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OER and Creative Commons

How To Use This Guide

This guide was created to serve as a helpful, interactive resource for UMass Boston instructors considering, integrating, and/or creating open educational resource (OER) content for their courses.

Whether you are exploring OERs for the first time or building on existing experiences with open access materials, this resource is for you!

What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?

OERs are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers. They utilize open licenses like Creative Commons to enable open use.

Creating, using, and sharing Open Educational resources directly affects faculty and students. Students are worried about the cost of their course materials, and with no autonomy in deciding what materials are required for their courses, they are at the mercy of publishers. Students have had to make tough decisions when choosing between buying a textbook and buying food.

By adopting free to low-cost OER materials, students no longer have to make these hard decisions. OER materials are freely available on the open internet, and can be accessed on the first day of class (or even earlier).

Some OERs to consider are:

For more information about OER at UMass Boston, visit our Open Education page.

Are OERs right for me?

Reasons to use OERs:

  • Save your students money with low-cost/free course materials
  • Save time by using open materials already created by peers in your field
  • Join the movement to challenge the rising costs of academic publishing
  • Students have access to course materials from day one of classes
  • Improve access to information

How to find OERs

Check out our Checklists tab for interactive guidelines to find and evaluate OERs for your subject area.

UMass Boston's OER website has a great list of places to find OERs broken out into the categories of: OER aggregators, textbooks, open source articles and books, course materials, science and engineering, virtual simulation tools and software, movies videos multimedia, games, photos, faculty development, and open access repository.

If you are interested in seeing what's currently available within your subject area, explore these recommended OER repositories!

  • MERLOT (Curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development resources)
  • MIT Open Courseware (Web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content; open and available to the world to improve courses and curricula)
  • OpenStax (Textbooks written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields, peer-reviewed)
  • Open Textbook Network (OTN) (Growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks)

Adapting and Remixing OERs

You might be interested in adapting or remixing your found OER(s) into a new OER work.

  • The term adaptation is commonly used to describe the process of making changes to an existing work. Though we can also replace “adapt” with revise, modify, alter, customize, or other synonym that describes the act of making a change.
  • To remix is to combine your original or revised copy of the OER resource with other existing material to create something new (e.g., make a mashup). Remixing is one of the "5R activities" of OER (retain, revise, remix, reuse, redistribute).

The definition of "remix" is excerpted from Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, which was originally written by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. The definition of "adapt" is excerpted from the Adaptation Guide by BCcampus, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

Understanding Public Domain and OERs

What is Public Domain?

The term "public domain" refers to materials not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. No individual or group or company owns these works. Instead they are OWNED BY THE PUBLIC (and freely accessible, making them function like OERs in this respect). Anyone can used a public domain work without obtaining permission, but a citation still should be included .

In the United States copyright protection begins upon creation of the work and expires 70 years after the death of the creator. The work then passes into the public domain. For older works created in the United States, passage into the public domain depends on a variety of factors including publication status, recordation of notice, and registration. For foreign copyrighted works, it is possible that works once considered to be in the public domain may have had their copyright protection restored.

How does an item enter the Public Domain?

  1. The copyright has expired.
  2. The copyright failed to apply the required notice.
  3. The copyright owner failed to follow renewal rules.
  4. The copyright owner deliberately places the item/artifact in the public domain.
  5. Copyright law does not apply to a certain item/work/artifact.

How to find Public Domain Works?

Creative Commons License for this Guide

Unless otherwise specified, the OER & Creative Commons Guide by C. Elliott, Lucas Hall, and Lauren Movlai is licensed under CC BY.

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