Our friends at the Canadian Co-operative Learning Object Exchange (CLOE) have released an important statement on protecting rights and sharing learning objects, aptly titled: Sharing, Intellectual Property (IP), Copyright & Creative Commons. CLOE is a collaboration between Ontario universities and colleges for the development, sharing, and reuse of multimedia-rich learning resources via the CLOE Learning Object Repository.

Many academics and educators today spend their time creating learning objects to help their students learn more effectively. These learning objects are inherently valuable to the larger learning community, yet their creators may be reluctant to share them without legal counsel on how this would effect their intellectual property rights.

Choosing to share a learning object under Creative Commons copyright licence is a free and easy way to tell others that they may make use of your work under certain terms, while respecting your copyright. CLOE recommends using the most recent Canadian version of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, as the default copyright licence for the CLOE repository.

Learn more about learning objects and copyright by reading our Learning Object FAQ.