Creative Commons Licenses for your Course Content
Tara Spies Smith
Learning Objectives
- Learn how to find and use openly licensed, Creative Commons, and public domain content
- Understand Creative Commons, public domain, and other types of openly licensed creative content
- Learn how to give attribution to content you use, your own content, and how to give your own work a Creative Commons license
- Understand how to use Creative Commons Licenses in Canvas
Finding and Using Openly licensed, Creative Commons, and Public Domain Content
You can use the Openly Licensed & Copyrighted Creative Content For Your Scholarly Works guide to find creative content to use in your presentations, papers, and publications. See the Open Access Images, Video, and Music & Other Media tab for lists of websites and cultural institutions with openly licensed, Creative Commons, and public domain content you can use and to learn more about what Creative Commons licenses are and how you can use them.
Read the Open Licensing and Creative Commons Licenses chapter of the Publishing section in this book to cover the following content:
- Understand what Creative Commons licenses are
- Learn about public domain and other types of openly licensed creative content
- Understand how to give attribution to content you are using
- Understand how to give attribution to your own content
- Learn how to give your own work a Creative Commons license – attribution to yourself
You can use the License Chooser Beta tool or this “Which Creative Commons License is Right for Me?” interactive tool to see which Creative Commons License is right for you and your work.
Canvas and Creative Commons
Canvas has a Commons area where educators can find content, share their content, and import others content into their Canvas sites. Read more about the Canvas Commons and what you can do with it.
When you add content to the Canvas Commons, you will see sharing and license information that you need to enter, as well as metadata fields for you to fill out. Here is a screenshot of what you will see:
Diving Deeper
- Read more about the licenses and giving your own work a Creative Commons license in the Open Licensing and Creative Commons Licenses chapter of the Publishing section in this book.
- Contact Tara Smith if you have questions about finding and using any Creative Commons content or other openly licensed content for your teaching and with any other licensing questions you may have.
An open license is one that grants permission to access, re-use and redistribute a work with few or no restrictions (definition from Openedefinition.org). - https://libguides.csudh.edu/c.php?g=679215&p=7626572
Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. - https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-creative-commons-and-what-do-you-do
The public domain of copyright refers to the aggregate of those works that are not restricted by copyright within a given jurisdiction. A work may be part of the public domain because the applicable term of copyright has expired, because the rights holder surrendered copyright in the work with a tool like CC0, or because the work did not meet the applicable standards for copyrightability. - https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-the-public-domain
Creative Commons licenses provide an easy way to manage the copyright terms that attach automatically to all creative material under copyright. The licenses allow that material to be shared and reused under terms that are flexible and legally sound. Creative Commons offers a core suite of six copyright licenses. - https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-are-creative-commons-licenses
to give credit or attribution to a creative work or idea. Attribution vs. Citation from the Gettysburg College Digital Humanities Toolkit. https://dh.sites.gettysburg.edu/toolkit/media/attribution/
Canvas "Commons is a learning object repository that enables educators to find, import, and share resources. A digital library full of educational content, Commons allows Canvas users to share learning resources with other users as well as import learning resources into a Canvas course." - https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Commons/What-is-Canvas-Commons/ta-p/1788