Remixing OER

In this course, you’ll be writing a chapter on the theory or theorist you were assigned.

• You have been given a template outline to help you draft this chapter.
• You also have found OER, which, depending on the CC license it has, allows you to reuse or remix them as parts of your chapter content.
• You have created a video that can serve as part of the content, if you wish.
• You can research and write the pieces of your chapter that are not covered by the OER you found.

OER gives us the ability to reuse and remix content rather than starting from scratch, which is great! Why reinvent the wheel when you can adopt the wheel and build upon that idea instead? So, what does “remixing OER” look like?

First stop: Review Your OER Licenses

The licenses of your OER tell you what you can and cannot do with them. As you’ve probably discovered with the help of your peers, OER that are licensed with CC0 (public domain – do whatever you like with it and no attribution needed) or CC BY (do whatever you want with it, but you must give attribution to the creator) give you the most freedom as a creator. These are golden.

However, the other CC licenses will require careful and thoughtful use.

• SA – Share alike
  • If you use an OER with this license and remix it with other OER, there is a caveat. When you choose your new license for the remixed OER, it must use the same license as the original OER with the SA license.
• NC – Non-commercial
  • Can’t make any money off of an OER that has this license, and if you remix it into your own OER, you can’t make money off of your OER, either.
• ND – Non-derivative
  • Can’t make any changes to this OER. If you use it in your OER, it must remain untouched as it is. When you choose your new license for the remixed OER, you’ll have to either license your entire OER as ND, or you could state the licenses separately – one for the entire OER “except where otherwise noted” and one for the OER piece that is licensed as ND.

You may notice that, when remixing OER that have different CC licenses, and choosing the license for your new creation, there is a sort of hierarchy that has to be applied. Creative Commons has tried to help creators understand this hierarchy with the following compatibility infographic (which some find more confusing than helpful). Use the arrow to view the Compatibility Chart.

CC License Compatibility Chart

However, I find it more helpful to give a concrete example.

In short, to make life easiest on yourself as a creator, choose to use the CC BY or CC0 licensed OER first. Then, perhaps use CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC. As a last resort, use OER with the ND in the license.

Second Stop: Review the OER Quality

In hunting for OER, you probably noticed that not all OER are created equal. While CC-licensing opens up a world of shared creations, it also means that you have to turn on your Spidey senses to determine if these creations are any good. While some CC-licensed educational materials undergo rigorous review, not all OER have gone through a peer review process. This used to make OER sort of frowned upon, but this has improved over time. For example, some repositories, like Open Textbook Library, include transparent peer review. Many OER are formerly copyrighted books and chapters that did undergo peer review before being published, but whose authors have now changed the license to Creative Commons for reuse and remixing. Regardless of these improvements it is up to you, the creator and remixer, to ensure the quality of any OER you choose to use. There are many OER evaluation tools available, but this one from BC Campus offers a concise list of things to consider when choosing which OER to use.

Now You’re Ready to Remix

For your OER chapter, you will use existing OER and some of your own writing as part of your new creation. You can think of your OER as a cookbook filled with recipes from various contributors. A section of your OER chapter may contain a video, an image, and text all written by other authors. Your OER will remix a variety of ingredients, preferably public domain or openly licensed content. (Note: if you believe your chapter must include a piece of copyrighted material, please reach out to me directly for guidance on “fair use”.) Like any good recipe, though, there are rules and tricks to mixing your content to legally create an openly licensed compilation or remix. Nate Angell from Creative Commons uses the useful analogy of a compilation as a tv dinner with distinct portions and a remix as a blended smoothie of indistinguishable parts. Take a look at this Andrew Cambron’s visual take on Angell’s explanation, which explains the difference between a compilation or a remix of several OER:

A Few More Questions

Use the arrows to get answers to some commonly asked questions when remixing OER.

Let’s Draft

To keep the chapters each of you create consistent, I am providing you the following template outlines for your theory or theorist:

Theory Chapter Draft template

Theorist Chapter Draft template

For the chapter draft, you are just drafting the content. This is the information that is outlined with guiding questions on the template. It might include content you write or CC-licensed content you found in your OER search. It might include text, videos, or infographics.

1. Adding to the Jigsaw Puzzle Use the template as the framework, and like a jigsaw puzzle, begin to plug in pieces of OER that could be used under each of the outlined chapter sections. Don’t worry if it feels like the pieces don’t fit together yet. You’ll work on smoothing out the transitions later.
2. Write in the Gaps Take a look at the content in the outline that still needs to be filled in. You can research and write these portions yourself, citing and listing peer-reviewed references at the end of the chapter as you would for a formal paper. Note: Peer-reviewed references would include peer reviewed journal articles or published books by theorists, for example.
3. Track Your Sources It is easy, as you remix various OER to lose track of the licenses for individual OER pieces. This is dangerous, because you must ensure you are using each OER as its individual license requires! One excellent practice as you remix is to use different colors for each OER and its corresponding license you bring into your document. For example, you may change the color of the text of one OER piece and its license to green and another to blue. That way, as you being to remix, rewrite, and rearrange content in your chapter, you can quickly review the license associated with it to see if what you plan to do is legal. Later on, when you choose a license for your newly created, remixed chapter, you can see which OER you ended up using and decide on a compatible license for your chapter.
4. Smooth it out Once all of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are filled in on your outline, smooth out the writing to make a seamless chapter with introductions, conclusions, and smooth transitions between paragraphs and sections.

Remember, this is just the chapter draft, not the final product. Your peers will review it to help you improve it, you’ll have time to revise a bit, and later in the course, you’ll be adding engaging pieces to it.

This portion of the chapter applies after you have drafted that chapter, had it peer reviewed, and made your revisions (but feel free to read it!).

Choosing a License for your OER Chapter

Once your draft is complete, been reviewed by your peers, and you’ve made revisions, you are ready to choose your own license for the chapter. This is your creation, so you get to choose. However, remember that the OER you used in your remix plays into which license you can choose. (See the Example of applying the hierarchy of OER licenses callout above).

Creative Commons does have a license chooser that can help you begin to craft your license statement and choose the license for your chapter. However, be sure to review the OER you used against your chosen license to ensure it is compatible with all of the OER you used in your chapter.

Writing an Attribution Statement

As mentioned in the previous chapter, you can identify works openly licensed under Creative Commons (CC) by the attribution. The attribution may be located on the landing page of a Pressbook, in the front matter of an ebook, in the footer of a website, or directly next to a particular item.

Formatting Attributions

The Creative Commons organization developed a standardized method for attribution to ensure openly licensed works were properly attributed. Like the image here, CC licensed content may use written language, it may have a CC badge or both. Whichever format you choose to display an attribution, Creative Commons prefers you follow the Title, Author, Source, and License (TASL) attribution format.

TASL

Select the arrows to reach about the different components of an attribution for your OER.

TASL Example

Here is an example of an image with an attribution. Select the + hotspots to read about each part of the attribution.

For additional guidance see “Recommended Practices for Attribution,” part of the extensive CC Wiki.

Placing Your Attribution Statement

It may feel a bit odd to remix existing work, because copyrighted works generally prohibit such practices. But in open education, it is common to remix a work and list yourself as the author of a Pressbook chapter, for instance. Then, you will place your attribution statement in your OER. For your OER chapter, you may put this statement at the end of a chapter. It might look something like this:

Note that each of the OER used that require attribution are included in the attribution statement.