Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand
Max Riley is a maths teacher at Nayland College in Nelson If schools address the issue of copyright in advance – rather whose website, Nayland Mathematics, provides a range of high than after the fact – they can ensure that everyone knows quality resources that are reused by teachers all over the country. their rights and responsibilities. This has the twin benefits of As of July 2014, the website has received over 1.5 million hits – a preventing potential disputes and encouraging greater resource truly extraordinary number for a school’s department homepage. sharing and collaboration, with all the attendant professional It’s worth pausing to consider the amount of time and energy benefits this provides. that Max’s website has saved maths teachers across New Zealand. Here’s the solution: Over the last two years, over fifty New The teachers using the resources on Nayland Mathematics – Zealand schools have adopted a Creative Commons policy, unlike many of their colleagues in other subjects – no longer enabling their teachers to legally share their resources for need to reinvent the wheel; they can, instead, spend their time adaptation and reuse. These schools, including Taupaki School, adapting and improving Max’s resources to meet the needs of Albany Senior High School and Hutt Valley High School, passed their own specific classrooms. their policy to address some Even if Max’s website saved of the thorny legal and moral The more we share the more only a few hundred teachers a issues of sharing copyright few hours a month, this adds resources there will be for all. works. up to thousands of teacher These schools are well placed hours every year. under current Government There is, of course, only one Max Riley. But there are many policy. Boards of Trustees are encouraged to consider using thousands of New Zealand teachers who have spent their Creative Commons licences for their teaching resources, using careers developing a range of high quality resources. And there the New Zealand Government’s Open Access and Licensing are many more thousands of teachers who would benefit from framework, approved by Cabinet in 2010. The recent Future being able to easily find, use and adapt these resources, without Focused Learning in Connected Communities report, put out by having to worry about legal or technical restrictions. With over Associate Education Minister Nikki Kaye’s 21st Century Learning 50,000 teachers in the compulsory education sector, the potential Reference Group, supported this by encouraging schools to savings in time and energy are enormous. enable teachers to use Creative Commons licensing to share Here’s the good news: There’s no longer any technical reason their resources. why every school in New Zealand can’t replicate the success of A Creative Commons policy provides a clear statement of a Nayland Mathematics. With the increasing availability of digital school’s position on copyright resources produced by teachers technologies and the rise of centralised resource sharing portals employed at the school. Simply put, the policy allows teachers to like the Network for Learning portal, Pond, it is now trivially easy use Creative Commons licensing to share their work for reuse. to share resources for reuse by every other teacher in the country. The policy ensures that when teachers leave, both the teacher and But here’s the rub: under New Zealand copyright law, the school retain access to all teaching resources. It also ensures employers have first ownership to copyright works produced in that teachers will be free to make the most of the Network for the course of a teacher’s employment. This means that teachers Learning sharing portal, Pond. who share copyright resources outside of the school are legally But what is Creative Commons licensing? CC licensing is a infringing their school’s intellectual property. As more sharing free and easy way for copyright holders to give permission to takes place online, copyright will become harder and harder to others to share and reuse their work. Each licence comes in both ignore, and is likely to cause teachers considerable uncertainty. human and lawyer readable versions, meaning that everyone No teacher, after all, wishes to break the law. will understand exactly what permissions have been granted. To head off this uncertainty, I believe that schools need to Creative Commons licensing has been used by organisations clearly state their position on intellectual property and resource all over the world – including the White House, the New Zealand sharing. At the moment, schools tend to only think about Government and MIT – to enable resources to be shared and copyright when problems arise, such as when teachers change reused, for the benefit of everyone. In New Zealand, the licences schools and take their resources with them (leaving the school are supported by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, with an empty cupboard) or when teachers wish to monetise which supports licence users and provides a range of free their resources (by, for example, writing and selling textbooks). supplementary resources.
As more New Zealand schools start using Pond, Creative Commons licence will ensure that every teacher is able to share and collaborate, confidently and legally. Simply put, digital technologies and Pond make sharing resources easy; CC licences make sharing resources legal. With CC licensing and great online sharing portals, New Zealand has the opportunity to ensure that all teachers, no matter the subject or year level, have access to the best resources produced by their colleagues in other schools around the country – without having to worry about any technical or legal restrictions. As Max Riley puts it, “The more we share, the more resources there will be for all.” Schools looking to adopt Creative Commons licensing can visit creativecommons.org.nz/ccinschools for a range of resources,
including a link to an off-the-shelf policy produced by Albany Senior High School. Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand is also willing to provide free workshops to schools and principals’ organisations. These can be arranged at creativecommons.org.nz/ workshops or by emailing matt@creativecommons.org.nz. Bio: Matt McGregor is the Public Lead of Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, a project hosted by the Open Education Resource Foundation. Prior to CC, Matt taught English at the State University of New York; he also taught literature and literacy at an academy in Vancouver, Canada, and has worked in the technology sector in Wellington.
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