School of Open teaches Creative Commons licenses and more | opensource.com

"The School of Open is a learning environment that focuses on increasing our understanding of openness and how it fosters creativity and education in the digital age. The School of Open leverages the strengths of communities and open source software to increase awareness about an 'open' world. The School of Open is a volunteer-run, global community that develops and provides online courses, offline workshops, and training programs in topics such as Creative Commons, open research, sharing creative works, and more. The school offers a wide range of courses created by experts and users that cover everything from foundations to advanced topics in open models. The courses can be taken on your own or facilitated by an instructor, and they run for a set length of time (weeks). Some of the courses in the facilitated category include Copyright for Educators, Creative Commons for K-12 Educators, An Introductory Course on Open Science, and (my favorite) Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond. I signed up for it and was glad the materials were comprehensive. The course covers the values of Wikipedia, wiki markup code, how to evaluate the quality of Wikipedia articles, and the art of creating an article on the site. I strongly believe that in today’s world, creativity gets a boost through participation. The School of Open gives us an opportunity to learn about a topic with other users who share similar interests. A case in context is the course titled, "Teach someone something with open content". The course teaches: how to find and recognize open content—like Creative Commons licensed video's, images, articles, and more—in a certain area of interest how to start discussions revolving around these topics People with an expertise in a certain area can collect resources and assist participants who have questions in that same area. People who are interested in a field can also choose topics in the field and trigger discussions around it. The topics can be be anything ranging from the history of tanks to the intricacies of the Linux kernel. At the end of the day, it is education made more open, interesting, and participatory ..."