Sharing and Sharing Alike

Remember that every Creative Commons license contains an attribution (BY) clause. This means that you must include a statement that gives credit to, or attributes, the creator of the work from which you have customized/remixed, whether it’s text, an image, a video, or other item. If you have made a change, indicate that in your attribution statement.

An example:
This work is an adaptation of Natural Disasters and Human Impacts (on Open Geography Education) by R. Adam Dastrup and Maura Hahnenberger, and is used under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license.

When you customize/remix an OER, the new content can be released with whatever open license you choose. If you are customizing an OER textbook, any new content you create can be licensed as you like, while the rest of the book will be released under the license of the original book. In other words, you need to respect the license of the original work. You cannot license what you do not create. You can only attach a CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution), or other open license to the parts of the book that you have created and are new.

However, there is a caveat. If the textbook you are adapting has a Share-Alike condition (e.g., CC-BY-SA 4.0) stipulated, then you must release the entire book using the same license as the original book.

More Sharing Considerations

Man taking photo of mural

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

There are multiple motivations and points of entry into using OER: cost savings for students, the benefits of open pedagogy, full control over teaching content, and more. Thinking about sharing your OER creation may feel like a question you don’t need, or want, to answer in your first venture into open. However, planning to share is far less taxing at the beginning of OER customization and creation than after your work is “done.”

Global sharing requires a mindful approach to both mixing open and “closed” licensing and content format. You don’t have to navigate these decisions alone, or create new design models from scratch.

In a nutshell, there are just two aspects to global sharing:

  • The openly licensed portion of your courseware should be autonomously coherent and usable.
  • The format is which it is published should be meaningfully adoptable and editable.

An example:
When you develop open courseware in a platform such as Pressbooks, you put only openly licensed content in Pressbooks, but can add materials with “closed” licenses in your LMS, such as Blackboard. This model allows you to create the course you need to offer but also to readily share the open portion. From Pressbooks, you can export into editable formats, thereby supporting efficient adoption by anyone, anywhere.

Local sharing is more easily accomplished with the support of instructional design and technology staff. A copy of your courseware in the LMS can become an immediately adoptable and customizable resource for colleagues without the need to keep open content segregated from “closed.” Your LMS administrator can create a “library” of adoptable open courses for all campus faculty to review and share.


Creative Commons CC BY License ImageUnless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.