Open Educational Resources and Creative Commons (Create 3.1.1)

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Open Educational Resources (OER) are resources that are made available on the web for anyone to use. OER's can be incredibly valuable for today's teachers.  With these resources, teachers can discover lesson plans and media to use in the classroom.  Teachers can also contribute their own work to OER's to share with others.  The rules for attribution and usage vary according the Creative Commons license for each source.  While some of these licenses allow an educator to freely use the resource--to change it, share it, and add to it simply by attributing credit to the original developer--others require that the entire source remain intact.  For more detailed explanations of the Creative Commons licenses, see this article or watch the video below.

To abide within ethical and legal code, teachers need to understand the differences between these licenses and boundaries when integrating these resources into course content.