CCCS Faculty Toolkit

License and Accessibility Check

Be sure that the work is eligible to be shared. In order to release your work with a CC license or in the public domain, your work should be cleared from all copyright issues. To do so, your work should be one or a combination of the following types:

1. your original work,
2. built from open resources,
3. built from the public domain,
4. built from copyrighted work that you obtained permission to use, or
5. combination of above works

Note: For any third party materials, whether openly licensed or copyrighted, those materials need to be attributed as not governed by the CC license you chose for your work, but under different terms and by different authors. In other words, where you are using other content, is your use allowed? Did you include an attribution back to the original? Did you add an open license to all of your own content?

Accessibility

Hopefully you built good accessibility practices into the creative process from the beginning. Consider doing a final accessibility check and improve your materials where possible. A few basic practices that should become habits:

• Include alt tags with images
• Video is captioned
• PDF's are machine readable
• Document structures use headings to support navigation by screen readers
• Links are anchored to descriptive text rather than the word "here"

Choosing a License

Decide on which license you want to use. Do you wish to release your work under a Creative Commons license or in the public domain?

Review the difference between these two copyright terms:

• By releasing your work in the public domain, your copyright ownership is waived. It is as if you are GIVING your work to the public as a gift. Users may still cite you when adopting your work, but they are not required to do so.
• By releasing your work under a Creative Commons license, you retain ownership while allowing others to use your work (as long as they attribute it to you) without needing to ask permission of you directly. CC licenses are non-revocable meaning you cannot stop someone, who has obtained your work under a Creative Commons license, from using the work according to that license. Think carefully and review the considerations for CC licensors/licensees when choosing to make sure you are happy with the terms of how people can use your work.
• The Creative Commons License Chooser helps you select a CC license that matches the conditions you want. It also provides you with a snippet of code for your website to signal which license you’ve chosen.

Ready to Share

Next, you will need to select a sharing platform to host your file or files in an online place accessible to others. This can be as simple as uploading your files to Google Drive (remember to make the files viewable to the public and give appropriate "owner" roles in accordance with the CC license) or upload to another publicly available platform.

For Images:

Consider Flickr or Wikimedia Commons. As you upload your image to these repositories, you will se the option to select the terms of use. Here are instructions by Open Washington if you need help uploading an image to your Flickr account and marking it with a CC license.

For Videos:

Consider YouTube or Vimeo. Here are instructions by Open Washington if you need help uploading a video to your YouTube account and marking it with a CC license.

For Drop-Box or Google Drive:

You can also choose a web storage space that allows easy and free access, such as Drop-box or Google drive. If you choose a web storage space, make sure to (1) manually mark your work as a CC licensed or the public domain work by placing the copyright notice somewhere visible and (2) make the link accessible by public.

For CCCS (Colorado Community College System) LOR:

Everything you need to get started using the CCCS Learning Object Repository (LOR). Remember to share locally as well at your institution.