Transcript Teaching presentation 4 - Finding OER (Powerpoint link)

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 incopyright 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
Exercise
http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/links.html
or
http://is.gd/54yKi
•
Select your licensing preference
•
Search
•
Assess the results for
– Quality
– Appropriate licensing
– Reusability
•
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