Originally published by me at Alan Levine – Get CC Certified (see it there)
In a presentation last Friday at the 2016 Open Education Conference Paul Stacey and I described the Certification project as “Massive Open OER Development.” MOOD? People who know me know how much I think of acronyms that start with M-O-O… (that was meant to be wry humor)Thus the presentation was proposed as:Hearing about @creativecommons 'certificate' prog – awesomeness with @cogdog and Paul Stacey. –>@NKorn
— Viv Rolfe (@VivienRolfe) November 4, 2016
Deeply woven into successful open education and pedagogy is an understanding and practice of what Lumen Learning defines as the 5R Permissions – Retaining, Reusing, Revising, Remixing and Redistributing content and ideas. As one of the most visible ways to communicate these permissions, Creative Commons makes the 5Rs clear in the licensing of over a billion pieces of content. But understanding Creative Commons– as a content producer, as a content user, or as organizations supporting open practices– is more than reciting a list of licenses. Therefore a new project has been underway to develop a Creative Commons Certification to provide organizations and individuals with a range of ways to demonstrate their knowledge and use of Creative Commons to place even more information into public spaces. It’s value is in the focus on a certification of performed skills and principles, not just an examination of factual knowledge. Openly sharing materials is a common value for the the Open Education community, and in this project we are pushing openness farther by sharing the process of design and develop of the Certification. We absolutely implore that this not become a repeated acronym, but we share in this presentation how the project is an experiment in Massive Open OER Development.
Before a few comments about the presentation, here are some details on how to explore it. All of the presentation is availableWould you be interested in a Creative Commons certification? What might that look like? Let @pgstacey and @cogdog know! #OpenEd16 pic.twitter.com/wighKFmHc6
— Travis Pynenburg (@travenburg) November 4, 2016


ESCAPE
key provides an overview of the presentation, and lets you jump to any portion directly:

Yes, our mode was to be conversational, as if we were having a conversation over coffee. Also, because of the 30 minute time for the session, we built the presentation materials with a load of links for deeper dives.Everyone's getting a little brain-full as we get to the end of the day. @pgstacey & @cogdog presenting w/coffee in hand. #OpenEd16
— Anali Perry (@grumpator) November 4, 2016
The “structure” of the certifications will be a series of modules and in those, learning units. Each unit will include a “Big Question” to put the unit in context, learning outcomes/objectives, a framing set of opening questions to situate the learner and her prior knowledge, a selection of OERs to learn about the subject (and links to many more), a selection of activities to do that will result in a published public demonstration of a person’s work, and a summary response that answers the question.@pgstacey @cogdog talking #creativecommons certification program #opened16 https://t.co/gSdzauhRuf
— Grant Potter (@grantpotter) November 4, 2016
Because my role in the project is framing the way it will work, I want to expand a bit on how we are trying to build the system. It’s definitely influence on the model of “forking” in GitHub – a common “CORE” of things one should know in general about Creative Commons, and then forked (meaning copied and modified) for contexts in the specialty areas of Education, Government, and Libraries.Using github to create OER has long been talked about at this conference. @pgstacey and @cogdog are doing it #OpenEd16
— David Kernoh?n (@dkernohan) November 4, 2016


Markdown format for a unit



A demo of the same markdown content published in Hugo
But this is just the content of the certifications. The things people will be doing to “get” (or we prefer, “claim”) a certification, is by completing tasks or as we are calling them, “Quests.” I am building a “bank” of activities using the same model of the DS106 Assignment Bank using the template version openly shared as a WordPress Theme into a Quest Bank. These are things people will need to do, publish their work at a public URL, and submit to the bank with a bit of written reflection, as evidence of their work on a unit. For a sample of what this might look like, see the example Quest for the unit under The Commons on Compare / Contrast Physical vs Digital Commons. In this quest, you would explore the differences between sharing a physical and digital item you own.@creativecommons is gonna meet #ds106. Oh. That will be awesome then. @cogdog and Paul Stacey. #OpenEd16
— Viv Rolfe (@VivienRolfe) November 4, 2016



We want this to be community sourced. So this #CCQuest is still running this week. We have a few responses already:#CCQuest06 – Which Creative Commons CORE certification would you adopt? https://t.co/kQPKU0ljl3 pic.twitter.com/sb4hqDD6Id
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) November 4, 2016
@mollyali @pgstacey @cogdog I'd also love to help as a member of CC Japan and an ex-instructional designer of OER #OpenEd16
— Tomo Nagashima (@tomonagashima) November 4, 2016
And we are asking again this week– are you in the MOOD with us?@cogdog What interests me regards @creativecommons is the question of why 'the commons' and the socio-cultural implementation #ccquest
— Aaron Davis (@mrkrndvs) November 4, 2016
Audience Questions
Thanks to Olga, we have some notes on the discussion from the audience, some technical, some operational.- How do people contribute back to the CC cert after they’ve forked it? (Like we do in open source software)
- Split it granularly so we have fewer merge conflicts
- How do we identify all the forked versions of the certificate?
- What does this look like as a professional development? How official is it? How can I relate it back to my professional profile?
- This is needed now!
- When will it be available? Should we advertise the slow release of content so that people can use it as its available?
Featured Image: Duke Ellington Orchestra – Mood Indigo Wikimedia commons photo by Freimut Bahlo licensed Public Domain
There is something fascinating in watching an idea grow. Along with Ian Guest’s work on Twitter, I am fascinated in seeing how people like yourself work. It is at times even more fascinating than the ideas being built (although Creative Commons is REALLY important).