I recently completed the Creative Commons Certificate for Librarians course. Most of the assessment pieces and learning resources I developed as part of the course will be shared here. The Creative Commons Certificate resources are open and available here.
Assignment – Unit 5:
Create a video, slide presentation, poster, or infographic (or choose another medium), designed specifically for patrons of your library, in which you describe Open Access and Open Educational Resources. At a minimum, include:
- a definition of Open Access,
- a definition of Open Educational Resources,
- a description of the relationship between OA and OER,
- a description of why Open Access is important for faculty and students, and
- a description of why Open Educational Resources are important for faculty and students.
This assessment was particularly useful as I feel that being a strong and knowledgeable advocate for OA and OERs is very important to me both professional and personally. My everyday work involves the constant updating and improvement of AIRS, which at its core is an OER designed to help both QUT Higher Degree Research Students and the wider HDR community build their skills and understanding around research, publishing, data management and many other aspects of higher degree research. This project helped me understand some of the finer points around the importance of OA and OER and has given me a a great deal of useful information to share with others when I discuss both topics.
Assignment – Unit 4:
For this assignment, create an instructional artifact (a video, flyer, another type of document, audio file, slide presentation, etc.) in which you describe a collection and a remix / adapted work / derivative work.
Your assignment should include:
- A description of a collection
- A description of a remix / adapted work / derivative work
- A collection that you create, which includes two existing CC-licensed works.
- A sample attribution statement for the collection that adheres to licensing expectations for collections
This week, my assignment focused on exploring how Creative Commons licensed works can be shared, collected, adapted and remixed. This was a particularly useful learning experience because understanding how to use Creative Commons licensed works in learning objects and OERs is a large and growing part of my work. This week we also learned a bit more about licence elements, notably NoDerivatives (ND). It was great to engage in discussion about when ND might be useful, particularly within the library/higher education context.
The assignment for this week was made using PowerPoint. I thought this would be the best format as it lends itself to mixing images with larger amounts of text than perhaps might be easy to digest in a long infographic.
Assignment – Unit 3: Anatomy of a CC Licence
Create a video, slide presentation, or infographic (or choose another medium) in which you describe the Creative Commons licenses as well as how and when they might be useful to your institutions’ work. At a minimum, include a description of:
- the three layers of the CC licenses,
- the four license elements and the icons that represent them
- the six Creative Commons licenses,
- how the CC licenses affect exceptions and limitations to copyright, and
- how the CC licenses affect works in the public domain.
After playing around with some PowerPoint slides earlier in the week with a view to turning them into a video with narration, I ran into some road blocks which robbed me of the time I’d usually put aside for the CC course. With that in mind, I decided that I’d have a better chance of getting things done on time if I made an infographic, so I returned to Piktochart!
This project was a great educational exercise for me – reading and writing about the different layers and elements of the licences while making my infographic really solidified things for me. Show casing the six different CC licences was also handy for cementing this unit’s contents in my mind. I feel much more confident talking about CC licences now and the discussions that I had with my course mates on Canvas were also really illuminating. This week was great!
Assessment – Unit 2: Copyright Law
Assignment 2 task: Create a video, slide presentation, or infographic (or choose another medium) in which you describe the basics of copyright law as covered in Module 2. Make an effort to create something that would be useful and interesting to someone else.
I decided to use Piktochart again for this assignment because I had found it so easy and intuitive to use last time. I decided to put an Australian focus on my work, so that I could learn more about copyright in the Australian context. I figured this would be most helpful to me in my day to day work. I also tried to include some interesting information under the ‘did you know?’ headings to bring some interest to the topic. Upon reflection, I think a video may have been a more useful resource for this assignment as my infographic is quite long as there was a great deal of information to cover for this assignment. This might give me the push I need to try and learn how to make an interesting video for my future projects!
Assessment – Unit 1: What is Creative Commons?
Assignment 1 task: Create a video, slide presentation, podcast, wikibook content, an infographic in which you describe the key historical events leading up to the launch of Creative Commons and the state of Creative Commons today. Rather than a disconnected list, create a narrative (tell a story) that ties events and people together. Try to create something that would be useful and interesting to someone who just heard about Creative Commons and wants to learn more.
I decided to use Piktochart to create a simple infographic to tell the story of Creative Commons. I had never used Piktochart before, but my supervisor and I had been talking about learning how to use it and/or Canva for a report we have coming up so I thought I’d use this opportunity to try it out. I decided to create a very simple infographic, I didn’t want the key message to be distracted from by lots of different colours or images. In the end, I chose a few simple icons, black text of varying sizes and an orange background.
The assignment itself was a nice introduction to the history of Creative Commons and an enjoyable task.