Privacy and Use Policy

OER Commons is committed to developing open and fair policies for the use of OER materials for teaching and learning. We are equally committed to protecting the privacy of our users online. This privacy and use statement discloses the privacy and use practices for the OER Commons web site.

Use

Information gathered from users on the OER Commons web site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Rather than perceived as a restriction on use, this is seen as facilitating use through the addition of context, association, and relevance, to make OER easier to find and use for educational purposes.

Not all OER are covered by the same licenses. OER Commons gathers and presents metadata (pointers) on OER materials, which themselves have varying degrees of open use and reuse policies, copyright agreements, and licensing arrangements.

Although we seek to point to open and re-usable content, OER Commons in no way promotes the use of materials outside the particular legal restrictions imposed by an OER author or provider. We reserve the right to remove any material from the site deemed to fall outside of the definition of OER. We make no claim of rights over OER content hosted on other sites that we may link to. We take no responsibility for the consistency of OER content that we may link or for the use that any user of the OER Commons site may engage in or recommend to others.

Privacy

Sharing of Personally Identifiable Information

OER Commons respects the privacy of the individual and undertakes to protect the confidentiality of personal information that is supplied in the course of membership and participation on the OER Commons web site. OER Commons will not disclose any personally identifiable information, including a user's name and/or email address, to any third parties without user's consent or under special circumstances as may be required by law.

Creation and Sharing of User Data on the Site

OER Commons provides its registered users with the privilege of adding user-created data to the site. It is the right of OER Commons to grant and revoke this right to any user of the OER Commons web site. A user may be required to or allowed to submit some personal information as part of his or her Member Profile, such as user name and role, affiliated institution, subject or grade taught, for example, as part of membership and participation in a online community based on open educational resources vetting. A user may choose to make his or her Member Profile public or private. Ratings, reviews, and tags created by the user are by definition part of the OER Commons knowledge base and are created under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. My OER Member Portfolio, which acts as a collector of a registered user’s contributions, may also contain notes and annotations created by the user. A user may choose to make his or her My OER Member Portfolio public or private.

OER Commons is not responsible for any personally identifiable information that a user discloses to sites visited and for the privacy practices of such sites. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by the OER Commons web site.

Conditions of Use

This website and all of the content herein, including XML feeds, is licensed by OER Commons and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), 2006 under the Creative Commons license. Some Rights Reserved.

“OER Commons” is a name reserved for exclusive use in developing products and services by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME).