TEEnet and Creative Commons licences
TEEnet’s vision is to encourage open access to theological learning materials. Our courses are free for any TEE programme or church to use to prepare its members for life and ministry. Our vision is to make TEE courses freely accessible, downloadable and distributable without a licensing fee. Additionally, some of our TEE courses are also fully contextualisable. Our courses are published and copyrighted under the Creative Commons licence. You can read more about our vision in our blog “TEEnet and Open Access learning materials.” TEEnet uses two different licenses, each with distinct user rights. One is called the “TEEnet Open Access License” (which corresponds to CC BY-NC-ND) and the other is called the “TEEnet Contexualisable License” (which corresponds to CC BY-NC-SA).
Creative Common licences briefly explained
Creative Commons licences are an internationally recognised copyright licence for published and creative works (see (https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/). The Creative Commons licence is flexible and gives us different options for our published material while ensuring a recognised international copyright. There are six different Creative Commons licenses to choose from. One of the great advantages for us is that the Creative Commons licences allow us to freely share the material as it is (and allow the printing and the sharing of materials locally without any charge). Additionally, we can even modify the licence to enable the end users to edit, update, and contextualise our works.
TEEnet Creative Common licenses
TEEnet uses two distinct Creative Commons licenses, which give users different rights. Here are the two TEEnet licences side by side with our description to highlight their differences.
| TEEnet open access licence (CC BY-NC-ND) | TEEnet contextualisable licence (CC BY-NC-SA) |
|---|---|
You are free to: | You are free to:Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) |
 |  |
 BY (“attribution”) means credit must be given to the original copyright holders | BY (“attribution”) means credit must be given to the original copyright holders |
 NC (“non-commercial”) means that the material cannot be sold to make a profit (but you can charge for the material to recover its production costs). | NC (“non-commercial”) means that the material cannot be sold to make a profit (but you can charge for the material to recover its production costs). |
 ND (“no derivatives”) means no changes to the original course are permitted. Translations are possibe but require prior permission from TEEnet. |  SA (“share alike”) means that changes to the original course are permitted (like contextualisation or translation, for example). SA (“share alike”), also means that any course or translation that uses part of the original copyrighted TEEnet course must retain the same copyright as the original and needs to be shared like the original with an unrestricted license. This new material must then be shared with TEEnet to benefit others. |
How to access the TEEnet contextualisable licence TEE courses?
The TEEnet courses are available as downloadable PDFs from our website. However, TEEnet offers TEE courses with a contextualisable licence, which includes the option for TEE programmes and churches to contextualise the material, translate it, or add their logos and contact details to the course workbooks. Word documents for all courses are available after signing a licencing agreement with TEEnet that recognises that all contextualisation and translation of the material must be published with the same open access licence as the original on TEEnet. Please also see our Frequently Asked Questions page, “Questions FAQs,” or contact us directly for licencing.