Creative Commons - ccLearn

ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

A brief background on the logic of ccLearn’s existence…

Educational paradigms are changing. The pace of information creation necessitates new ways of managing and imparting content. New technologies exacerbate the information overload, but they also provide many potential solutions. In particular, the advent of the internet has profoundly altered the ways in which information is accessed and shared, and one would expect the impact on education to be revolutionary. While technological tools are being used in many classrooms to enhance instruction, one of the most exciting areas of development is in the creation of open educational resources (OER), which in their fullest form should be free, accessible, authoritative, and derivable. The availability of open educational content is growing exponentially, yet the usage of such content does not appear to be widespread. Worse, much of the OER currently being created is incompatible — legally, technically, and socially — with other OER.

An immediate goal for ccLearn is to encourage and facilitate the adoption of practices that will enable the fullest realization of the potential for OER to transform education. ccLearn will leverage the unique capacity of Creative Commons to act upon this overarching view in a manner that popularizes the resources that already exist and brings new communities and groups into the world of open learning.

Longer term goals include substantial community building, providing educational access to underprivileged communities at home and abroad, and changing the culture of educational practice so that teachers have greater control over their classrooms and pedagogy, greater freedom to experiment, and a larger community for support. Fundamentally, the grand goal is to rise to the challenge and promise of technological and pedagogical innovation in such a way that access to and the experience of quality education is a reality for everyone, everywhere, at any time.

—ccLearn