CC BY-NC-SA, No doubt! License preference for sharing OERs on teacher community platforms

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are open and free-access teaching- learning materials, based on author-led sharing, readapting, and communitybuilding logics. OER are usually created and shared by teachers in open community platforms. Nonetheless, even if these teacher-led actions are altruistic and aimed at a collective effort towards improving education, it is important to ensure the protection of intellectual property and authorship. This also guarantees the legal and appropriate use, modification, development, and implementation of these resources. In order to respect the original creator's will, there are different licenses under which an OER can be shared, and it must be handled according to the stipulations established by the license. This study collects the data from a sample of in-service school teachers who participated in teacher training in digital competence development. The course introduced various Creative Commons (CC) licenses along with examples of teacher community platforms available for sharing and reusing OERs. Later, teachers were asked to provide their insights regarding which CC license they considered more suitable for publishing their materials based on their own conceptions and beliefs, and explain the reason(s). This information was collected from 18 responses to a proposed task. Results showed that the totality of teachers considered that the “Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike” (CC BY-NC-SA) license is the one that best aligns with the mission and vision of public education and its institutions. It guarantees intellectual property by citing the original source, ensures the non-profit creation of resources, and preserves the same license conditions, thus avoiding extra-educational interests.