Where to Find Creative Commons Licensed Works
- Creative Commons SearchUsing Open APIs, this tool searches millions of CC-licensed and Public Domain images, text, and multimedia works.
- Google ImagesYou can find CC-licensed material by searching Google Images, then clicking the drop down "Tools." Here, you can refine your search based on usage rights.
- FlickrFlickr contains billions of images, many published under CC licenses. After performing a search, use the "Any License" drop-down menu to refine your search by usage rights.
- Wikimedia CommonsMillions of images and other forms of multimedia are available, many in the Public Domain (free of copyright restrictions).
Introduction to OER
Open Educational Resources (OER) are "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others."* This means, OER are free of most copyright restrictions, and as such are ideal for use in online teaching. OER May include full textbooks, or other tools such as streaming media, images, open access publications, and more.
OER allow:
- Retain -- users have the right to make, archive, and own copies of the content
- Reuse -- content can be reused in its unaltered form
- Revise -- content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered
- Remix -- original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new
- Redistribute -- copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.**
* From: https://hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/
** From: http://opencontent.org/definition/
Guides for Incorporating OER
- The OER Starter kit Workbook
The OER Starter Kit Workbook is a remix of the OER Starter Kit to include worksheets to help instructors practice the skills they need to confidently find, use, or even create open educational resources (OER). We welcome instructors, librarians, instructional designers, administrators, and anyone else interested in OER to explore the OER Starter Kit Workbook. - OER: A Field Guide for Academic Librarians
We intend this book to act as a guide writ large for would-be champions of OER, that anyone—called to action by the example set by our chapter authors—might serve as guides themselves. The following chapters tap into the deep experience of practitioners who represent a meaningful cross section of higher education institutions in North America. It is our hope that the examples and discussions presented by our authors will facilitate connections among practitioners, foster the development of best practices for OER adoption and creation, and more importantly, lay a foundation for novel, educational excellence.
Resources
- Wikimedia Commons (media)
- NYPL Digital Collections (images) - Be sure to select Public Domain
- MIT OpenCourseWare Educator (documents, videos, and more)
- OER Commons (documents, modules, and more)
- Open Textbook Library
- OASIS OER Search Tool
- eCampus Ontario Open Library
- Project Cora
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig and others. The organization is dedicated to expanding the range of materials available online that we can share, repurpose, and build upon. To support this work, Creative Commons developed a set of free and easy to use human and machine readable licenses that allow creators to give broad permissions for how their intellectual property can be used by others.
Creative Commons licenses come in 7 "flavors" ranging from expansive to restrictive. A full explanation of usage rights is available in the chart below, but the general categories of CC licenses are:
BY - Users have broad rights, but must attribute the creator.
SA - In addition to attribution, users must "pay it forward" by publishing any derivatives under the same CC license as the creator.
NC - Users have broad rights, but must provide attribution and cannot use the work for commercial purposes
ND - Users can share the work, but may not adapt, modify, or otherwise create derivatives.
These Licenses may be present in the following combinations:
CC-BY
CC-BY-SA
CC-BY-ND
CC-BY-NC
CC-BY-NC-SA
CC-BY-NC-ND
