Open education and legal issues

When we just started to talk about open education, I was glad to hear that there is something ”open” in our educational system. I was always glad to have teachers at russian high school who have never counted their working hours. When I immigrated to Germany, german students told me that very often the behavior of teachers at german schools is demotivating. They teach from one year to another the same material, and are not interested to invest any minute of their free time to help students if they don’t understand something. When I was a student at Russian high school, I had around me a lot of teachers who invested enormous amount of their free time hours into the improvement of my knowledge in physics, chemistry, literature, history, etc. I see in open education an opportunity where you really want to share your knowledge with others for free and during your free time. If you really like teaching, it is a great opportunity to become even a better teacher than you are and learn to work with even more diverse students. When you are inspired to do something what you really like, don’t forget that challenges could start to follow you. One of my major concerns is the legal right. You spend a lot of time to prepare your teaching material, learning activities and administration, but somebody can just start to use your “teaching luggage” for free, without even mentioning your name. My colleague Susan from South Africa shared a very inspiring document about copyrights and open licenses, which can be used also in Europe and USA. There is so called non-profit creative commons organization that aims to promote better identification, negotiation and reutilization of content for the purpose of creativity and innovation. Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyrights, but they work alongside copyright so that we can do modifications in our copyrights how it best suits to our needs. There are many different types of creative commons licenses. Therefore, we don’t need to be worried about legal issues, just think about protection and security of your “teaching luggage” and use creative commons licenses as much as it is necessary!