[audio logo]

Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Penny Pearson: Welcome, everybody online. We got a few in here. I'll turn around so I don't have my back to the camera. Nice portable system here. So everybody's here for Creative Commons and OERs and all that stuff? Are we in the right spot? OK, that's a rousing response here.

How are we doing? Do I get any thumbs up from my audience? OK. Not yet. All right, we're getting started here. So first welcome.

[side conversation]

Penny Pearson: Get that up there. OK.

Most of you may know me, but my name is Penny Pearson. And I am a Subject Matter Expert for OTAN. I used to be working with OTAN for many, many years. You'll hear more about that for a minute. But don't know how well you can see this on the screen here locally, but you and the audience should be able to see this. When you hear the word copyright, do either of these two images resonate with you? Nothing happened.

I was a classroom teacher for 12 years. And you may or may not have seen this happen, but did you ever walk into the teacher lounge room where the copy machine was and there was somebody there with a textbook, making copies?

Audience: All the time.

Penny Pearson: Yeah. Did it break your heart a little bit or was it like, oh, that's OK, not a problem? No? I saw that a lot. And I had gone to my administrator and I was like, well, wait a second, that's not right, these are copyrighted materials. And at that time, it was a huge budget crunch and we didn't have money to buy new textbooks. So that's what happened. That was in the past.

So now I really want to talk about using different options for getting, I'll say, around copyright, but it's basically a decision of teachers and administrator, of how well we're going to police ourselves for copyright. And I'm one of those people that was always kind of going around going, wait, wait, there are alternatives. And that's basically what I hope to talk about today.

Just a little bit of history about me, I was formerly the Coordinator for Distance Learning Projects at OTAN. And I just recently retired in July and they brought me back. I don't know why, but they did. So I was always involved in distance learning. That's how I got my high school equivalency when I was 16 years old. I finished four years of high school in about a year. And I was living in a very remote area in Alaska. And I found that snail mail works.

You can learn any number of ways. And so I've always had a passion for that. And I don't know really how I fell into teaching, but it enabled me to teach for about 12 years in the classroom and working with technology and helping students gain digital skills and get certifications like in Office products like Microsoft Office or learning digital photography. I did a lot of things like that in my 12 years there in the classroom and then was able to carry that over into OTAN, where for the past 15 years, worked in various different capacities basically focusing on distance and blended learning.

But as part of that process, I recognized, as many of you may, that, sometimes it's really hard to find materials. And in our digital lives these days, it's very easy to find something that's protected by copyright, and you don't know it, and you put it up on your class website or on your school district website. And all of a sudden, you've got a notice to cease and desist because you used a copyrighted image. I have friends that are here with me today that have experienced that.

So I really got involved with this organization called Creative Commons. Have you guys heard of it? Has anybody in the audience? And my online audience give me a thumbs up if you've heard about Creative Commons. I should see that float, right? It should come up here somewhere?

Audience: You can move it on the screen. You can either use that.

Penny Pearson: Oh, I think I saw something go by here. Let me see if I can move this. Wait, this button maybe. I'm going to put this down here. I'm trying to get out this stuff out of the way here. So what does my chat folks say? No, haven't heard of it? OK. Joyce, we'll hopefully get you started. So when I learned about Creative Commons and had to dive into copyright. I don't know if anybody's ever had to try to do that.

My favorite saying is, I think Diana and I are kind of cohorts on this, I worked with a copyright attorney and I was like, look, I just want a really simple primer for my teachers of learning about copyright and make it simplified. And he basically came back, you cannot use the word copyright and simplified in the same sentence. So I thought, OK, and that sent me off. So not that I'm going to talk a lot about copyright, other than if you have questions, I did a deep dive into the history of it.

And it's actually amazing what happened with this. But Creative Commons stepped in because they recognized that problem of you cannot use simple and copyright in the same terms. And they went to the US Copyright Office and said, this is crazy, what can we do? And they basically said, I don't know, think of something. And so Creative Commons and that team, way back 2021-- in 2010-- sorry, getting my dates wrong here, they set about to create this system.

And I went through their certification program because I really wanted to understand more about how this worked, how Creative Commons worked, how copyright work, how fair use work, how all of these things that impact us as instructors and therefore how we need to instill that into our students, because a lot of what I was seeing was as this digital ramp was going up, many of our students were not learning about copyright, and they were exposing themselves to some pretty serious problems potentially.

Some people are highly risk averse and they won't do anything that will be potentially labeled as wrong, whereas other people like myself, I'm a little more OK with risk. I might say, no, I'm not going to pay my taxes until June. So there. But other people don't do that. And so I wanted to find a way to have gained more knowledge. And so through this class that I took, I really learned a lot.

And one of the most important things I learned was that statement at the bottom, I am not a lawyer, I do not give legal advice, because every situation is different, but I hope to be able to send people on the right path of what they can look for or look at and reflect on their own work, because that's where this all really hits the road is the work that you do. I know, Diana, you've been working on this for a while. She's one of my OER groupies, which I love.

And so I just want you to know that it's like the iceberg, right? I feel like I have about this much of the iceberg and the rest of it's all down here because there's so much to learn. So I want to teach and help you to learn, but also understand that there's lots of resources out there. OK, go forward. Now that I moved that, I probably can't move my slide. Go. OK, if you want a copy of this presentation, I don't know if my guys locally here can get this because there's all kinds of stuff in the way.

Let me see if I can get this out of the way for you, see if it'll work. You guys that are online with us, give me a shout out in the chat. Does that work? I don't know. Let me see if I can move this. That should give you a better shot at--

Audience: Got it.

Penny Pearson: --the QR code. You got it? Did it open up?

Audience: Yep.

Penny Pearson: So you are welcome to use this presentation. I've licensed it in such a way, which you will learn about later, that you are allowed to do that without repercussion because we don't want anybody feeling like they can't do something here. So my online guys, were you able to get it? Give me a shout out or something. Got it. Joyce got it. Thank you, Joyce. How about my other folks?

Francisco, were you able to open it up? If you can, just let me know. And if you didn't, OK, great. Thank you. So we're really going to look at some basic things here. And this first item here that says something good this way comes, I have to ask you guys, what areas do you teach in, program areas?

Audience: I was an ESL teacher.

Penny Pearson: ESL? OK.

Audience: I've done academic ESL and now instructional technology.

Penny Pearson: OK, cool. Diana, I know, you're everything. So I'm going to talk a little bit about a project that OTAN worked on that I was highly involved in. And I just want you to be aware of it. And as ESL teachers or anybody who teaches EL Civics, you might find that very useful. We'll look at defining OER. We're looking at licensing and copyright and creative commons and what all that stuff is. And then we're going to give a chance to what we call Join the Movement.

And this is a promotional video from Creative Commons, but then we're going to spend some time practicing. So is that us? Let me close this.

Audience: No, that was our previous presentation.

Penny Pearson: Was it? OK, good. All right. And then this says discussion on here, but since we have 90 minutes, I'm hoping that both my online audience and my in-class audience here, we can spend a little time experimenting with both, looking for and finding materials, and then also licensing your own work. And hopefully, that fits with your expectations of what we're doing today. So there's something good.

If you haven't seen it yet, OTAN partnered with CASAS, which is California's assessment testing service, to create the COAPP Exchange. And this is where we are asking our wonderful adult education EL Civics teachers to create these COAPPs and put them on our site, online, and make them available to everyone in California. Now, there are a couple of caveats here in that the materials that are supplied, they have to be licensed under Creative Commons.

And the reason why is that we need to make sure that the materials that you've put into that COAPP are indeed either Creative Commons licensed or public domain. And we'll talk about that more later. And here's the other caveat. They have to be fully accessible. So that means making sure you have alt text on all of your images in your file, that you use styles so that the screen readers can navigate through your documents quickly.

And there's lots of resources on the site, but this is something that, believe it or not, we've been working on this for the last 15 years trying to get this put together and working with CASAS and working with the CASAS specialists and working with OTAN and the programmers at OTAN to build this site for the COAPP Exchange. If anybody has been participating at all with the Teaching with Technology courses and/or materials that are offered through OTAN, that's what we started.

If you look at the Teaching with Technology site on OTAN, the COAPP system looks very similar. So I don't know if you've seen it or not. Anybody seen it? No? No? OK, remind me, we'll go and look at that on the OTAN site. And the reason why this is important is that in the state of California with EL Civics, everybody was recreating the wheel for the same COAPP topic. And that's not bad, but oftentimes, isn't it better to work as a community and create materials that everyone can use?

And that was the premise because it was very difficult for anyone if they saw a great COAPP package, 4.2 or 42.5 or whatever, to track that down and use it. It took a lot of effort. So what CASAS wanted to do is try to build this collective. And the reason why this is important in this presentation is because it's already a place you can go to look for materials that are Creative Commons licensed and also fully accessible. So that's something we'll try to visit later.

Now, this is a definition. I'm going to see if I can move this again. I don't think my guys online, it's blocked for them. But this is actually a quote from the 2010 National Education Technology Plan. And ironically enough, they took this out after the next plan was revised because everybody knows it already, but I found often that people don't know what an OER is or Open Educational Resource. So as you read this, is there anything that kind of hits you about what is an open educational resource?

Is this old news to you guys?

Audience: Didn't know it existed.

Penny Pearson: Didn't know you existed. OK, so it is important to read this definition. How about you?

Audience: I've heard of it. And I knew that there was, I guess, licensed training materials that were permitted to be used, but i didn't necessarily connect the two.

Penny Pearson: And that has important ramifications with our concept of copyright, creative commons, and open educational resources. They all kind of link together. So I want to get us started with looking at what does that look like, what can we be aware of, and then help to understand how can you find these things online. And honestly, Diana over here, she has done some amazing work with finding repositories and resource places where they have open educational resources.

So I didn't get all of your stolen off of your presentation, but I know where to find you. This particular definition is fairly common across the world. This is actually in USECO They're used as something very, very similar to this. A few words may be changed around. But oftentimes, what get's people is this whole idea of intellectual property license that permits sharing, accessing, repurposing, including for commercial purposes. And everybody goes, what? Materials with and collaborating with others.

And I just want you to kind of just take a deep breath because all of these things are left in your control when we talk about licensing. Can I skip this? No? OK. These are the types of things that can be licensed under open educational resources or licensed in a way that allows a high or higher level of use. So you may be looking at, I don't know, maybe you listen to podcasts. I've been listening to some great audiobooks at the very end of every chapter.

This episode of this podcast is licensed under Creative Commons version 3.0. And I'm like, yay, because then I know what I can do with that file. If I wanted to use it instructionally or if I wanted to share it with others, I don't have to worry about somebody saying you can't do that because it's against whatever rule you want to pick. So all of these things could be licensed in a way that allows for all of those purposes. And we'll talk about they have what we call the five R's, what that means.

But do all of you use lesson plans, textbooks, slide decks, audio files? Maybe you go out and find music online that you could use with helping your students create videos legally? So all of these things can be licensed in such a way. The trick is finding them. That can be difficult sometimes. Or you do like Diana does. And she finds these really great repositories, and she just goes there first.

In the old days, you had to search for them individually. So let's talk a little bit about copyright and then public domain. So I didn't put copyright on here because I think we all have this kind of general sense of its rules that say that we can't take things without the permission of the owner. If you wanted to take a portion of a book or a movie or something like that without regarding right now the fair use, just saying we're going to put fair use aside because that's a whole different critter, you have to have permission to do that.

Because if you don't, that author can come along, especially with new tools digitally online, they have these little bots that crawl the web and say, that's my picture, you can't use it, and they'll send you a little note saying, take it down or pay me money. We don't want to have to deal with that, especially in a school district because the school district gets a message too, by the way, you have a teacher breaking copyright, here it is, make them stop. And so we don't want that.

So when we look at copyright in terms of protections, it's gotten really twisted around from the original purpose. Did you know that copyright started back in the 1600s? Queen of Spain said everyone should have access to knowledge. Yay, Queen! The problem was that over time, it got embroiled in a lot of legalities. And now instead of it being individuals having access to material, it was individuals having to go through attorneys to get to materials because they were protected, and that whole idea of protection has morphed.

Originally, it was like 20 years that would say, if you wrote a book, we would guard your rights that this is your book, but after 20 years, it moved into what was called the public domain, the public commons, anyone could use it, they can use it for whatever purpose, it's available to you, have at it. But that's changed. Does anybody know how long a term of copyright is right now?

Audience: 82 years?

Penny Pearson: I think it's closer to 90, after the death of the original author. That's it. Yes?

Audience: So 90 years after the death?

Penny Pearson: Mm-hmm. So anybody have any idea when Walt Disney died? Do you know the big deal about Mickey Mouse? Mickey Mouse comes into the public domain next year. And everybody's going, wow, what's going [audio out] But you got to remember, it's the first iteration of Mickey in 1912. All right, now, in 1912, Mickey looked a whole lot different in "Steamboat Willie" than he does now.

So that whole idea, it's a long time. That's a long time. And there's Sherlock Holmes coming into the public domain. Well, wait a minute, not all Sherlock Holmes. It's only the original ones by Arthur Conan Doyle. And even then, it's limited because he didn't write all of his books in just one year. So there's a progression now, these things coming into public domain. And public domain means really simply that ownership of it is gone, it has been released.

Now, what's nice about now is that you or I as creators can make the choice, I'm putting this into public domain, anybody can have it, I don't care, it's yours, I'm going to share it with the world. You've made a conscientious decision to do that. Otherwise, what do you have to do to have your materials under copyright?

Audience: A lot of money, an attorney.

Penny Pearson: Really, only have to create it.

Audience: Oh, right.

Penny Pearson: You create it, it is automatically protected by copyright laws in the United States. It used to be that you had to register, you had to get a lawyer, you had to write all this stuff up, and then you send it to the Copyright Office, and they blessed you with the copyright symbol. Not anymore. You can be in your favorite restaurant jotting down some ideas for the newest greatest plasma drive, and that napkin drawing is protected because it's yours, you created, it's your intellectual property.

That's great because it makes it a whole lot easier for creators to create without having to worry about protections because they're automatic. It's the creators who truly want to share that have to figure out a way to do it legally. And that's where the public domain or these open licenses, creative commons, can make the difference. So that's why these items that are listed here in terms of the author gives away the rights. There's a conscientious decision, or under law, it's expired copyright.

So we've got a lot of those things. Every January we have new things coming into the public domain. Now, open licenses means that I am the creator, I still retain the copyright ownership. It was mine. I took a great sunset photo out of San Diego Bay, whatever, but I grant certain rights to other people to use my material. I have a lot of control over those rights, what you can and cannot do with my material. Does that part make sense?

Public domain, I completely give up my copyrights. Under an open license, I have choice, it's still mine, I own the copyright, I created it, it's mine, but I'm able to tell people, I want to share with you, here's what you can do with it. Does that make sense? Yeah, go ahead.

Audience: So if I took a picture of a sunset and I just posted it on something, I'm a public domain person?

Penny Pearson: No, you are copyright protected.

Audience: You got specifically asked to do one of those two things, right?

Penny Pearson: Yes. By law, and right now there's lots of stuff going on in copyright, but anything posted on the web is not public domain. It is owned by the person who created it, which is what gets our students in trouble because we'll tell them, we're going to make a PowerPoint presentation, go find a picture of a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, not realizing that that photo is 99% protected by copyright.

Unless the original owner or if there's a photo service, there's all kinds of photo services that they'll say, oh, we'll let you use it one or two or three, but if you use four, you've got to pay for it because you're basically paying for the license. So we have to teach our students, OK, where are you getting this stuff, who owns it, can you use it, are you allowed to use it, and then the proper procedures for marking that work or saying where they got it and what can be done with it?

Audience: Is that why Unsplash says you have their permission to download it as long as you give the author credit?

Penny Pearson: Correct. And that's all part of the licensing that we'll talk about pretty soon.

Audience: Oh, OK.

Penny Pearson: And that's wonderful because I personally have found like those first two photos, I love that author. I downloaded all of her photos because she took a model and she had a model doing all of these gestures. And I love them because I can use them in all of my presentations and she licensed them in a way that I could use them. I can even change the color of her shirt if I wanted to, but I don't need to. But that's part of that license part. So we need to look at what does this process look like.

So this is the definition. Before I talk about the definition of open educational resource, now, there are five areas. There's five Rs of openness. And openness is-- I don't even know how to classify this because open means open, but we can restrict it. Now, if we restrict it, it's no longer open, but it doesn't mean it can't be used. And that's really important to keep in mind because I, as an author or creator, I have the control over how I let other people use my stuff.

And if I say that I took a picture of that sunset, I didn't put it on Unsplash, but I put it on my website and I say, you can use this in your stuff, but you can't change it. If you read those rules, that does not make it open. It doesn't mean you can't use it, you just can't change it. So that's why these five Rs, there used to be four, now there's five, retain this mind, I made it, I own the copyright to it.

I can download it, store it, duplicate it, do whatever I need to it. I can reuse it, I can put it where I want it, whether it's in a class, use it in a study group, use it online, whatever. I can revise it, I can adapt it, I can change it, modify it. Maybe I want to translate it into another language. Maybe I want to change the colors in it. In the next one, remix, I can combine the original or revised content with other material. Whoo! Whoa ho ho, a lot more options here.

And I can then redistribute it. I can send it to other people. I can put it where I want to put it. I can make different revisions to it. So those five Rs, they're very important to understand how the author is saying you can use it if they want to keep the full openness of it, meaning the greatest flexibility of use. We want to adhere to those five Rs.

Now, Creative Commons is what lets us do that because Creative Commons has six different licenses. And we're going to watch this video here to talk more about how this becomes important and how Creative Commons can use that license. Let me see if I can make this run. And my monitor, can you make sure that they're hearing it online?

[music playing]

Nicole Allen: Educational resources are automatically copyrighted when you create them under US Copyright Law.

Cable Green: So let's say that I wrote a textbook, for example. I own that and nobody can use it without my permission. When we openly license that textbook, what we're doing is we're giving a license, we're giving permissions to the public to use that book under the terms of the license.

Meredith Jacob: Licenses are a part of the copyright system all around the world. They're used by big companies like when a clothing manufacturer wants to sell a superhero T-shirt. And so licenses are part of the fabric of copyright law, but all of those licenses are negotiated one to one. So when a company wants to use a text or a song or a character or a part of a movie that belongs to a different rights holder, they have to have their lawyers sit down with the other lawyers, and it takes time and money.

Nicole Allen: So adding a Creative Commons license to a work is like saying, hey, this resource is free for you to use however you want.

Meredith Jacob: The basic Creative Commons license is the CC BY license or the Creative Commons attribution license. And that's the most basic Creative Commons license. And all it says is you can use this work, this copyrighted thing, this photograph, this book, this song, if you attribute it to me, the creator.

Cable Green: The reason a lot of educators and governments more and more are choosing that license is that the only requirement is to give proper attribution to the author, to the original creator. That's really easy to do. It also allows you to remix those works with other openly licensed works in a very easy way.

Meredith Jacob: And teachers have always given each other materials. And if you know the person you're sharing the materials with, you can give them permission. But when you want to share materials with teachers across the country and potentially teachers across the world, you need a standardized way to do that. And that's what the Creative Commons licenses are.

Penny Pearson: All right, you just got it all in a nice little nutshell. OK, let me see if I can get out of here without messing everything up here. Every time I do this, I end up clicking on one of those other videos, and I didn't mean to do that. So they talked about the licensing. Let me see if I can get this out of the way for my local audience here so we don't have to see that.

So on this left side of the screen, this particular graphic here is showing this green area in the top. And at the top of that little triangle, it says most open. Most open means it's adhering to those five Rs that we just looked at a minute ago. Make sense? When we get into the yellow, what does yellow generally mean?

Audience: Slow down.

Penny Pearson: Slow down, caution, hang on a second. That's because those yellow ones are adding an element that take away one of those Rs in the five Rs. Remember, it says you can revise, you can remix, you can use it for commercial purposes, you can change it, you can modify it, you can combine it with something else. Well, when you get down in here, you're starting to take away some of that stuff. And that's fine. That is perfectly fine.

You just have to understand what you want as a creator. So we're going to move on here to look at all of the ways that we can use these licenses or what the meanings of these licenses are. These are the typical icons. And tell me, does anybody either in the online audience or in the room, have you ever seen these when you're out and about?

Audience: Not together.

Penny Pearson: Not together, usually one. Yeah, one license would indicate what you can do with something, but you're starting to see them more and more. Does anybody use TED Talks in the classroom? They have a Creative Commons license attached to them. Sometimes they're hard to find. And we're going to practice a little bit with that, I think, if we can to see your favorite site, what do you find there that is Creative Commons or not?

So each one of these icons has a slightly different meaning about what you can do with it. So in this slide, my descriptions got crunched up a little bit, this green part, it matches the green of that previous slide, meaning it's Creative Commons attribution. You got to give credit like they were talking about in that video. Give credit to the person who created this. So I must have touched the screen. This is a very sensitive screen.

So it says, can someone use my work to make money? Yes, they can. And teachers go, what, why are you doing that? They can't be [audio out] for you to say, no, they can't make money off of me. But sometimes those relationships are built where somebody who really likes your stuff, and I've seen this happen, because you can still use materials and sell them.

I'm thinking about textbooks where they might charge you $5 because the fees are covering the printing of the book. There isn't profit there per se, but it is a personal decision. So I'm not saying yes or no. I'm just saying according to how Creative Commons built this, somebody could put it in a book, and what would they have to do? They have to give you credit.

And if you license it in a way where somebody can find you, you may have somebody else come along and say, hey, Diane I saw your books that you did or that you wrote and you had this picture-- not that you wrote --your picture was in this book that I found, I really like your photographs, can I get more? Now, maybe that's a different relationship because now that person can say, I want to buy more, I want to use all of your Creative Commons stuff and put it in my materials because they're so great, or there's a different relationship that's built on that.

So the other one that's fully open is this one down here, which has a little circle with a reverse arrow in it. And this means attribution and share-alike. So if I'm a share, I'm a teacher, and I create something and I say, you give me credit, but, by golly, you have to share this too, you can't just take it for yourself and turn around and change the licensing unless there's other things that apply to this. But you have to share what you've done because that's what I said you needed to do with my stuff.

Audience: Is share it with?

Penny Pearson: Whomever. I'll take my sunset picture. I've made it share-alike. Diana comes along and she goes, ooh, I like that picture, looking good, but she's going to put it in something, and she might want to do something like in a book, but my license says, wait a minute, she has to share it just like I licensed it. So she's going to see that as more of a restriction if her intent is to use it commercially. Now, is it used for commercial purposes? Yes, it can be.

So maybe her intent is something different, she wants to keep it internally or she doesn't want to tell anybody about it. The idea is that if I say I want you to share it as a creator, she needs to follow that rule and share it as well. And it all depends on her use, what she's going to use it for. Maybe she's going to print it and hang it on her wall. That's fine, but I just know that if somebody asks for it from her, what does she need to do?

Audience: Share it.

Penny Pearson: Share it and give me credit. So those two in the green here, in this green box on this page, are open works, meaning they meet those five Rs. When you move into the yellow zone, you come over here where there's more restrictions. And that just means there's more restrictions for the potential creator who wants to use this work or the creator who is going to license that work. They make choices.

So this CC BY-NC means you got to give credit, but you can't use it for commercial purposes. OK, they can't use your stuff to make money. Can someone change my work? Yes, they can. Under this license, they can do that. But because they can't make money off of it because that was one of the original intents of Creative Commons licensing, it's not fully open. There's a restriction. Each one of these has different restrictions.

CC BY-ND means no derivatives. What does derivatives mean? Changing it. So using the sunset photo, you can't change the sun to green because I said, no, no, you can use it to make money, but you can't make the sun green. And that, again, I am removing one of those Rs, which is revise. And so you can't do that. It's got to remain as is. So a lot of times people will do writing and they'll say, you can't change any of the text I put in here.

You can share it, you can take a copy and make it a chapter in your book that you're going to sell, but you can't change a word in my text and change this color of the sun. No derivatives, you can't make changes to it. When you get to attribution-noncommercial no derivatives, we got more circles up here, circle with a dollar sign and slash through it and equal sign. And this is basically saying non-commercial use, no derivatives.

So can someone use my work to make money? No. Can someone change my work? No. Pretty restrictive, saying you can't do anything with it, I got to give you credit. But does that make that particular item not valuable? No, it's still wonderfully valuable. You just have to follow the rules of what the creator said you could do with it. Is this starting to click about how each one of these works?

Audience: De facto, is it set up so that all are all five Rs are protected unless the creator starts giving up some of those protections? Or how does that work?

Penny Pearson: No, think of it as copyright is first. Copyright is very restrictive. It says, you can't do anything with this without permission of the owner.

Audience: OK.

Penny Pearson: Creative Commons comes in and says, OK, as the owner, you have choices of how you license your work. You still hold the copyright. It's your stuff, but you now have to decide how can others use your work.

Audience: Is it purely just based on the creator's preference? Is there some advantage to--

Penny Pearson: That's entirely personal.

Audience: OK.

Penny Pearson: I have a lot of teachers that when they see that commercial use, they're like, no way, nobody's going to take my stuff and make money off of it. It's a personal choice. That's fine, but the licenses, if you apply that, you're allowing people to do that. So if you don't want people to make money, that they take your stuff and they print your sunset picture on a T-shirt and you're not getting any benefit from that, you have to be OK with that.

If you're not, then you have to come over here and say, no commercial use.

Audience: But you have to license your work first?

Penny Pearson: Yes.

Audience: OK.

Penny Pearson: You make the choices on what license that can be. You make that choice when you create your work or when you mark your work. I'm going to call it marking your work.

Audience: Right.

Penny Pearson: When you first create it, we know it's copyright protected. You created it. It's yours. It's the Fusion Drive on a napkin.

Audience: And this is all on an individual level?

Penny Pearson: Yes.

Audience: OK, so this came up during the pandemic, and I didn't know how to answer it. We use an LMS called Schoology. And the teacher asked, OK, if I create something and then I put it on Schoology, can Schoology then do what they want with it? What are the protections? Is that in the fine print?

Penny Pearson: That's in the fine print, because that's a commercial entity that you're dealing with, and they may already have it built in that it says, anything you put up on my site, we own it.

Audience: Right.

Penny Pearson: If I put a picture up on Unsplash, it's technically not mine anymore. Unsplash owns it. And I don't like that because it's my copyrighted material. I want to control where it's distributed and how it's distributed. Most of us won't read that fine print.

Audience: Right.

Penny Pearson: And if you read through many of those, you're going, whoa, wait a minute, I can upload all kinds of stuff. And when I do so, I release a lot of rights to those materials. They're not calling it Creative Commons. They're just saying, oh, this is ours now, we can do what we want. We want to put it in a promo video? We can put it in a promo video and ain't nothing you can do about it. That may be fine for you. For other people, it may not.

So that's why it's a perfectly legitimate question because I've seen this like on-- what was that old blogger site? WordPress? WordPress. WordPress, the framework was Creative Commons licensed. Somebody built it and said anybody can have this framework to do blogging. What they didn't clarify is that if Penny came along and in her blog I put up my sunset picture, everybody was assuming since it was on WordPress that my photo was also licensed the same way.

And it's not because it's my personal content, which is different than WordPress as a website container place to put my stuff. Does this make sense? And it was public. Anybody could get to it. So I always had to tell teachers like, don't assume about anything on WordPress because at the bottom of the page WordPress is Creative Commons licensed. WordPress is Penny Pearson's blog may not be. See that? I see the furrow in your brow. This is copyright.

Audience: Wow, it seems like you have to be a copyright lawyer or else you're going to get screwed over.

Audience: If you don't even think about it till you--

Penny Pearson: No. Something happens. Right, which is-- I mean, I think, Diana, you and I did this before where we were going through, and we were reading these end user license agreements. And we were both going, holy crap. You're just kind of giving up a lot if you don't read it.

And I'm sorry. How many of us are going to spend 15 to 20 minutes reading those things, and then trying to decipher them from the legalese?

Audience: Well, the three of us now.

Penny Pearson: Yeah.

[laughter]

I mean, the only thing that might have been kind of enlightening is that they were pretty boilerplate, you know? You could go through and sense they had the same clauses. Every now and then, they'd have something a little bit different, but it wasn't hugely different. So it's probably the same lawyer group that went around and said, do it this way, you'll be fine.

But it wasn't necessarily a benefit to the creators, right? They wanted a place-- the people that had a platform, WordPress-- to say whatever they want-- freedom of the press, freedom of speech, whatever you want to do. But not always was that individual-- any Pearson blogger-- aware of the fact that people were going in there and assuming the sense that platform was Creative Commons licensed, that everything on it was Creative Commons licensed.

Audience: So I have a teacher who won't-- she created her own curriculum for a specific class. And there's a student who needed accommodation. But she said, because her material-- she doesn't want her m-- her material is copyrighted, she won't allow the student access to the material. So is a teacher's information copyrighted because they work for a district, or is it separate, or?

Penny Pearson: That is a very good question. Diana and I were working at it. And I've worked with her a lot, so I keep referring to her. But we are geeky people.

It entirely depends on your employment contract. So if you go-- and I'm not going to speak for your district, but if I look at my district employment contract, all intellectual property that I created were owned by my district, not by me. If I did my work in work hours, they're my work, they're my stuff. I can copyright them.

But often, what happens is that nobody keeps track of when they worked on stuff, right? They don't take into account that there's a difference between this public side in a district and my private life when I'm writing curriculum at home. So it's really looking at what does your district say about intellectual property.

I will tell you that the universities and community colleges are probably a whole lot more on top of it than K-12 districts are because they just-- they buy books. They're copyrighted, right? And I get a set number of them that technically I'm not supposed to photocopy because I've paid for the license for those. But when it's intellectual property, it's a different story.

Diana, I'm sorry. Did you have your hand up?

Audience: No, but I was going to say our contract specifically-- I work at a community college. Our contract specifically states if you're paid for the work. So what community colleges do is they'll get grants and get a group of teachers. OK, create curriculum. You're going to get paid on this grant.

So all of a sudden, even though they worked on it-- doesn't matter if they worked on it at home-- it's part of that project, then it belongs to the district. But same thing-- what Penny mentioned. If I'm Diana just creating my own stuff at home, it's mine. I own it.

Audience: But if you create it at home but teach it in school, you still own it?

Audience: It depends on what your contract says. They can say--

Audience: I don't even think that that-- I mean, I've been in the district for 27 years. I'm sure it's nowhere in the contract. Probably isn't.

Penny Pearson: I mean, that's why-- I mean, I'm going to tell you-- again, I'm not a lawyer. I can't advise you.

But teachers have to understand what are their work responsibilities. And if they're interested in working outside of that district box, they have to know what they can and cannot do because if that teacher created everything on her own over here, privately, herself at home, it wasn't assigned to her by the principal. It wasn't because you could no longer afford to buy a textbook. Whatever the case is.

If she brings it back in, that can have ramifications because when she leaves, the curriculum technically is no longer there. If she does not release it to the school, it's copyright protected by her. So that gets to be a real sticky wicket-- my official legal term-- right? Because teachers aren't aware of this. And as they are creators, they need to know what they can and cannot take or give based on these contractual intellectual property provisions.

And I don't think K-12 schools even address it because we haven't been in this era of open educational resources and copyright awareness to have it really make a difference because they're always buying textbooks. Now, it's shifting. I mean, Diana leads a whole OAR department where that's all they do is write OARs for the college. So that-- yeah?

Audience: Sorry, there is a question in the chat. I'll go ahead and read it. She says, what about uploading to YouTube or Instagram? Do they own--

Audience: I had the question on it.

Penny Pearson: They own it unless you specifically mark it as Creative Commons licensed. And when you do so, anybody who sees that can come along and chop it up into little pieces. And they can put it on a standard YouTube channel where if they get their 50,000, 100,000, 1 million viewers, they're making money because remember, Creative Commons licensing, the open licensing says somebody can make money off of it.