The OpenContent UCT project at the University of Cape Town tries to encourage academics to create resources which can be shared and reused by their colleagues as well as other educators or self-learners. These resources, shared openly on the internet, can then be discovered, used and remixed by teachers around the world.
In order to make resources openly available we must adhere to issues of copyright. We encourage academics to source and use works licensed under Creative Commons whenever possible so that we can legally share the resulting materials more widely. Creative Commons provides an alternative legal framework for specifying conditions for reuse of creative materials. Creative Commons provides the vehicle for content creators to specify a licence for reuse of their content with “some rights reserved”, thus providing an alternative to the “all rights reserved” model of traditional copyright.
This video attempts to bring awareness to some of the implications in sourcing materials online without considering the copyright on the material. If we can transform teachers practice so that they use Creative Commons materials exclusively, we can legally share much more of our teaching and learning content!