I have been developing free educational content since 1993, starting with the teaching material for the Micromouse Design course series at UC Davis. I also switched to using open-source software in 2000 and have never looked back.
Why?
In retrospect, it is a mixture of personal value and pragmatism. First, I believe that if I am going to teach a topic, I should know the topic inside-and-out, to the point that I can write the teaching material. In other words, writing teaching material is my way of preparation.
Second, most textbooks do not organize topics the way that I prefer. In the case of Micromouse Design, there were no textbooks available! Micromouse Design is a course series in which students design and implement robots from the ground up. The course crosses multiple disciplines: embedded system programming, motion control, motor driving, power circuits, microcontroller programming, graph algorithms, etc. Interestingly, I find that even when I am teaching a “run-of-the-mill” course, I often find myself coming up with an organization of course material that discourses from available textbooks.
When I started teaching full-time at American River College, writing my teaching material was considered “doing students a disservice.” Fast forwarding to the present, I am now one of the co-chairs of the Affordable Learning Material Committee (ALMC)! There is a small group of faculty members who develop and promote the use of Open Educational Resources (OER).
Creative Commons (CC) licenses play an important part in the development and adoption of OER. When properly marked, CC-licensed work can be located quickly with the help of a search engine. This helps others locate and adopt OER content. As opposed to being in the public domain, work that is CC-licensed has enforceable distribution restrictions. This is important because otherwise, for-profit publishers can simply “borrow” all the work free of charge and improve their own profitability. On this point, CC and many OER developers like myself share similar values.
For many years, the copyright of my work specifically states “all rights reserved,” but I give explicit permission to students to make copies of my work. Now, I am licensing all my work as CC BY-NC-SA.
Because American River College is still in its infancy regarding the development and adoption of OER material, most faculty members are unaware of CC licenses. This lack of awareness can lead to anxiety when adopting any work that “seems to be free.” The same lack of awareness can also inadvertently lead to work being published in the public domain, resulting in a loss of control of rights.
Fortunately, awareness can be improved by workshops, presentations, and even software tools. For example, a Google Form can implement a decision tree to help educators determine which CC licenses meet certain requirements.
This is not a challenge specific to CC licenses, but rather a challenge of the motivation to develop and create work that is CC-licensed.
Everyone has some intrinsic laziness, or resistance to do certain kinds of work. In my case, changing how I teach a class to fit the framework of a book is more work than originating my material. However, the majority of my colleagues consider originating work to be more work than following the framework of published textbooks.
This challenge is more complex to overcome because it is in part due to the intrinsic drive and resistance of each person. Being paid for developing OER work is a solution, but only a short-term one. Grants and other forms of monetary incentives will, eventually, run out.