Last month, Creative Commons USA’s Outreach and Policy Manager, Ethan Senack, spoke on a webinar hosted by SPARC. The purpose of the virtual meeting was to provide those in attendance with best practices for communicating and educating OER stakeholders on open licensing. Here are some of the questions, and answers offered by Ethan.
How do you incorporate teaching stakeholders about open licensing when you meet with them in various settings?
ES: We focus heavily on copyright education and making those lessons as tangible as possible. We often provide one page tools that breakdown highfalutin legal theories into practical matters so that we can simplify the learning about and engaging with Creative Commons licenses. We also meet educators where they are by attending conferences and professional development opportunities. In those sessions, we make sure to leave nearly half of our time with them for question driven discussion. Generally, we ask ourselves: Where/what are the educators problem spots and how can we help them?
What resources do you use to aid in teaching stakeholders about Open Licensing?
ES: There are various resources on our website that we use to help those in the classroom about what licenses can be most beneficial to them based on the work they’re doing. Those resources include the above mentioned one-pagers, in depth policy considerations, as well as a rather broad Frequently Asked Questions tool that stakeholders find helpful.
After meeting with stakeholders, what do you want their biggest takeaway to be about open licensing?
ES: We’ve found that making the CC licenses part of the overall copyright education narrative is a really successful way for people to understand why and how our licenses can help them. Telling the story about the inception of the licenses also combats the notion that they are too abstract to be fully conceptualized. Ultimately, informing stakeholders why the licenses came about and what the differences are between them in a story makes them more memorable and concrete.