Information for Users

The English 302 OER Collection is designed to be used, not just read.  Anyone, GMU affiliate or not, is welcome to use the materials in the collection in any way allowed by the Creative Commons Licenses attached to those materials (CC BY 4.0 for all Abstracts,  Instructor’s Notes, and journal-wide material such as this section; as indicated at the bottom of the file for other materials). We do expect that you will retain and, as necessary, update the licenses and attribution statements on any materials from the collection you redistribute, whether to students, colleagues, as part of a teaching portfolio, or in any other way.  

Here are some brief guidelines for handling licensing and attribution statements on materials obtained from the collection. For a more detailed discussion, see the licensing and attribution document linked from the Author Guidelines.  

  • If you're using material directly from the collection (regardless of who the author is) with no changes at all, it's easy: just make sure that any copy you distribute includes the licensing and attribution statement. This includes copies distributed to students. We hope students will come to see the advantages of materials from the collection, which costs them nothing, and have been created, adapted, and/or curated especially for use in English 302, and reviewed by English 302 instructors. As students learn more about licensing/attribution statements, we hope the statements will serve as reminders that they're using locally-created and regularly-updated curricular materials designed to meet the particular needs of the current GMU student body.   
  • If you're adapting or remixing material from the collection (even making minor changes such as inserting dates or specialized vocabulary or making references to other activities, readings, or assignments in your course),then you need to modify the licensing and attribution statement to reflect that fact. Here are examples:
    • Adapted assignment: This exercise, “Discipline Awareness Exercise,” is adapted from an exercise created by Ben David Orlando, available in the English 302 OER Collection at https://journals.gmu.edu/OEREnglish302/article/view/2279 .  It is licensed CC-BY 4.0. Some elements were replaced to better fit the current class.
    • Remixed assignment: This assignment, “Review of the Literature,” created in August 2018, includes a combination of original content by [your name] and content remixed from earlier assignments titled “Review of the Literature” by Psyche Ready (available in the English 302 OER Collection at https://journals.gmu.edu/OEREnglish302/article/view/2304 ) and Virginia Hoy (obtained from an earlier version of the collection housed on George Mason University’s Blackboard platform). The earlier  assignments and the present one are all licensed CC-BY 4.0. Remixed content has been adapted to fit the needs of the present class.

There are additional examples in the collection itself of how individual instructors have approached writing licensing/attribution statements. There's no one right way to do this, though there are some required elements.

The above information is probably enough to get you started. If you'd like to learn more about the details of the creative commons licensing of OER, and how we handled them for this collection, you may be interested in reading the additional information on licensing and attribution linked from the Author Guidelines. If you have questions, please email Cathy Saunders (csaunde1@gmu.edu).