Week 5: Finding, using, and sharing educational materials online

Introduction

Figure 1 Open or not? Images on the internet may be subject to copyright

Long description

The internet contains an abundance of images, textbooks, videos, learning objects and more, which teachers could take and use in their teaching. However, this creates opportunities and challenges for online teachers. Not all of these resources can be readily reused due to restrictions of copyright or intellectual property.

This week, we explore this topic and focus in particular on Open Educational Resources (OER). These are online materials that have been shared with the intent that others can reuse them. You will learn about Creative Commons licences, which underpin OER, and which you can apply to share your own work. These make it clear exactly what permissions there are to reuse the shared resources, and provide you with choices about how your own shared resources can be reused by others. Finally in this week, you will examine some repositories and other ways of finding OER to reuse and repurpose in your own context.

Teacher reflections

This week we hear from Andy, who discusses his experiences with finding, using, and sharing OER as part of teaching practice:

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Transcript

ANDY:

Hello. Open educational resources is something I have thought about quite a lot over the last few years. But in the area that I work in, there really isn't a lot out there. That's in business education. I've been lucky enough to work in places that are quite open in sharing resources between other members of staff. But that is only within the institution itself, and that's not really open at all.

Now, I have tried to be as open as I possibly can when I've created my own learning objects. For example, I created a set of lessons for my year 10 business class fairly recently. I made sure I gave it a Creative Commons licence and noncommercial, as well, so that they can be repurposed and sold on and they remain open, which I think is really important.

But before my study with the OU, licencing wasn't really something I've thought about too much, especially when creating lessons and things like that, whereas now, through my studies, I very much focus on getting visuals from- if I get them from Flickr, for example, I'll only search on Creative Commons, that type of thing. So through my studies, it has helped me to think about licencing a bit more.

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By the end of this week, you should be able to:

• define Open Educational Resources and list some examples of what this term covers.
• understand Creative Commons licences and use these properly
• search OER Repositories and the wider internet for material that you can legally reuse in your teaching.