Pilgrims' Home

Well....after four days of a public course (Leading CHristian Communities), I pulled its publicness. I realized that I include copyrighted material in my course, for which Western Theological Seminary seek permissions to use. Therefore, CC does not continue for me. I must, and rightly so, honor the permissions given to WTS and me. This means that the fair use of CC is void unless I pull all copyrighted material from my course (Which I am not willing to do since my students deserve access to articles). Anyway, realizing this, I sent the following to a guru of LMS and DL (Distance Learning) education: "Name, I just realized one issue of making my course public: I use articles that only WTS students have permission to access, so if these are available to the public, then I am breaking ccl rules and using copyright material in a public way.... in order to do this all of my internal posts/files/content must also be cc or public domain. Well, the process of trying true open...

I eagerly celebrated that my spring semester course was public under the laws of Creative Commons . I read the details of the license and chose specifically attribution and non-commercial, meaning that I was willing to let anyone use the course and modify it (make derivatives) according to their need. I was willing to share - a lesson we are constantly teaching our children, and then I hit an obstacle. Though I am willing to share, I load content onto my page from other thinkers and teachers, for which I have acquired permission, yet their work is copyrighted material distributed to me for [formal] educational purposes. Therefore, my creative commons license is in violation of the borrowed copyrighted material. Copyright trumps creative commons, which I support, and creative commons holders must respect works that do not adopt open-policy. I have now removed my course from the Creative Commons domain, yet I have kept it public, albeit now with very limited access. This is the joy...