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Hi all, I'm reporting a minor thing I've done for open education.

At the Economics Network we have a directory of online learning resources across different topics in university-level Economics (a manually maintained web catalogue? In 2013? I know, but humour me).

We've struggled about how to order items within categories: alphabetical order seems arbitrary and there's no point having a quality scale since educational contexts vary.

I've settled it by having a database field for IP licence and ordering by the freedoms give to the end user: Public domain/CC0 at the top, then CC-By, then down through the other CC and similar licences to "All rights reserved" and the Standard YouTube Licence. Reflecting a precautionary
approach, an unknown licence is assumed to be equivalent to All Rights Reserved.
An example of the ordering:
http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/teaching/Video%20and%20Audio%20Lectures/Intermediate%20Macroeconomics

There's a clear way for providers of learning materials to "optimise placement" on our site: just release under a freer licence.
This also lets me query the relative numbers of resources with different licences:

Licence                                                                                            Resources
*No copyright restrictions (Public Domain/ CC-Zero)*                               1
*GPL / LGPL / MIT / Other free software licence*                                      1
*Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY)*                                                19
*Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA)*                             10
*Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC-BY-NC)*                       28
*Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA)*   43
*Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)*   13
*Mix of licences*                                                                                             3
*Full copyright with permission for educational use*                                            11
*Standard YouTube Licence*                                                                            37
*All Rights Reserved*                                                                                      202
*Not known: assume All Rights Reserved*                                                        184

Notes:
1) We have dozens more CC-By-NC materials not yet catalogued into this database.
2) CC-By-NC-SA is the MIT OCW licence, which explains why there is so much in that category
3) "Full copyright with permission for educational use" is a pseudo-licence, clearly, but there are still academics using this sort of wording.

Hope this is interesting to somebody. Recent discussions on this list have
only made me more keen to prioritise free cultural works.

--
Dr Martin L Poulter
ICT Manager, The Economics Network