ccLearn is constantly getting requests from people—teachers, heads of organizations, and people just curious about how it all works in general. (Open licensing in education? What purpose does that serve? How do I attach licenses to my resources anyway?) These requests are more for brief overviews and instructions than for long, detailed reports about the philosophy behind licensing or OER, which, though necessary, are not particularly useful when you need to distill a concept to a roomful of open education newbies in half an hour or less.

We haven’t been turning a deaf ear; on the contrary, we have been in production mode all the while. ccLearn Productions consists of a variety of documents and media, including three new document series, ccLearn Recommendations, ccLearn Explanations, and ccLearn Step by Step Guides.

The ccLearn Recommendations series provides best practices, advice, recommendations, and guiding principles for OER, CC, and related issues. The ccLearn Explanations series distills key concepts or explores interesting issues for outreach and awareness building for OER and ccLearn. The ccLearn Step by Step Guides provides detailed and recipe-like guidance to specific actions of interest to the OpenEd community.

The aim of the three series is to spark initial interest in OER, while still relaying accurate and meaningful information that can be put to good and immediate use. However, like most, if not all, educational resources, these documents are by no means final or summative. They are meant to serve as starting points, licensed openly for future iteration and improvement.

Three productions, one from each series, have recently come to fruition:

ccLearn Recommendations:
Publishing Your Open Educational Resources on the Internet
These are best practices for properly specifying terms of use (TOU) and copyright licenses for any site hosting Open Educational Resources (OER).

ccLearn Explanations:
Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons Licensing
If you are a teacher or creator of educational resources, this primer gives you an introduction to the concepts of open education, Creative Commons licensing, and other issues pertinent to putting your educational materials on the Internet.

ccLearn Step by Step Guides:
Applying Creative Commons licenses to your educational resources
This is a very basic step-by-step guide for people who want to apply Creative Commons (CC) licenses to their educational resources, thus making them open educational resources (OER).

All three productions (and future ones) are licensed CC BY, free for you to reproduce, adapt, translate, remix, or redistribute accordingly. We have made them available in both PDF and Open Document Format (for OpenOffice). If you make a particularly compelling or contextually rich adaptation, please feel free to let us know, as we would love to link to derivatives. Additional documents in these series are being planned or already underway.