A very interesting announcement from Blackboard.com:
… Blackboard will now support publishing, sharing and consumption of open educational resources (OER) across its platforms. […] Support for OER enables instructors to publish and share their courses under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) so that anyone can easily preview and download the course content in Blackboard and Common Cartridge formats…
What makes this big news is that these kinds of initiatives usually use one of the non-free Creative Commons licenses: one containing either no-derivatives (“ND”) or non-commercial (“NC”) clauses or both. Instead, Blackboard.com bucked the trend and opted for full freedom: by offering CC-BY, they’re encouraging users to choose a truly Free Culture license. Let’s hope others follow their fine example!
Kudos to Blackboard.com. And congratulations to the educators and students who will now be able to share, translate, re-use, and transform educational materials for any purpose, without having to ask permission first.
