Education

With over 53,000 teachers and over 2,500 schools in the New Zealand state-sector education system, the potential for New Zealand teachers to save time and energy by collaborating online is enormous. The free licences provided by Creative Commons enable New Zealand teachers to legally share their copyright resources by giving a range of permissions in advance. To learn more about our licences, check out our video on the homepage.

Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand works with the global Open Educational Resources (OER) movement to license textbooks, courses and lesson plans, to allow kiwi teachers to share and customise a growing range of digital and print resources.

Creative Commons Policies in Schools

Before New Zealand teachers can start to share their resources, they need their Board of Trustees to pass a Creative Commons policy. This is because New Zealand teachers don’t legally hold the copyright to their resources. A Creative Commons policy gives teachers advance permission to disseminate their resources online for sharing and reuse. The policy also onsures that both the school and the teacher — as well as teacherss from around the country and around the world — can continue to use and adapt resources produced by New Zealand teachers in the course of their employment.

If you want to know more about why you need a Creative Commons policy, read this short post or check out this presentation.

If your school is working towards a Creative Commons policy, email us at admin@creativecommons.org.nz — we’d love to hear from you. If you’ve already passed your policy, we’d also love to add you to the list of Creative Commons schools and, if you’re keen, interview someone at your school for a Creative Commons case study.

If you want to learn more about Creative Commons policies,  you can read this piece, published last year in the Education Gazette, and these case studies on Wellington High School, Albany SHS and Warrington School

If you’re looking for a policy to reuse, most schools have adapted the policy from Albany Senior High School.

The New Zealand Government’s Support for Creative Commons Policies

In July 2010, Cabinet approved the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL), which advocates the use of Creative Commons licensing for all non-private copyright data and content produced by State Services agencies — including schools.

Under NZGOAL, school Boards of Trustees to “take NZGOAL into account when releasing copyright material and non-copyright material to the public for re-use.”

Thousands of government copyright works, including datasets, reports, research, cultural works and teaching materials have already been released under a Creative Commons licence. Check our our Government section for more information, or else head to ict.govt.nz to read more about NZGOAL.

Explaining Creative Commons to Teachers and Students

• This short Free to Mix guide (PDF) is a simple introduction copyright, Creative Commons and how to find and use Creative Commons material
• Our video,which gives a basic introduction to the licences themselves
• Our Creative Commons poster (PDF) is a good reference tool. We can send you print posters if your
• More resources can be found at our resources page!
• We always have a bunch of print resources sitting in our office. If you’d like us to send you some, free of charge, get in touch.

Creative Commons Around the World

• Stay in touch with open education updates from Creative Commons International.
• The Capetown Declaration on open education.
• The World Bank’s Policy on open access.
• UNESCO’s Paris Declaration on OER.