Making a Creative Commons MOOC: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

It is likely that only a small proportion of educators are willing, interested, and incentivized to complete an entire MOOC, but we believe that many more can benefit from our educational resources if we empower our participants to take our materials and put them to work. We launched the MITx MOOC Envisioning the Graduate of the Future under a Creative Commons (CC) license because we think that making the content explicitly open (with the requirement of attribution) would make it easier for the target audience (teachers, administrators, and others in the education sphere) to get value from the content. The decision to use a CC license, specifically CC BY 4.0, affected course development in several ways. The course team had to learn more about the intricacies of the various CC licenses. The work of finding, tracking, logging, and labeling resources (both third-party and created by the course team) involved a great deal of collaborative, detail-oriented work. Certain resources, like commercially produced music tracks, were no longer a good fit due to conflicts regarding terms of use. From the first run of the course, we now recognize the importance of collecting data regarding how much learners know about CC licenses and also about how they are sharing, using, and adapting our content. We now believe that releasing a course under a CC license does not guarantee that learners will notice and begin sharing and adapting our content. We hope to innovate in terms of data collection to make it easier for learners to report how they are experimenting with repurposing course content.