Recently Creative Commons opened a new division focused on open learning and educational content, ccLearn. ccLearn's mission is to "minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials."

This is an exciting step for online education. As it has done with images and other content, Creative Commons has the potential to make sharing educational content easy and fair. Instead of having to choose between traditional copyright laws (which make it difficult to share content) and simply giving away their work (which takes the power away from the content creator), instructors can chose to share their educational material under a copyright license of their choice.

In addition to encouraging the use of Creative Commons licenses, ccLearn will promote the distribution of material by working to overcome legal, technical, and social barriers. Here's how they describe their goals:

• With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.

• With technical barriers, we promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.

• With social barriers, we encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other's contributions.

To learn more about Creative Commons for educational content, check out their website here: ccLearn.