Creative Commons is trying to steer the middle ground between stifling regulation and creative anarchy that pays no heed to intellectual property. By using private rights to create public goods, the orgnisation is following in the footsteps of free software and open-source movements, to deregulate content use from the authoritarian “All Rights Reserved” to the more accepting “Some Rights Reserved”.

ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons that is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and Open Educational Resources (OERs). This is particularly pertinent for countries and societies that do not have the content resources to power their information technology efforts.

ccLearn advocates the lowering of legal barriers by licencing educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licences, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. ccLearn also works to educate learners and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education. ccLearn is also active in trying to erode technical barriers by promoting interoperability standards and tools to facilitate the generation of new knowledge from existing information.

The ccLearn initiative aims to protect the intellectual copyright of educators, authors and publishers while providing content creators with more freedom to distribute educational content with peers, OER repositories and communities and OpenCourseWare (OCW) platforms. The division supports the development of OERs on the internet to plug the content gap in the digital divide.The end objective is a vibrant community of global information sharers where content stops being a static object and turns into dynamic streams that are being remixed and changed all the time.

According to Ahrash Bissell, Executive Director of ccLearn, “ccLearn brings focused expertise on licencing and technical interoperability issues, and is working from the very beginning to include the international voice in conversations about OER. ccLearn is somewhat unique in its work on behalf of all of the orgnisations involved in open education, which makes sense when one considers the importance of open licencing for producing OER and growing the global effort.”

Bissell observes that static, subscription based models of information access are being challenged by multitudinous usergenerated content sources. “The internet was initially constructed rather like a large, digital library. The assumption was that people would put information online, and then other people would find and read that information, but nothing more. Orgnisations that already possessed valuable information often tried to generate revenue streams by closing access to the information to everyone except subscribers. In a world of limited information availability, this model makes sense.

“However, recent changes have made the subscription model less relevant.First, the total amount of openly accessible information has exploded, and it no longer makes sense to pay for access to one set of information when another free set may be available. Second, the technology for and culture of sharing information has come to dominate. The internet is not a static body of content to be looked at by many but touched by few; it is instead a platform for dynamic information exchange,where anyone can easily participate in the creation and sharing of digital content,” observes Bissell.

Though digital information is easily redistributable and shareable, copyright laws mean that altering, contextualizing or updating information is trickier. For instance, though fair-use laws mean that teachers can use materials for their classroom, they will not be allowed to share the material with the wider online community if they have remixed and added to the content.Restrictive copyright laws can ensure that information becomes a static object as opposed to a dynamic process of renegotiation. This in turn means that protected information will start turning obsolete the minute it is generated.

ccLearn believes that CC licences, and other forms of open copyright (e.g., GFDL), offer a solution to the problem. The most generous CC licences allow users to adapt works and to share those adaptations with everyone. According to Bissell, such licencing can lead to the birth of a virtuous cycle of innovation and improvement is born, engendering a global community of content providers.

“The engagement and appropriateness level of content matters in the learning process. Students are far more likely to be motivated to learn, and to understand, if the materials resonate with their lives,and if the outcomes of the learning tasks are made available to more people than the teacher,”says Ahrash. He believes that OERs that are accessible and changeable will give rise to a large library of contextualised information that other users can then in turn build on and add to.

ccLearn is acting as a compiler and advocate of the OER movement, but not necessarily as a moderator or developer. Bissell says, “We are not planning to develop many OER ourselves, except for important areas where existing materials are lacking or exemplars are needed.We have already created some tools for re-mixing OER [and other things] and plan to develop others.And we are developing educator's portals to the licences we offer, and we are crafting documents and other media to further our mission of making copyright as easy to understand as possible.

ccLearn is currently working on an open education search project where it is compiling a resource of accessible and alterable educational materials on the internet. “The resulting search portal will be a gateway to OERs, but we are hoping to be just one of many pathways to those materials.We believe that multiple points of entry are needed, and that different feature sets will appeal to different people, so the more access points the community can generate, the better,” explains Bissell.

Of course, the issue with any compilation portal is one of selection.What criteria should be applied to decide that one resource should be included over another? Ahrash notes that ccLearn’s collaboration with Google means that some of the search engine’s existing measurement heuristics come into play.

“The highest criteria for ranking are an easy to use comprehensive search interface, and amenability to user feedback.We hope to identify all educational materials based on targeted grade levels, copyright status, sources, standards met, user ratings, translations, and versions. We believe that these data, when accessed by Google's custom search platform, will help users find materials of interest. A planned user interface with feedback tools will further refine searches. At the same time, we are looking to direct traffic to other sites that work as search platforms for OER, such as OERCommons,”notes Bissell.

ccLearn believes that an open feedback paradigm will help ascertain the usefulness and quality of different sources. Bissell says that ccLearn will be encouraging orgnisations to offer feedback on OER resources.“Orgnisations that approve of certain resources can apply a tag [e.g., the orgnisational name] to those resources, which will be an indication that those resources meet their criteria. We see this as a major public service and a significant role for existing professional societies to take on. Our central premise is that transparency ensures quality; by opening up the process of evaluating educational resources to everyone, we believe that the resulting resources will end up being of much higher quality.”

Effectively, learners will be able to see who has created or approved of certain resources, and will also be able to give feedback on their own learning progress, which will help others determine whether the materials are working or not.

Bissell expects that applied education fields (e.g., nursing, engineering, trades, etc) and science, technology and mathematics education are likely to see the biggest gains at the start of the project.“In part, improvement will be felt because these educational areas are in need of more educators and workers, and any support for the educational system in this regard is likely to be noticed. But this is also because the assessment in these fields is often more straightforward than it can be in the humanities or social sciences. In the long term, I expect all of education, at all grade levels, all over the world, to be positively and significantly affected by the emergence of OER as the medium through which educational goals are realised.

“In the near future, we expect OER to be standard components of formal education.We also expect OER to be the preferred materials for self-study, hopefully with a linked pathway to accreditation and degree completion. We expect worldwide communities of interest to form around generating the best possible OER for their disciplines, and that these materials will be in a constant state of improvement and localisation as both teachers and learners explore their potential for education and then give feedback and adaptations to their communities,” says Bissell.