Ever since planning your course you should have kept notes on where you got other people's ideas from and who created any figures or videos that you are using.

Other people's ideas get collated into a reference list, and figures or videos get collated into an acknowledgements list.

Your references and acknowledgements pages should appear on the homepage of your course, after the last piece of course content. If you have long lists of references and acknowledgements to add, they can be separate pages Add a Moodle book with the Name 'References and acknowledgements'. The Chapter title can also be 'References and acknowledgements' or, if they're going to be separate pages, a first Chapter title 'References' and a second Chapter title 'Acknowledgements'.

The references and acknowledgements go in the Content field. References are listed in alphabetical order and acknowledgements are listed in the order that the assets they refer to appear in in your course.

References

The Open University uses Harvard referencing and we recommend that you so the same. 

As well as adding a reference list at the end, this will mean going back through your course and adding in-text citations to the reference list whenever you refer to some else's ideas. 

You should follow the guidance in the OU's quick guide to Harvard referencing for more details on how to do this. 

Acknowledgements

Before you complete your course you need to: 

• confirm that you have the necessary permission to use any third-party content or assets used in your course
• make sure that they're acknowledged appropriately.

When we say 'third-party', that means anyone apart from you. So if all the text, images and information in your course were created by you, you don't need to acknowledge them.

If your course includes figures (such as graphs or pie charts), are they your own work? Even if you created the figure, is the data that you used to create it your own?

If you're producing the course for your place of work or for an organisation that you're a member of, you must check whether you're allowed to use their content in your course – and if you are, what wording should be used to acknowledge it?

If your course has decorative images, are they all your own work? Royalty-free stock image sites like Unsplash or Pexels state that you are not required to acknowledge the creators of any images you download and use, but that it is appreciated. 

If you have used AI to generate images you should have recorded any prompts you used so that you can list them in the acknowledgements.

Any content that has a Creative Commons licence is free to re-use but you must acknowledge the content creator. The Creative Commons website features a list of rules about re-using Creative Commons material, depending on which licence the material has. If you acknowledge any material like this you should include the wording 'reproduced under the xx Creative Commons licence', replacing 'xx' with the name of the licence.