Creative Commons, Copyright and Education Part 4. Finding OER Rowan Wilson OUCS November 2009

Some general tips Double check licensing conditions where possible (click on linked © statements, read site terms and conditions, look out for the CC logo) Many of these portals search similar groups of resources, so expect to see the some of the same resources turn up in multiple searches Some resources may be listed as Public Domain. Although this is a term from American law, these resources can be used here in the UK in any way, even without attribution

Some more general tips Some resources may bear the GNU Free Documentation License, formerly used by Wikipedia. This licence is very similar to CC Attribution-Sharealike, except that it has the additional requirement that the whole licence (a far from brief document) accompanies all copies of the work or derivative works. Watch out for obvious mis-licensing; after all there’s nothing to stop people uploading Annie Liebovitz photos to Flickr and labelling them as CC. Examining context on the site can often help here.

Open Courseware Consortium Over one hundred educational institutions including Oxford (Maths Institute), MIT, UC Berkeley A wealth of material of varying depth Search interface has few configurable fields

DiscoverEd Run by the Creative Commons project Very simple search interface A fair proportion of resources with ‘unknown’ licensing Still a work in progress

CCSearch Run by the Creative Commons project Not just educational material Cross-searches many sources of open content Accuracy of licence metadata is generally good

OER Commons Large quantity of material Complex search interface available, if a little confusing

Connexions OER for all levels – primary to higher education Allows creation of ‘lenses’ – collections of material chosen by a particular user Search interface allows staged refinement of searches

Slideshare Not solely educational material Licensing is input ‘on-site’, so accuracy of licensing metadata is very good Search interface is fairly basic but has all essential features Content is almost entirely presentations or supporting notes – beware false authority

Jamendo Open content music hosting Basic and slightly confusing search interface

Open Clip Art Library All material is either CC or PD Cannot search by licence Requires a browser that will display PNG or SVG files (old versions of Internet Explorer will not)

Flickr Not an educational site by intention Licence information is entered on upload, so metadata is generally good Beware mis-licensing of items like photos of in- copyright art works

Internet Archive Vast collection No easy method to search by licence (although it is there who don’t mind parsing an xml document for their results) Nevertheless much of the collection is public domain Also home of the Wayback Machine – the contents of which are not open content

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