Open Education 2016

As a vanguard in the effort to connect meaningful credentials and college credit to its OER-based online college courses, Saylor Academy has facilitated a range of diverse institutional and partner agreements to widely distribute its twenty-two credit-recommended courses, while also honoring the rights of the original content creators. This presentation seeks to examine the question: How does a college credit recommendation change how the retained rights of content creators will be communicated to the benefactors of the recommendation.



This presentation pays particular mind to the reserved rights of third party content creators, especially commercial rights, in contexts where students may incur tutoring costs, proctoring costs, and/or tutition and fees while leveraging Saylor Academy credit-recommended courses for their own purposes. We will share examples of innovative business models which interpret that critical first modifier in the license code's prohibition against using materials for "primarily commercial purposes."



We will also briefly discuss threats and opportunities for alternative credentialing and credit-potential courses which arise from the need to respect the Share Alike and No Derivative works langauge of the licenses.



Context: For over eight years, we have published our courses under a Creative Commons Attribution license. For licensing purposes, we have defined a "course" as the structure, syllabus, learning outcomes, unit descriptions, and the framing text that accompanies resources curated from third parties. Much of these curated, third party educational materials which populate the courses are Public Domain or are licensed variably under the other Creative Commons licenses. Since 2012, twenty-two Saylor Academy courses and counting have been recommended for college credit by ACE and/or NCCRS. A larger share of our courses have also passed muster with an international credentialing authority called Qualifi, a UK Awarding Organization with ability to extend Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator recognition to testing centers located throughout the English-speaking world. Thus spreading the utilization of Saylor Academy exams for practical benefit worldwide.