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.

 Why Not OPEN? My thoughts while taking the CC Certificate Course by Sushumna Rao is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.