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Open and Affordable Educational Resources

This guide supports UMD instructors and students with using open educational resources (OER), affordable course materials, and open pedagogy. Visit oer.umd.edu to learn more.

"Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation." (UNESCO, 2018).

Open Educational Resources include:

  • Learning content: Full courses, course material, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.

  • Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.

  • Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles, and localization of content.

Creative Commons in Use

Enter your search query:

use for commercial purposes;
modify, adapt, or build upon.


Search using:

Creative Commons Image Search allows you to search for images with specific licensing parameters. Various websites such as Google and Flickr have this feature built in to their searching. Below is a list from the Creative Commons website on the image sharing websites that are cooperating with creative commons image searching.

Providers

Provider Domain # CC Licensed Works
500px https://500px.com 52,600
Animal Diversity Web https://animaldiversity.org 14,839
Behance https://www.behance.net 5,245,769
DeviantArt https://www.deviantart.com 187,803
Digitalt Museum https://digitaltmuseum.org 88,970
Encyclopedia of Life http://eol.org 497,138
Flickr https://www.flickr.com 9,602,322
Flora-On http://flora-on.pt 26,498
Geograph® Britain and Ireland https://www.geograph.org.uk 998,383
IHA Holiday Ads https://www.iha.com 2,058,271
Montreal Social History Museum https://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/ 108,698
Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org 194,384
Museums Victoria https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au 64,433
New York Public Library https://www.nypl.org 168,550
Rijksmuseum NL https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/ 30,000
Science Museum – UK https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk 13,942

 

Licensing with Creative Commons

Here is a list of licenses provided by the Creative Commons site.

The Licenses

Attribution 
CC BY

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

View License Deed | View Legal Code


Attribution-ShareAlike 
CC BY-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

View License Deed | View Legal Code


Attribution-NoDerivs 
CC BY-ND

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

View License Deed | View Legal Code


Attribution-NonCommercial 
CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

View License Deed | View Legal Code


Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 
CC BY-NC-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

View License Deed | View Legal Code


Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 
CC BY-NC-ND

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

View License Deed | View Legal Code

We also provide tools that work in the “all rights granted” space of the public domain. Our CC0 tool allows licensors to waive all rights and place a work in the public domain, and our Public Domain Mark allows any web user to “mark” a work as being in the public domain.

If you are looking for more information on Copyright see the LibGuide.