A license is a document that accompanies a work and delineates what kinds of uses are permissible or restricted for that work. Licenses supersede Copyright: the terms of licenses are agreed upon by the entity offering access to the work as well as the entity that will actually provide that access to users. Licenses accompany much electronic and digital works.
Open Licenses are licenses applied to an original work (such as a video, song, document, or piece of software) that allows for anyone to make use of that work (by accessing, re-using, building upon, or distributing) as long as they follow the licensing conditions. Open licenses therefore give permission to use the work at no cost, with no or minimal restriction.
While there are several different types of Open Licensing, Creative Commons licensing is most common in Education.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that works against the legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity. One of the ways that Creative Commons does this is by providing Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools that offer an easy, free, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works in order to ensure proper attribution while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works.
Creative Commons Licenses and their elements are described in the graphic below:
"Creative Common Licenses" by David McTaggart is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible and open licensed content, such as books or other text, media items, and others. OER materials are used in an instructional context, like teaching or research. OER uses various licenses to give permission to use, reuse, re-mix, or redistribute materials.
