OER Creator Workshop

Helpful resources for Open Educational Resources (OER):

Basic resources and guides:

• Canvas - plan and develop your OER with the OER Canvas - slide 3 is the one with accessibility, you can download it in different formats
• Publish your material as OER - Step by step guide to publish your material as OER
• FAQ copyright, Creative Commons & OER - helpful resource that answers frequently asked questions on copyright, Creative Commons and OER, also available in German

Resources on Creative Commons:

• About Creative Commons Licences - overview of all the elements of the licences
• Licence chooser - find the right licence
• FAQ about Creative Commons and its licences
• Video on Creative Commons licences explained

Institutional resources:

• OER Website (ZHAW) - OER information and insights into projects and services 
• OER Policy (ZHAW)

How to search for OER?

There are different ways to search for different formats and resource-types.

There is a comprehensive link list on Creative Commons, which is regularly update. 

OER-specific search platforms:

• Wikimedia Commons
• openverse (extensive library of images and audio)
• OER Commons - you can search directly for subject-specific content or use sites within OER Commons that has it all aggregated, like the Open Textbook Hub 

Openly licensed material under own licence:

Some platforms like Pixabay, Unsplash and thenounproject use their own licence. If you use their resources, you need to link to their licence. Always read the licence before using the content, in order to know what is allowed and what is not:

• Pixabay - has its own licence - images, videos and music and sound effects
• thenounproject and its licence - search for icons and photos, 3 different licences: Public domain, Attribution Licence CC BY 3.0 and royalty-free Licence, always read the licence.

Search engines - you need to use filters to find OER material

• Google - search for OER in the search field, e.g. "psychology OER" or adjust the usage rights filter in advanced search settings to "free to use or share, even commercially"
• Flickr - refine your search by setting "any licence" filter to Creative Commons

OER subject resources - you can find them through google by searching for open textbooks

• Open Textbook Library on a variety of subjects
• Open Library
• Cal Poly Humboldt - OER subject resources
• bc campus open textbooks
• University of Adelaide - OER subject resources
• Virtual linguistics Campus - OER platform for linguistics
• Open Textbook Hub on OER Commons

OER guides

• University of Adelaide  - OER Guide

OER portals like Zenodo, PLOS 

• Zenodo, examples of OER material: see our Students4OER-area for different resources that have been released under an open licence
• PLOS - open access, you can go through a suite of open access journals on PLOS