A Creative Commons license allows you to share, on your own terms, the course content you create. You determine how and to what extent other users can reuse your original course content. Likewise, you can reuse other users' content if it has a Creative Commons license. The benefit of using Creative Commons licenses is that other instructors can use, build, and improve upon your own content. This type of creative collaboration can add value to your curriculum.
When sharing a resource to commons, you will need to select a content license option.
Notes:
- To enable Commons in your Canvas instance, please contact your Customer Success Manager.
- Commons is available in all Free for Teacher (FFT) accounts. Free for Teacher users are limited to finding, importing, and sharing public resources.
- The license you select for your resource in Commons is not tied to the license that is set for the resource within Canvas course settings.
- For more information about copyright infringement, please read the Canvas Commons Terms of Use.
- Learn more about setting the content license.
Copyrighted
Copyrighted means original content created by you. If you select this option, you can add additional information.
Public Domain
Public Domain means the work has no known copyright and is free to use without restrictions. To learn more, click the Public Domain image.
Attribution
All Creative Commons licenses require Attribution. In other words, when others distribute or reuse your work, they must always credit you for your original creation. If you select Attribution as your only Creative Commons license, others can copy, distribute, and use your course content or altered forms of your course content. To learn more, click the CC - Attribution image.
Attribution ShareAlike
If you add a ShareAlike license to your course content, others are allowed to copy, distribute, and use your course content only if they redistribute your content using the same Creative Commons license. To learn more, click the CC - Attribution ShareAlike image.
Note: The Attribution-ShareAlike license is used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects. With this license, others can copy, distribute, and use your course content or altered forms of your course content (even for commercial purposes) as long as they credit you and use the same Creative Commons license.
Attribution No Derivatives
A No Derivatives license indicates that others can use your course content, but they may not change it in any way. To learn more, click the CC - Attribution NoDerivs image.
Attribution NonCommercial
A Non-Commercial license adds the caveat that others can use your course content, but not for commercial purposes. To learn more, click the CC - Attribution NonCommercial image.
Choose a Content License
To share your resource in the way that works best for you, select a license from the Copyright and Licenses drop-down menu. The list below shows the available copyright and license combinations, from least restrictive to most restrictive:
- Copyrighted
- Public Domain
- CC - Attribution
- CC - Attribution ShareAlike
- CC - Attribution NoDerivs
- CC - Attribution NonCommercial
- CC - Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike
- CC - Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs
You can view more information about Creative Commons licenses and how they work at creativecommons.org/licenses.
