Finding and using OER

Search the OER collections to find suitable materials. There are several databases to search. Here are some examples:

• The Library of Open Educational Resources, aoe.fi (Finnish National Agency of Education) is probably the best place to start with in case you are a teacher or an educator in Finland. In aoe.fi, you can search for and share open educational resources from all levels of education. The service and its OER are available for teachers, learners of all ages and everyone interested in learning. The OER can also be found in Finna.fi, which gathers materials from Finnish museums, libraries and archives under one roof. Visit the Further information (aoe.fi) page for more info and see the guide for uploading OERs.
• OERSI stands for Open Educational Resources Search Index – a search engine for free educational materials in higher education. As a central search entry point, OERSI connects OER repositories of distributed state initiatives, institutional repositories of universities and libraries, and subject-specialized repositories for OER. OER for higher education published in aoe.fi can be found in OERSI.
• OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
• OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier.
• MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
• Open Textbook Library provides open textbooks which are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network.
• DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.
• DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals and articles from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.
• Zenodo is a multidisciplinary open-access repository designed to help researchers share, preserve, and disseminate their work. It is managed by CERN and is supported by the European Commission. Zenodo provides a platform to upload and share various types of research outputs.

Evaluate your chosen OER e.g. in terms of relevance to your course, quality, accessibility, inclusion, interactivity, technical issues and licenses.

You can use evaluation methods and rubrics to assess the quality, such as YouTube video tutorial Evaluating and Selecting OER (29:39) or Open Textbook Library: Open Textbooks Review Criteria

In general, copyright means that the creator of a work has the right to decide how the work is used. Copyright protection is given to any work that exceeds the threshold of originality: the work is an independent and original result of the author’s intellectual creation. Copyright is given to the author of the work.

Read more about the copyright: The ABC of copyright

Creative Commons (CC) licenses give everyone a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. CC licenses are primarily intended for sharing rights to content in digital form. They are widely used in education, research, and creative industries to promote sharing and collaboration.

For the author, the CC licenses express how the author wants to share some of their rights. The author can choose a preferred license from the CC licenses (Fig. 13) . Check the CC license chooser.

For the re-user, the CC license explains what they can do with the licensed material.

Fig. 13. There are different CC licenses to choose from. CC0 and CC BY licenses are the most open ones. Image by CreativeCommons.org, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses explained:

• CC0 (Public Domain Dedication): Enables creators to give up their copyright.
• CC BY (Attribution): Credit must be given to the creator. Suitable for OER.
• CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike): Credit must be given to the creator, and any adaptations must be shared under the same terms. Suitable for OER.
• CC BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivatives): Credit must be given to the creator, and no derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted. Not recommended for OER.
• CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial): Credit must be given to the creator, and only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted. Suitable for OER.
• CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike): Credit must be given to the creator, only non-commercial uses of the work are permitted, and any adaptations must be shared under the same terms. Suitable for OER.
• CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives): Credit must be given to the creator, only non-commercial uses of the work are permitted, and no derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted. Not recommended for OER.

Watch the video (7:32): Anatomy of a CC License (Wilson College Library).

Remixing Open Educational Resources (OER) with CC Licenses

Creative Commons (CC) licenses make remixing materials possible by specifying how materials can be reused. However, not all CC-licensed materials can be remixed together. Key points to consider:

• Compatible Licenses: Ensure that the licenses of the materials you want to remix are compatible. For example, works under CC BY-SA must be combined with resources that allow sharing under the same terms.
• No-Derivatives Restriction: Materials with a CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC-ND license cannot be remixed, as they prohibit adaptations.
• Non-Commercial Use: If using CC BY-NC materials, the remixed resource must also be for non-commercial purposes.
• Proper Attribution: Always credit the original creators as specified by the license terms.

If an open material meets most of your criteria, consider whether you could make some modifications to improve its quality and usefulness (for example, through editing, revising or replacing content).

Check the license under which the material is shared, and make sure that you are allowed to edit the material.

You may have heard about the 5 R’s related to Open Educational Resources (OER). They describe the key permissions that make a resource truly open, and this 5 R’s is what an OER producer should aim for. The 5 R’s are:

• Retain – The right to keep a copy of the content (e.g., download and store it).
• Reuse – The right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, on a website, in a video). Content can be reused in its unaltered original format.
• Revise – The right to adapt or modify the content (e.g., translate it or update examples) to suit specific needs.
• Remix – The right to combine the content with other materials to create something new.
• Redistribute – The right to share the original or modified content with others.