If you’ve downloaded as many teaching materials from VIPEr as me (or even if you’ve only downloaded a learning object or two), you’ve probably noticed a header or footer on the document that says who wrote it, when it was uploaded, and then some strange text that looks something like this: “This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License. To view a copy of this license visit {http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/}.” Why does the Leadership Council want you to license your work, and what do all the licenses mean?

Here’s a simple (I hope) explanation. Just like when you publish a book or a manuscript, a document that you publish on the web is copyrighted. Although fears have surfaced that some social media websites own your photographs, snopes says that “…Facebook members own the intellectual property (IP) that is uploaded to the social network, but … users grant the social network ‘a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post’ on the site.” There is a similar license agreement you signed when you created your twitter or instagram accounts. Normally you sign many of your rights away to the publisher (giving them freedom to publish and disseminate your work) but on VIPEr, we allow you to decide which rights you want to keep.

What does this mean? We want you to claim your rights, explicitly, by placing header text (see sample here). That way, when someone downloads your LO, the citation to your work is already present. More importantly, this allows the user of the LO to give others credit for the work they did in developing the learning object.

Creative Commons licenses are a web standard for claiming your work. There are a variety of possible licenses ranging from public domain (the completely unrestricted CC0 license) to “attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs” (the CC BY-NC-ND license) that limits others to use your work with citation but not change it. We encourage VIPEr users to use Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA license) for their LOs, as this allows others to use your work (with attribution), but importantly, it allows others to adapt the LO for their local situation, and post a derivative work that might even improve upon the original. And hopefully they would post it back to VIPEr so YOU could use it too.

Next time you’re downloading something from the internet, look to see if there are any citations on it, and compare that to what it feels like when you download a tried-and-true LO from VIPEr, an LO developed by a real person who you are attributing. Pretty cool.