Tag Archives: policy

Utah and Creative Commons

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Last year I began having conversations with Utah public school educators about sharing their educational materials as open educational resources. The conversation generally went like this:

Me: Would you be willing to share the lesson plans and other materials you create with others for them to reuse?

Teacher: Sure!

Me: Great! The best way to do that is by applying this Creative Commons license to your work.

Teacher: A copyright license?

Me: Right. So that others know for certain that they’re allowed to reuse, revise, and redistribute your work.

Teacher: I don’t think I can make copyright assignments. I’m happy to share informally, but when it comes to formal sharing, I don’t know who actually holds the copyright in the materials I create for use in my class. Sorry.

After hearing this a few times I dug into the Utah Administrative Rules to answer the question of who owns the work teachers produce for their own use in their own classrooms. The answer? The issue was not addressed anywhere in the UAR. A call to the State Superintendent’s office and some research by their staff confirmed that there was no explicit statement about who owned the teachers’ work. Consequently, no one knew who could share what with whom.

So, last summer I testified at a meeting of the Interim Education Committee and had a longer conversation with our State Superintendent and one of his staff asking for a new Administrative Rule, explicitly stating that teachers can in fact share their work under open licenses. State Superintendent Larry Shumway then grabbed a hold of the idea and worked on making it happen.

The result is the shiny new Rule R277-111: Sharing of Curriculum Materials by Public School Educators, which includes the following language:

The purpose of this rule is to provide information and assurance to public school educators about sharing materials created or developed by educators primarily for use in their own classes or assignments. The intent of this rule is to allow or encourage educators to use valuable time and resources to improve instruction and instructional practices with assistance from appropriate materials developed by other educators….

Utah educators may share materials under a Creative Commons License and shall be personally responsible for understanding and satisfying the requirements of a Creative Commons License…

The presumption of this rule is that materials may be shared. The presumption is that Utah educators need not seek permission from their employers to share personally-developed materials.

I haven’t done an in-depth review of state policies, but I believe that Utah is one of the first (if not the very first) to formally adopt language (a) saying that teachers are allowed or encouraged to share their educational materials or (b) actually mentioning Creative Commons by name. Many thanks to Superintendent Shumway and his staff for making this happen!

Two Units in BYU Adopt Open Access Policies

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Two units at Brigham Young University have adopted open access policies – both the Harold B. Lee Library faculty and the faculty in my own department, Instructional Psychology and Technology, voted to adopt the policies earlier this month. IP&T’s policy was based on the HBLL policy, which was based on existing OA policies at other universities.

I am giddy with excitement to see some of my own published articles beginning to appear in BYU’s institutional repository – they now have an open, permanent, curated home and I can link to them with confidence. And the whole world can and will be able to access and read them, legally, in perpetuity! This is the way science should work.

For those who are interested, here’s the text of the IP&T policy:

The faculty of the Instructional Psychology and Technology Department adopts the following policy:

Each Instructional Psychology and Technology Department faculty member grants to Brigham Young University permission to make scholarly articles to which he or she has made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available as part of the Harold B. Lee Library’s ScholarsArchive system, or its successor, and to exercise any associated copyright in those articles. This includes the right to deposit, use, reproduce, perform, publicly display, distribute, and publish the scholarly articles in the university’s institutional repository or any other method or medium of delivery, whether now known or hereafter developed. Accordingly, the permission granted to the University by each faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to exercise the above-mentioned rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for profit and are properly attributed to both the author(s) and the journal of first publication, if applicable.

This license is not meant to interfere in any way with the rights of the IP&T faculty author as the copyright holder of the work. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the IP&T Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy which have existing licensing commitments or copyright assignments which are inconsistent with the intent of this policy.

The term “scholarly articles” includes articles prepared for presentation or publication, whether in electronic or print media. Other scholarly works in connection with the faculty member’s academic or professional activities may be included at the discretion of the faculty member.

The IP&T Department Chair or the Chair’s designate shall waive application of the policy to a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need. The IP&T Chair, in consultation with the faculty, will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the faculty. This policy will be formally reviewed two years after implementation, by September 30, 2011.

As of the date of publication, each faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the University Librarian’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the University Librarian’s Office.

When Innovation Gets Difficult

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A summary of the core argument of my recent keynote at the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (slides at http://slideshare.net/opencontent/).

Throughout the late 20th century, and into the early 21st, when we spoke about “innovation” we largely meant impressive technical feats. Think Jobs and Woz creating the Mac, or Larry and Sergey creating Google, or the kinds of things Tony Hirst and Jim Groom seem to pull off regularly. We made heroes of the two geeks working in their mom’s garage… We made heroes of the lone coder, working late at night armed only with Emacs and Mountain Dew. These legends engaged in mythical man-versus-nature battles, subduing the wild frontier of source code and bending the Internet to their wills. They’re just plain cool.

However.

The kind of innovations these legends produce – technological innovations – are the easy kind of innovation. They are innovations that manipulate inanimate entities free of agency. During John Seely Brown’s visit to BYU last week, I heard him say that while the 20th century was a time of technological innovation, the 21st century must be a time of institutional innovation. This is the most insightful statement I’ve heard made in recent memory. It impacted me deeply, as it neatly summarized a frustration I’ve been feeling more and more keenly.

Anyone who has worked to reform an institution will readily admit that the more people are involved, and the more they are invested in maintaining the status quo, the harder it is to affect change. Even something as small as a stepwise incremental policy change can be a multi-year battle. I can hear you now thinking, “Just burn it down and plant a new institution in the ashes,” or “Just punch out and create a new institution to compete with the first.” Sometimes these are legitimate approaches to getting things done, but sometimes they aren’t. I seem to keep finding my interests lie in problems and institutions where these more radical methods simply don’t seem to apply. This seems to portend many difficult years ahead for me.

Imposing your will on bits and bytes is “easy.” Leading an established institution through the valley of the shadow of reform and up the opposite bank toward innovation is “hard.” But it is absolutely critical work, and precious few people are in positions that afford them opportunities to provide this kind of leadership.