 Hello, everyone. My name is Carl Blythe. I'm the Director of Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. And I want to welcome you all today to our OER Hangout. We have kind of an informal discussion and a couple of tasks to get you into the wonderful world of open. I'm really glad that you're joining us today. The main idea here is just to introduce you to the wonderful world of open. What is an OER? What is open education? So another thing that we want to bring your attention to is that this is really an enticement to get you to take a course that we have, an online course that we just completed that teaches you a lot more details than we can go into here, but a lot of details about licensing and preparing OERs and that kind of thing. Okay, but this will certainly give you an overview of what we mean by open. Okay, hello. I'm Sarah. I'm the Project Coordinator here at Coral. And just to go through the agenda, we'll be doing the introduction, which we just did a little bit of. Then Carl will give you a warm-up task to do to practice searching for OER. That should be a pretty quick little task list in 10 minutes. And then we'll do some group work for 15 minutes, so everyone will break up into groups and talk to each other. And then we'll report back on that work, have some Q&A, and then some concluding remarks. And we'll be referring you to the OER course that Carl mentioned throughout the Hangout. OER, of course, is in the middle of our acronym. We are the Center for OER and Language Learning. OER is literally in the heart of what we do. An OER stands for Open Educational Resources, and it can be for anything. We want to make sure that people understand that we are here to promote language learning, but we do that through the lens of open education, which changes things. So at the, really, the central issue is about copyright. And we want to start off our discussion today by familiarizing you with Creative Commons and the icons that Creative Commons uses to break down copyright, because sometimes people get confused. These icons are very simple. That's the whole point of an icon. So there are four of them, and once you learn them, you'll be able to speak the language of open licenses. So the person there in the circle means attribution. So in education, for example, when somebody creates a material, whether it's a syllabus or it's a test, what have you, we want to point, and if you use that test or you use that syllabus, we want to point back to the person and say, essentially, thank you. That's what we mean by giving attribution. This is pointing back to the person who originated the material. Then that kind of symbol that looks like a, I don't know, a recycling sign. This means that when you see that, it means that you have to share the derivative in the same way that the license tells you to do so as the original. In other words, that symbol has to show up on your license as well. So the next one, the equal sign that says no derivatives or meaning that you have to use the material that you see in this same way. You cannot change it. You have to, when you start out, what you start out with has to be what you end up with, the equals. So that's kind of not particularly open because we want to produce, we want to promote the notion of open, which is an open exchange of ideas. We want to create materials that other people can use and reuse and take apart and the ideas just keep on going. And finally, the dollar sign and the slash through the dollar sign is pretty obvious. That means no commercial use, do not sell the original or derivative. There are other signs, obviously other monetary different currencies. So if you see a euro with the slash through it, that means the same thing as the dollar sign. So attribution, share alike, derivatives yes or no and commercial yes or no. Another way of thinking about then these different kinds of open licenses is it's not really as a dichotomy but much more of a spectrum. So in other words, there are degrees of openness and that's something that people need to understand. So if you see it to the far right, you see the C in the circle, that's what most people associate with copyright. That means all rights reserved for the author and the publisher. But the whole point of OER, the whole point of open education is to share your rights with others. So you've created something and you want to give it away, you have to decide which rights you want to give to other people, other users. So at the other end of the spectrum, the most open of all is something called public domain. And when you come across some content on the internet and it has this label public domain, that means that you are free to do anything you want to. There are no limits. In fact, sometimes we don't even know who created it, we don't know who the author is and so point to or to attribute it to. But creative commons licenses, those are all the CC in the circle, creative commons. And you see that the most open license of all to the left there, that just requires you to give attribution. So if you notice, every single creative commons license carries attribution. So that is what we call the CINACONON of CC licenses or open licenses. You have to share. And this is simply saying, think of it as good manners. Somebody created something for you. You want to give praise and thanks, your gratitude for the person who created it. So you always have that in every single creative commons license. The next in the green zone then is the share alike. So here you can say, okay, I'm pointing back to the originator. I've created something a little new and I want you to do the same. Okay, so that's what it means to share it alike. So you basically are telling people who are making subsequent copies and derivatives that you have to play the game just like me. Okay. Now, the other, as you see, it gets less and less open. And that means that you're simply putting more constraints on the users of your OER. So you don't want them to make any kind of profit from them or you don't want to make derivatives. We at Coral want you to stay in the green zone because we want to promote openness. We think that your ideas will prompt other people to have ideas. Okay. So another way of saying all of this, we've kind of, this is a different array of the licenses. But typically, we want you to stay, as I said, in the green zone. So we tell people that we're creating materials to be shared. And we also want them to, for their own purposes, maybe to use them for commercial purposes. So the most open license, just the attribution license, is the most open of all. And that's what we prefer to use at Coral. The next one over to the right there is attribution share alike, or ccbysa is how you kind of, you name them by referring to the icons. And so they can be shared, but only with the same license. So again, in the red zones, you can't make derivatives. You can't use it for commercial purposes. We're not really promoting that. And finally, another way of thinking about this is, what is an OER? What is the purpose of an OER? There is a discussion about what constitutes an OER. And what we're essentially saying is that an OER is a product. It's educational material that other people can use and reuse, can edit and change. So that means that if you're saying that you can't make derivatives of it, no, no, no. Right? We want to make sure that all of our OER allow people to change and make derivative copies. So again, basically this slide is avoid the red zone at the end there. We don't promote the use of non-derivative licensed. And finally, another question that comes up all the time is when people are making materials for other people to use, because that's really what it's all about. The question then arises, well, can I use this piece of content here in my own OER? If you focus on the first two, the ccby and the ccbysa, those two licenses, you will always stay legally safe. You can create materials that other people can use in a legal fashion. So to simplify it, we say just stay at the top two, ccby and ccbysa. They are OER and they are always safe for you to use. We put licenses on all the materials that we create. This is Coral's materials page on our website. On here you can find resources in 20 languages created by faculty and teachers with the support of Coral. Each material has a Creative Commons license on it, so that gives you more freedom to reuse the materials and to make modifications if you'd like. These materials are very from supplementary materials to full curricula. There's some videos on there that you can use in your classes and lesson plans and all sorts of different things. So we encourage you to check this out if you haven't already. Another way to think about OERs or what exactly do you do with this out? There is talk in the open education community of the five Rs. Not four Rs, but five Rs now. The idea that you can retain the copy. There are actually commercial publishing companies that will sell you a license to a product that's online. An online textbook, let's say, but it suddenly disappears at the end of the semester. So that's a right. You're right to retain a copy. So most of our OERs, of course, you can use them. You can download them and you retain the right to use them as long as they're on your laptop. Then, of course, we're also really talking about the notion of reusing. So going in and changing and making changes because you like the textbook but you don't want to use one of these chapters. You can simply remove it. Redistribute. That means making a copy. And everybody makes copies of different things, but that's usually a violation of copyright. If it's a C in the Circle textbook, for example, produced by a commercial publisher. So you want to make copies, but then you want to distribute them, send them out to your classroom. Well, with an OER, that, of course, is not a problem. You're allowed to make copies. You're allowed to share them with as many people as you want. The idea of remixing is if you imagine taking two OERs and creating what's called a mashup or a remix. So it's not just changing one OER, but it's actually taking many different OERs and making a new product, a new derivative. That's remixing. And finally, revision is important because most textbooks, if you buy a print textbook, of course, you can't go in and edit the copy. But let's say you want to go with an OER textbook. You might want to put in what I call Easter eggs for your students. Little hidden surprises. You can change the names. You can actually take their names and put them in a textbook in a lot of different ways that you can make small changes but have a big impact. So those are what we call the five Rs. They allow people, we give them permission to do all these different things, to retain, reuse, redistribute, remix, and revise. On our website, we have a page devoted entirely to the discussion of what is an OER, what are open educational resources. We have videos for you. What we want to do here is introduce this little warm-up task for you. And this shouldn't take very long, but we want everybody just to get their hands dirty a little bit by searching the Internet for an OER and directing you to creativecommons.org, which is a very important website. And once you go to this search.creativecommons.org, it's essentially a page that's been optimized with all these different search engines that can find open content on the web. You can search this in any language. So you simply type in, let's say, a phrase or a word that makes sense to you. If you're a French teacher, you may be looking for images of the Eiffel Tower, whatever it is. Then you find a piece of media that you like. Then carefully look to see if you can find the license. It's because we just had a really crash course on licenses. What license does it carry? And then we'll talk about that in a group chat. I want you to tell the group what media you found and then what license does it have. Remember those four icons? You can just say CC by SA and whatever it is. I just want to show you before you start that we have an example here. And so if we're typing in graffiti or something in Spanish and this comes to me, note that the license here is CC by NCSA. So they don't want you to use this particular image, immaterials that can be sold. It's for non-commercial purposes only. So let me give you about seven minutes to do this. And remember to write your answers. Go to the search.creativecommons.org. Find a piece of media and then tell us what the CC license is. I think that's good enough. If you've had a chance to, as I said, just get your hands dirty. This is a warm-up task after all. But the main idea is that some of you did encounter some problems and that's actually good because what I want to do is say, first of all, that not every piece of content on the Internet carries a license. Sometimes it's ambiguous. And what we want to train people to do is start to pay attention to licenses. The other thing that this little warm-up task is meant to do is to get you to use something like a Creative Commons search engine. In other words, there are many different places for you to go to find open content. But people often haven't filtered the search to look for the open content. So if you're using Google as your search engine, you should make sure that you are filtering for open content. Otherwise, it's going to give you lots of closed content or copyrighted content. That's the first thing to say. Even something like Flickr, when you go on Flickr, there are millions of images. But of course, they're all mixed together. So you need to make sure that you have chosen the correct filter, the CC license filter. And finally, some of you have found other open licenses. And that's true. This is the Internet after all. So CC licenses are becoming more and more popular as a standard for open licenses. But there are other licenses out there. So this warm-up is really just meant to get you to focus on open licenses. And if you can't find the license, if it's ambiguous, then you need to do more digging. So now we're going to move into our group work session. And we'll break you up into groups. And what we'd like you to do is you'll find yourself in different groups. Introduce yourself to the group. You'll have a new chat box there. So type in the chat box and introduce yourself. Then quickly assign a spokesperson. Here, maybe somebody will go ahead and just say, I'll take over. I'll take over this task. And then you'll need to complete the task somewhat together. So we want you to exchange information within your group about this task. So for this portion of the Hangout, now we're going to report back on what we did with our groups. So you can report back on, describe the task that you did, talk about any points of confusion among the group members, and mention any takeaways from the group that you were working with. So our first group was searching for OER. When we were the searching group. So Shannon, can you let us know? Okay, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, so we decided to look at the repository in Merlot. And generally, like the organization, there's a lot of stuff on there. There were a couple times where I got pulled out of the languages area, and I didn't expect to. So it would take a little bit of a learning curve to get used to the filters. But the biggest thing that we found was that at least a couple of the resources that we randomly chose were actually not open. They were commercial products. So we were reminded to always double check the license when we get things from these repositories. So I want to make just to follow up real quick comment. Sometimes commercial products and commercial companies will create teasers, parts of their materials that are open, but essentially it's a commercial product. So they'll allow you to use maybe a little quiz or like a conjugation activity, but 99% of the material is closed. So, but that's okay. You can still use that little bit that they've made open. But yes, I was really proud of my group that they sorted it out and they actually looked at the license and they said, hey, wait a second. This is actually a closed product for the most part. So we learned our lesson that even in OER repositories, some things aren't open. And the only way you can know that is by checking the license. So good job team. That's great. Thank you. And so the next group was the licensing group. And Natalie, I think you were working with that group as their spokesperson. Margaret was taking notes for our group for group two. And we were talking about licensing and attribution. Our task was to list the benefits of creative commons licenses and to explain the rights attached to for the CC by license. So the rights attached to a CC by license are the right to copy, the right to distribute copies, the right to make derivatives, to create your own work on the basis of another work, the right to sell the CC by licensed work for profit, the right to receive credit if you authored the work. The benefit of creative commons licenses, we've came up with the following points. First, you're protected when using someone else's resources. Creative commons licenses protect you from copyright infringement as long as user follows the author's terms. There is no legal knowledge required. Authors can easily license their work for different purposes by inserting a CC licensed image or text without having to come up with legal text themselves. The creator of materials is always attributed. That is the basic rule of creative commons licenses. Fourth, increasing the distribution with the help of others makes it much easier to find and share materials. The internet is a place to build your global presence. Giving something away for free will increase exposure and will spin ideas into new creative works. This spreads a work even wider than an author alone could ever do. It is about finding an audience with the help of others. Creative commons licenses are becoming more popular. Many media sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Vicky Media comments and Flickr include tags and filters that make it easy to identify creative commons content. That concludes the benefits of creative commons licenses. Now moving on to points of confusion. When you're looking for OER, you don't need to choose a license. You just have to understand the licenses. Only an author of an OER needs to choose the license. A lot of people were confused about this in our group. And maybe one day they will create their own OER if they are new to the OER world and the comments. At first you just need to understand the creative commons licenses. Group number three, we talked about remixing and revising. So I'll read what he wrote. So our group worked on improving a reading comprehension task about tomatoes. Our first impulse was to add images, which we did. So there was some confusion about a warning regarding personality rights. So that was just because there might not have been permission from the person in the picture to use the picture. Other multimedia ideas were floated as well. We also changed some of the locations to areas more relevant to students. For example, the US instead of Canada and Washington state. People mentioned that it would be good to have an audio component so students can hear the text. There was some discussion of interactive activities to help students learn from the text. Ideas for adapting the lesson to different contexts included cultural differences, immigration issues. Identify some dishes that use tomatoes relevant to the students you are teaching. Integrating food as part of cultural identity. OER for cultural specificity. And our takeaways in this group were that there were lots of ways to adapt an assignment like this, making it more visually engaging, more accessible and more relevant to the students context. So thank you, John. That was a great summary. Again, if you have questions about what we just went over, you can look in our OER course. That's where all the reference links and the tasks you are working on were part of the OER course. So you can always go back there with questions and of course contact us if you don't find answers in there. So where do we go from here now that you've gotten a little bit of an introduction to OER or maybe you already have been working with OER. So some ideas for what to do next. You can share an idea with a colleague. You can join a community. You can try putting a CC license on something you create. You can search for repositories for content for your class or you can have your students create their own learning materials. So some of those are pretty simple. Some are more complicated like having your students create their own learning materials, but these are all just a big variety of different ways to be open. Here at Coral, we have some summer workshops. So you can stay in touch with us by attending our summer workshops. You can sign up for our newsletter if you're not on it already. There's a link to sign up right here. You can also earn a badge on our learn network. As we said before, you can also use our OER course to find out more about OER. So now we have five minutes for Q&A. I think Natalie's been collecting from questions people have asked throughout the webinar. So we can answer those questions. And then if you have more questions, please type them in the discussion window. Yeah, a couple of interesting questions that came up. One question I thought was really interesting. So a PDF, sometimes PDFs will carry a license. And the question was, well, then can I revise it? Yes, depending on if it says that you're able to make a derivative. So you could use an optical scanner on that and turn it into a Google Doc. That's fine. You can go ahead and do it. The question is, well, it's not in an editable format. Well, you can turn it into an editable format. That's exactly what, by giving you an open license, that's what they want you to do. So even if it isn't editable, you can make it editable. So let's see. You can't find the license on a website page. That's often a problem. And sometimes we search around and search around. And if you can find a contact number, you'll have to send them an email message. This, unfortunately, is where we are today. And the internet people will put media up online and they want to share it, but they haven't made it explicit. So we're just talking about best practices in open licensing. So we want everybody, when you make a material and you want to share it, you need to put a license on it to let other people know exactly your intention. So if you can't find a license, that material is ambiguous. And you will have to either not use it in your OER or contact the person for permission. Some people have said they've noticed other licenses out there that replace CC licenses, like GNU, free documentation license. Yes, there are other licenses. Creative Commons, as I said, is becoming a kind of a standard open license, but there are other brands. And sometimes they're not as easy to read as the Creative Commons license because they don't have the icons. But try to find some kind of verbiage that gives you the permission that you're looking for. Let's see. Another one question. I use a lot of visuals in my ESL class. I use time to find copy-free images and documenting light attributions. Yes, this does take time. And that's why it's important for people to, I would suggest, instead of you're creating your own OER, at first you might just want to go to a repository and use kind of ready-made OERs that have, that everything is already done for you and you find materials that are somewhat of a shortcut. So Coral has a lot of our own teaching materials that we've made in different languages so you can start there. But making your own is time-consuming. You need to find content that is open that you can use and then you need to put it together and then you need to license it. And it's true. That takes time. Making your own materials takes time. Let's see. The YouTube I found in CreativeCommons.org had no mention of a CC license. Is there a way to filter for YouTube videos? There is. On the YouTube video site there is a way for YouTube to filter it. And it will give you different kinds of YouTube licenses. I can't show you on the site but you can type in YouTube and ask for help. There is definitely a way to filter YouTube videos. As a teacher, oh, there is one that's really great. Am I protected by fair use laws? That's a great question because teachers assume that they're protected. Well, general rule of thumb is, yeah, you're typically protected but just because you shouldn't assume that you're protected. Fair use means that if you're using a copyrighted material and you're using it for explicitly educational purposes at what are called transformative purposes, like if it's a song that's used for entertainment and you're using it for teaching a language, that transforms it. But you're usually not allowed to post it or make other derivatives of it. So if you're just playing it in the classroom for educational purposes, that's usually going to be okay. The problem is when you're using materials, when you're creating your own hard copies or your own OER. Some of you are now thinking already about making your own materials and in fact language teachers make materials all the time. And we want you to get credit for that. In other words, we give you badges. We'll give you a badge. In fact, we have a whole community of OER makers, our open educators who are promoting the use of OER, making OER, reviewing each other's OER. And we would really like you to visit our site, which we call Learn, Learning and Teaching with OER, by going to this link and seeing what your colleagues around the country are doing. Click on their links and find out what they're doing and you probably will tell yourself, well, I could do something that, or I'm already doing something like that, in which case we want you to join the community, get credit and get a badge. That brings us to the end of this, our OER Hangout. And as I said at the very beginning, this is just kind of a brief introduction to the world of openness and open design and open teaching. There's a lot more and we've just scratched the surface.