Your Instructional Designer will confirm which open license you wish to add to your work. They will help you to draft an open license statement, which they will add to all of your course materials as well as your course pack site. Please return to Year 2, Unit 1 for more information on open licenses.

There are many open licenses developed for different areas of knowledge. If you’re new to open licenses, we recommend watching the 6-minute Open Licensing Video [Streaming Video] for an introduction.

Why/Why Not Share With An Open License

Why would an instructor share their intellectual property with an open license, giving permission for reuse with attribution; or release their work into the public domain, giving permission for any use without attribution? More to the point, what does it mean for YOU to share your work with an open license as part of this project?

The first reason that many instructors share is affordability. Because open licenses give permission to redistribute the work, openly licensed course materials are available online for free or in print at low cost. This means that sharing with an open license enhances information equity: it makes your knowledge and expertise more available to everyone, including people who don’t have access to funding or libraries.

Second, because all Creative Commons licenses require attribution, they can promote your visibility. Creative Commons license choices allow creators to add some restrictions like disallowing commercial use or derivative works. Meanwhile, the increased use of your course materials expands the impact of your work, which you may be able to include in your tenure or promotion portfolio.

On the other hand, there are valid reasons why you might not want to share your work with an open license.

First, it’s impossible to predict the downstream uses of work that you share openly. For example, an image of your family that you thoughtfully share in a specific context in an open course could show up in Google Image searches or even on a billboard. Consider your privacy needs as well as those of other people represented in your work.

Keep in mind, too, that Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable – you can share a future version with a different license, or under all-rights-reserved copyright, but anyone who has a copy of your work with its original license still has the permissions it grants.

A final word here: many pilot instructors hesitate to share their work for a variety of reasons that have to do with perfectionism, vulnerability, privacy concerns, and so on. This is deeply understandable. It’s why your course goes through revision so that we put out the best possible version of your work. You’ll always find things later that you’ll wish you could change, add, update for currency, etc. That’s what the next course is for.

Sharing your course materials with an open license helps to meet our Oregon Context criteria for success: Copyright restrictions are minimized so that downstream users (your Oregon colleagues) have permission to revise, remix, and share forward.

Licenses and Attributions for Choosing an Open License

Open content, original

“Choosing an Open License” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Choosing an Open License” is modified from “Understanding the basics of OER” by Amy Hofer for Open Oregon Educational Resources, licensed under CC BY 4.0.