Practitioners of Open Pedagogy generally recommend that students have agency in their choice of license for a class project. This means they should be educated on the nuances of the license and what that means for how their work can be used in the future. In addition, they should have a choice in the matter of which license is selected. And that choice should not impact their ability to complete the assignment for class credit.

Licensing issues for content created through class projects

Key questions to consider:

Can students in your class project choose whether to openly license their work or not?
What implications might this have for the usability of the completed work?
If they choose an open license, can they choose which one to use?
If they choose a restrictive license, will their contributions still be part of the finished work?
Do all the students have to come to consensus, or can they choose the license for their individual contributions? What is the decision process when there are small-group contributions?
How do students want to be cited and attributed in their work and future derivatives?
What if they do not want to be cited at all and prefer to be anonymous or keep their work private?
How can students use the work in their portfolios or professional websites, if desired?
How will you take advantage of this topic to teach digital literacy to students around the concept of openness?

In a recent event at Rebus Community, we spoke with Robin DeRosa, chair of interdisciplinary studies at Plymouth State University; Steel Wagstaff, instructional technology consultant at UW-Madison; and Amanda Coolidge, senior manager of Open Education at BCcampus. We asked about their experiences working with students to create open textbooks. The three discussed pedagogy, faculty responsibilities, student rights, and agreements when students work on open textbooks and OER projects.

One of the key threads that emerged was the need for students to have agency over their choice of license–meaning they’re not forced into an open license without understanding what it is and the alternatives:

Robin said she handles this by giving her students choices: They can choose whether to openly license their work or not, and if they do choose an open license, they can choose which license to use. (But if their chosen license is not compatible with the other licenses, their contributions may not get into the finished book, she said, citing the more restrictive CC ND license as one example.)

Robin said over the three courses in which she has focused on open, she has only had one student keep their coursework fully private inside the LMS.

“I don’t think there’s any problem giving them all of that choice. It only works to reinforce the Open Pedagogy, which is that you are in the driver’s seat and you have control over what you do,” she said.

Steel also mentioned the students’ intellectual property rights (i.e. copyright) to what they create.

“In part I think Open Pedagogy is empowering them to say, ‘hey this is your content. What do you want to do with it?’” Steel said.

When publishing an openly licensed book, he said, “our strategy was that we wanted to obtain consensus on the license.”

He also talked with students about the attribution component of the license and encouraged students to think about how they wanted their work to be cited and attributed.

Steel noted that students should be able to choose not to use the open license and still get credit for the course and meet its educational goals.

Amanda said Open Pedagogy provides a great opportunity to teach digital literacy to students around the concept of openness.

“What does it mean to contribute back to the public good, and is that something you want to do or is that something you feel restricted by?”

Privacy and Anonymity

Privacy is also a concern, both ethically and legally, when embarking on Open Pedagogy projects.

Robin DeRosa says she handles this by offering her students the option to use a pseudonym.

“You might have people who want to be in the open but they don’t want to develop their own digital identity attached to their real identity,” Robin said. “But if you’re going to allow that as an option you just have to understand enough about how privacy works on the web and data so that you’re not offering them some false sense of privacy that isn’t actually authentic.”

Steel Wagstaff said he is conscious of the students’ right to privacy under FERPA when building materials during the course of their education. He suggested several options to protect this federally mandated right of students:

Get FERPA waivers from the students.
Make the open resource and credit the students who contributed, but without identifying that they were part of a specific course.
Allow students to use pseudonyms when building the open resource.
All of the above.

He noted that not all students will feel personally passionate or attached to the things they build under their name in a course, and especially when projects are public, digital and archived in perpetuity on the web, they should not be forced to be affiliated with something they’ve done as classwork indefinitely.

David Squires, a visiting assistant professor teaching at Washington State University, who worked with his students to develop an OER textbook on social media, solved this attribution dilemma by crediting the students who built the open resource at the front of the book rather than attaching individual students’ names to the chapters they specifically worked on.

Informed Consent

Ensure that students know the various types of licenses they can apply to their work. Ideally, this will include conducting an exercise as part of their assignment in which students can pick their own license.

The following agreement template can be used to clearly lay out the rights of students when participating in a collaborative open textbook project, and the faculty member's responsibilities to their students. Its purpose is to ensure that students are informed about the requirements of the project and the implications of the license they choose.

Sample MOU for Students and Faculty

Attribution

A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students by David Squires is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,