The Wasting of Precious Time

Imagine the following scenario:

An instructor of English Composition has just completed a 50+ slide presentation about the structure of the classical argument.  He has spent countless hours working on it, drawing from some of his older, more primitive presentations, as well as those of some of his colleagues and a number of web sources.  He has included two dozen images that he located on Google.  Everything, he feels, is appropriately cited.  The final work is streamlined and, he feels, will be effective for improving the success of his students.  

This instructor then uses the presentation in several of his classes, and the student response is promising.  Now excited, he looks into ways of sharing the material with others.  In so doing, he comes across the different guidelines of "fair use" and open resource materials, and his stomach feels suddenly void of content.

The presentation, he realizes, is not only unfit for free distribution; his continued use of it could be considered in violation of any number of copyrights.  The realization takes some time to set in, but, in the end, he understands that what he's created is not a legitimate educational tool.

All those hours wasted.  

Or, maybe not.

He has three options, and one of them is not recommended.

1. Continue his "unfair use" of these materials in violation of copyright  (NOT recommended)
2. Start fresh, building a new resource that is legitimate from the ground up  (not ideal, but possible)
3. Adapt his material to meet the standards of open sharing (recommended)

In this module, we will look as ways to create your own teaching materials that can be freely shared without the overwhelming waste of time described above. 

And, speaking of not wasting time, we'll skip the quiz at the beginning of this module (since this is a big one) and get right to the discussion of how to actually get started building and adapting your own OER for composition and rhetoric.