Why Not OPEN? My thoughts while taking the CC Certificate Course

 I believe that promoting openness either in practices or resources is very important for encouraging inclusion, diversity, creativity and efficiency among educators in an organization/institution. In my local community, as an Open Educational Resources advocate, in my workshops I stress on the important role of Openness plays in making information accessible, fostering collaboration and communal progress. Also promoting flexibility and multi-sector collaboration it empowers people. 

The CreativeCommons Certificate Course I did helped me to gain more confidence to do advocacy more efficiently. The two important takeaways are basic awareness towards intellectual property literacy and openly licensed materials and strategic ways of using CC open licenses and openly licensed resources. It is very important to have an awareness towards intellectual property rights, licensing ways, and patents, to understand the Open licensing mechanism thoroughly. And understanding the CC licensing mechanism, CC license anatomy, openly licensed resources helps in efficiently sharing and reusing, repurposing existing resources. CC licenses offer varied permissions to others for reusing/distributing/repurposing the resource while preserving the creator's rights. This course helped me to define these permissions efficiently so that I can be a better Open Education Advocate. Now I can make a strong argument on Openness by discussing how openly licensed software changed the tech world in the recent past and how open-access journals made a huge difference in the academic publishing world. 

A huge challenge as an OER advocate I always face is resistance to openness, collaborations and open practices. It is very difficult to make people understand and create awareness about the open culture and its benefits. How open practices can bring transparency to the system. And how it will open doors for collaborations through which a great invention might be seen.

Another great takeaway is how well we can utilize even a less open licensed material like materials with CC BY ND can be repurposed as part of a collection. And I may utilize various examples and ideas my peers discussed in the discussion forums, as part of the assignments in my advocacy.

 I strongly feel promoting an open culture and creating awareness about CC licenses and their permissions clearly can help in many ways to make educators embrace open practices in their teaching and learning practices. Many obstacles, and hiccups might come while promoting open pedagogy, open licensing mechanisms, advocating OER etc Open practices but nothing is impossible to solve, when we strongly believe that Openness can bring people together that is collaborations, while democratizing the opportunities for everyone and everywhere that is inclusion.

This essay is part of assignments in CreativeCommons Certificate Course that I took. - Sushumna Rao.

I strengthen my skills as an Open Education Advocate

     As an Open Education practitioner and trainer, I believe that knowledge should be freely available and easily reachable, and shareable. Which can help to create a more equitable society promoting inclusiveness. As the Open Education movement principle guides, enhancing remixing of already existing educational material is the key to nurturing innovative pedagogies. As a trainer with freely available resources, I can always iterate on existing resources to create new and innovative training resources to engage participants in the workshops. Emphasizing practicing together or participating together might give birth to many innovative strategies. Collaboration in education is essential to build a strong, vibrant, and effective teaching-learning environment. Through the interchange of concepts, tools, and approaches, the results of teaching and learning may be significantly improved. 

 “Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt, and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video, and animation. ” (UNESCO)

    Creative Commons licenses allow authors to clearly describe/decide how they want their work to be used from more open to less open. Others can easily understand looking at the CC license logos on the resource as they clearly communicate to them on what permissions are granted to use that particular resource. This is possible when one understands the CC licenses and their permissions. 

    I recently took a CC Educators Certificate course. It was an enlightening journey. The structure of the course and well thought of engaging assignments facilitated a thorough understanding of the subject. It enhanced my knowledge of Open licenses and the reuse of existing openly licensed resources. Kudos to my facilitator Shanna Hollich for fostering a wonderful collaborative environment with thoughtful discussion prompts and guidance on submitted assignments with her expert comments. 

    I usually come across in training sessions from participants many questions about OER and Open Licenses. For example the ND license usage, about reuse of a CC-licensed work,  also the difference between remixes and collections and OER, open textbooks, open courses, and MOOCs. Now I feel more confident in my skills to answer these kinds of questions. I will use my assignments as resources to address these types of questions. 

    The challenge I used to face while creating OER with H5P technology which allows me to specify metadata clearly about the license of each element is when we use various CC licensed / Openly licensed resources inside a big resource, what license we have to give if we use CC BY SA work inside this. I think I understood well through the certificate course as it states that:-

• you are not required to apply a ShareAlike-license to your overall work if you are using an SA-licensed work within it;
• the ND restriction does not prevent you from using an ND-licensed work; and
• you can combine that CC-licensed material with other work as long as you attribute and comply with the NonCommercial restriction if it applies.

    The biggest challenge I see is having educators/faculty understand the concept of Open Pedagogy, the benefits of OER, and how Open Licenses help them share their work with others. Even knowing Open Licenses they might have many inhibitions to reusing openly licensed materials/resources thinking about copyrights and limitations. To address this challenge I will conduct open online courses and workshops and use my course assignments to answer many of their queries. (What is Creative Commons? The Purpose of Copyright, Anatomy of a CC License, and using CC Licenses and CC-Licensed Works, etc.) Also, I will give group discussions and group submission assignments fostering collaboration. Also, I will try to explain the fundamental principle of CC license 4.0 on usage of ND-licensed works and collection and remix differences as this was challenging to me while taking the CC Educators Certificate. 

    Another challenge I see is that not many educational resources are available in Indian regional languages. To address this challenge and to motivate educators to create OER in regional languages, I am planning to create a podcast series in bilingual mode explaining Open education, Open Licenses, and their benefits with examples. Along with Open Educational Practitioners' insights by inviting them to podcasts to address the community. 

Test this Demo H5P content type

  H5P content type - Jigsaw puzzle is developed by Oliver Tacke If you want to use this content type and test, download the demo contents using the Reuse button of the content. Upload the downloaded .h5p file onto your H5P platform. 

Access Demo Content

To test it in Lumi application, click on settings button of Lumi application and add this in Libraries. Follow the screenshots below:-

Read more about this in Otacke's lab

How to add Math equations while authoring H5P Content types

Mathematical expressions can be added to all text fields in the H5P authoring tool. There are three different ways you can use to let H5P know this is LaTeX:

• \( some LaTeX \) for inline LaTeX, commonly used as part of sentences within a text
• \[ some LaTeX \] or optionally $$ some LaTeX $$ for block LaTeX, commonly used as a standalone formula that will be centered - from h5p.org
• For Example, to display the equation 
  
  
  
you have to type as \( S = \frac{1}{2}  \sin(\alpha) \)
• In the above S = \frac{1}{2}  \sin(\alpha)  is the LateX. 
• So the syntax is \ ( Some LaTex\) 

See these useful links:

1. Wiki Book on LaTeX code for math equations. 
2. A web based Mathematical Entry System
3. See working text in H5P Course Presentation