Empowering learning through open education: Integrating Creative Commons into course publishing projects

This lightning talk explores the incorporation of Creative Commons principles into in-class publishing projects to promote collaboration, knowledge sharing, and responsible content use. Course journals (and course books), an example of open pedagogy in practice, are open-access academic publications associated with for-credit academic classes. The talk emphasizes strategies for supporting course publishing projects, focusing on the workshop we provide to classes covering scholarly publishing, open access, copyright, and Creative Commons licenses. We highlight that while scholarly knowledge is intended to be shared widely and continually built upon and engaged with by other scholars and the community, copyright can impede its flow since permission is required to reproduce the work further. We point out how open-access publications can be licensed to give permission for users to use the work in various ways, and that open-access publications use Creative commons licenses which provide permission for certain types of uses up front.