversely, CC recommended not allowing courses into the marketplace if they are licensed:

• all rights reserved
• BY ND
• BY NC-ND
• with any other restrictive licenses that do not comply with the Hewlett OER Definition

The text discussing “open” in SB 520 reads:

(b) For purposes of this article, the following terms have the following meanings:(1) “Online courses of study” means any of the following: (A) Online teaching, learning, and research resources, including, but not necessarily limited to, books, course materials, video materials, interactive lessons, tests, or software, the copyrights of which have expired, or have been released with an intellectual property license that permits their free use or repurposing by others without the permission of the original authors or creators of the learning materials or resources.

Like the CA open textbook bills, this project is being staffed by Dean Florez (former CA Senate President pro Tem) and the staff at the 20MM Foundation. They have done amazing open policy work in CA and should be congratulated! CC worked closely with 20MM on the open textbooks project and will again on this initiative.

Bottom line

1. This could be the market demand for openly licensed courses and textbooks that will provide incentives for MOOCs to adopt open licenses.
2. If this model is successful in California, it could be adopted in other states, provinces and nations. What if all governments made the following promise to their citizens?

“No college student in [X] will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed.” – Steinberg, “California Bill Seeks Campus Credit for Online Study” (New York Times)

And as governments innovate and create new education marketplaces for their citizens, to ensure affordable access and academic progress, what if they (like Steinberg) required those education spaces to use openly licensed courses and textbooks?

Senator Steinberg continues to leverage 21st-century technologies, open licensing, and the collective strength of the academy and innovative entrepreneurs to ensure that students can access a high quality, affordable education. That’s leadership. Well done, Senator.

CC is once again opening its doors up to interns this US summer, offering opportunities to those with an interest in community development.

The 2013 Community Support Intern will work with our staff to facilitate CC’s global volunteer network and provide general support for our international activities. This means everything from assisting with coordinating collaborative projects to writing information resources and planning community events. This year will be particularly exciting, as the intern will be helping with preparation for our Global Summit in Buenos Aires, our bi-annual community meeting and single largest outreach event.

The position, which is open to enrolled students of any discipline or level, runs for 10 weeks over June-August here in our Mountain View office. International applicants are strongly encouraged and overseas experience is a plus, although you need to be eligible to work abroad through your university and/or a third-party work-study program. Creative Commons believes strongly in the skills development benefits of internships, and work tasks can be tailored to meet the intern’s interests and experience.

For more information and instructions on how to apply, see our Opportunities page.

Happy Open Education Week! We are happy to announce that the School of Open community has launched its first set of courses…

The Library of Congress / No known copyright restrictions

Sign up for these facilitated courses

this week (sign-up will remain open through Sunday, March 17). These courses will start the week of March 18 (next week!). To sign up, simply click the “Start Course” button under the course’s menu navigation on the left.

• Copyright 4 Educators (US) – Sign up if you’re an educator who wants to learn about US copyright law in the education context.
• Copyright 4 Educators (AUS) – Sign up if you’re an educator who wants to learn about Australian copyright, statutory licenses and open educational resources (OER).
• Creative Commons for K-12 Educators – Sign up if you’re a K-12 educator (anywhere in the world) who wants to learn how to find and adapt free, useful resources for your classroom, and incorporate activities that teach your students digital world skills.
• Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond – Sign up if you want to learn how to edit Wikipedia or improve your editing skills — especially if you are interested in and knowledgeable about open educational resources (OER) (however, no background in this area is required).

All other courses are now ready for you to take

at any time, with or without your peers. They include:

• Get a CC license. Put it on your website – This course is exactly what the title says: it will help you with the steps of getting a CC license and putting it on your work. It’s tailored to websites, although the same steps apply to most other works.
• Open Science: An Introduction – This course is a collaborative learning environment meant to introduce the idea of Open Science to young scientists, academics, and makers of all kinds. Open Science is a tricky thing to define, but we’ve designed this course to share what we know about it, working as a community to make this open resource better.
• Open data for GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) – This course is for professionals in cultural institutions who are interested in opening up their data as open culture data. It will guide you through the different steps towards open data and provide you with extensive background information on how to handle copyright and other possible issues.
• Intro to Openness in Education – This is an introductory course exploring the history and impacts of openness in education. The main goal of the course is to give you a broad but shallow grounding in the primary areas of work in the field of open education.
• A Look at Open Video – This course will give you a quick overview of some of the issues, tools and areas of interest in the area of open video. It is aimed at students interested in developing software, video journalists, editors and all users of video who want to take their knowledge further.
• Contributing to Wikimedia Commons – A sister project of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons is a repository of openly licensed images that people all over the world use and contribute to. This challenge gets you acquainted with uploading your works to the commons.
• Open Detective – This course will help you explore the scale of open to non-open content and how to tell the difference.

And more… check out all the courses at http://schoolofopen.org/.

Join a launch event this week

School of Open at the Citizen Science Workshop / Levi Simons / CC BY

• P2PU: A Showcase of Open Peer Learning (Wednesday, March 13) – Join this webinar to see a showcase of some of P2PU’s best learning groups spanning topics from education to open content to programming to Spanish and more, and learn how you can participate.
• Open Video Sudan (all week, March 10-17) – Join the Open Video Forum in improving “A Look at Open Video” and creating new courses and resources on open video in Sudan.

And more events as part of Open Education Week at http://www.openeducationweek.org/events-webinars/.

Spread the word

Just do these 3 things and call it a day.

1. Tweet this:

#SchoolofOpen has launched! Take free courses on #copyright, #OER, #openscience & more: http://creativecommons.org/?p=37179

2. Blog and email this:

The School of Open has launched! Take a free online course on copyright, CC licenses, Wikipedia, open science, open culture, open video formats, and more at http://schoolofopen.org/. Especially check out this course: [link to course of your choice here]. Read more about the launch at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/37179.

3. Print out a copy of this pdf and pin it to the bulletin board at your work, school, or local coffee shop.