Educating without copyright

Since most of my thoughts with websites and content without strict copyright tends to gravitate towards how I can use something in my classroom. With this in mind, I decided to look for lectures that were either in public domain or had creative commons licensing. What I found was Academic Earth. This is a website that seemed similar to Wikiversity to me in that it seemed like potentially you could take a whole course this way (the literature section was pretty interesting). There are lectures within each topic, and some of the topics and lectures have handouts, worksheets, syllabi, and even quizzes and tests.

This would be helpful to me since it would give me a good source of lectures already organized for content. If I were developing a class, I would be able to find lectures and handouts on a topic very quickly. Just in general, this website is a good source for lectures and seminars that were taped. I would be very interested to see a site like this combine with Wikiversity since online lectures in any sort of quantity were lacking a bit for each topic in Wikiversity.

Almost all of the lectures and courses I looked through were under creative commons with the freedom to share and to play around with them and remix them. The only stipulations were that I had to attribute, I can't use the courses and lectures for commercial purposes, and I have to be willing to share with the same license anything I adjust from this website.

I've embedded a lecture about Dante here (I plan on adding this in to my World Lit class).

Watch it on Academic Earth

This website is so awesome that most of the lectures even have a button to click for embedding and one for citation. So the video above has this citation: Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante's Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, Fall 2008. (Yale University: http://oyc.yale.edu/), Open Yale Courses (Accessed April 12, 2010). License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0

I'm glad that I found this and now know how to embed since I feel that many sites provide audio, videos, pictures, etc. that could really enhance my online courses and even be nice just for my own betterment and interests.