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.

It is time to celebrate and spread the dream that everyone in the world can access a high quality, affordable education if we collectively share our educational resources and spend our public resources wisely!

The second annual Open Education Week will take place March 11-15, 2013 (see schedule). Open Education Week is a five-day celebration of the global Open Education movement, featuring online and local events around the world, video showcases of open education projects, and lots of information. The week is designed to raise awareness of both the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.

Open Education refers to the growing set of practices that promote the sharing high quality, openly licensed educational resources (OER) and support for learners to access education anywhere, anytime. Open Education incorporates educational networks, open teaching and learning materials, open textbooks, open data, open scholarship, and open-source educational tools.

As part of Open Education Week, Creative Commons and its affiliates are hosting and participating in local events and webinars on OER, Version 4.0 of the CC licenses, the Open Policy Network, School of Open, and more. In addition, the School of Open will officially launch its first set of courses next week, including courses on copyright and Creative Commons for educators. Courses will be free to take and free to reuse and remix under P2PU’s default CC BY-SA licensing policy.

And a special thanks to our friends at the OpenCourseWare Consortium for organizing the 2nd annual Open Education Week.

See you all next week!

Hanging around with our own kind, we in the open science community might get lulled into thinking that everyone out there thinks like us. In reality, most scientists actually do science instead of worrying about whether or not it is open. However, even though some of their practices align with open science objectives, there is much more that can be done proactively to engender an open commons of science.

Sophie Kershaw, doctoral student in computational biology at University of Oxford, came up with the idea of injecting Open Science Training in formal curriculum, and teaching young scientists about Open while they are still young and learning about the scientific method, as part of her Open Knowledge Foundation supported Panton Fellowship. In Sophie’s words:

As the Open Science movement gathers pace, we are seeing developments in policy and infrastructure to support the transition of academia towards Open practices. Despite this, there is a considerable lag in awareness within the academic community itself – many researchers either haven’t heard about Open, or know the term but don’t know how to put it into practice! From a show of hands on the first day of my Open Science Training Initiative (OSTI), only ONE grad student out of 43 had heard of open science. It is now time for us all to step up our efforts in educating our academics in licensing, open access and data management, preferably through provision of pre-doctoral training. Our first research group plays a huge role in shaping our research outlook, but this leaves us with a huge variability in the level of awareness that students develop. Some will pitch up in a very forward-thinking group, where licensing, collaboration and data archiving is the order of the day, while others are left without this kind of information. Pre-doctoral training will ensure continuity of provision for ALL our science grads, enabling them to make their own decisions with confidence.

This kind of practical intervention delivered right to young scientists sounds like a great idea, and as Sophie says, reactions to the first edition of OSTI seem to confirm that:

Students from the inaugural OSTI came out strongly in favour of receiving training in licensing and engaging in debate on development of the publication process: furthermore, they’ve shown that while lectures are handy, hands-on experience is the best way to learn about how to license, how to release data, how to communicate science. We need to emphasize delivery of a coherent research story – comprising appropriately licensed data, code and writing – rather than merely the traditional written report. We need to make our young researchers see themselves as research users as much as research producers. Over time, this should help our newest grads deliver verifiable, reproducible research with vast potential for further development and scientific impact.

The Open Science Training Initiative is not an idea with immediate returns. Instead, it is for bringing about long-term change so the next generation of scientists and beyond proactively default to open. There are challenges ahead, such as creating right formats for different conditions and audiences, finding right partners who would incorporate OSTI in their courses, and scaling to reach the next generation of scientists all over the world. But, it is an idea we consider worth supporting, because the potential returns are lasting in nature.

Stay up to date with CC news by subscribing to our newsletter and following us on Twitter.

Top stories:

Law Books Kolinio Niumataiwalu / CC BY-NC-SA We’re nearing the finish line for version 4.0 of the CC license suite. Find out what’s new in Draft 3 and what issues are stil being discussed.	School of Open logo Join the School of Open! Our first classes are officially launching on March 11, as a part of the Open Education Week celebration.
US Office of Science and Technology Policy Public Domain The White House has issued a groundbreaking directive supporting public access to publicly funded research.	Open Science Brainstorming Billy Meinke / CC BY Creative Commons, PLOS, and OKFN hosted a course sprint last weekend to develop a new open science curriculum.

 

In other news:

• We’ve just announced the location of the 2013 Creative Commons Global Summit. Join us in Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 21-24!
• A new bill in the US congress would drastically expand public access to federally funded research. Get the facts on FASTR.
• Remember the contest to find a CC-licensed alternative to the Happy Birthday Song? Listen to the winners!
• The CC Arab World community recently gathered to celebrate ten years of CC and discuss the future of the open Internet in the Middle East.
• A few weeks ago, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton unveiled the Open Book Project, an initiative to expand access to free, high-quality educational materials in Arabic.
• For the fifth year, Creative Commons is participating in the Google Policy Fellowship program. If you’re interested in working on CC’s education and advocacy initiatives, find out how to apply.
• Vice ran a great interview with Adam Green, cofounder of the Public Domain Review.

Night over the bridge / Luis Argerich / CC BY

Finally the announcement you’ve all been waiting for – the Creative Commons Global Summit 2013 will be held from 21 to 24 August in beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This biannual gathering of CC friends and family will be co-hosted by our local Creative Commons affiliates, Fundación Vía Libre and Wikimedia Argentina and will take place at the San Martín Cultural Center. We’re particularly excited by the choice of Buenos Aires as the host city – not only because it is a world-renowned cultural hub and the home to some fabulous open access projects, but also because this is the first time our global community will meet in a Spanish-speaking country.

The event will bring together Creative Commons affiliates from the around the world with the CC board, its staff, key stakeholders, local representatives, and others interested in the present and future of the commons. Attendees will discuss strategies to strengthen Creative Commons and its worldwide community, learn about the latest developments in the commons movement worldwide, and showcase local and international projects that use Creative Commons licenses. Topics covered will include the implementation of open policies in areas such as government, education, culture, business, science, data, and more, as well as related topics such as free software, license development, collecting societies, and copyright advocacy. Watch for a call for papers/workshops/events soon.

The event is free for all attendees, although registration is required, and will include a Spanish-language stream to highlight the expertise of the local community. You can find out more information at our wiki site here.

We hope to see you in Buenos Aires in August.