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Open Educational Resources

Provides an overview of Open Educational Resources

Attributing content

All six Creative Commons (CC) licenses require attribution to the creator when using or sharing the resource.  When attributing CC it is best practice to include these four elements.

Title Author Source Licence
What is the name of the work? Who allows you to use the work? Where can people find the work? How can you use the work?

The most open licence is CC BY 4.0 and the Creative Commons resource page explains more about this.

For specific examples of attribution for each type of content (photo's, music, public domain, text, etc), use the Best Practices for Attribution guide by CC. The interactive Licence chooser tool by CC is also very useful. 

Getting started on developing resources

For guidance on each step of planning and workflow, follow the CAUL workflow. 

attribution required, modifying not allowed , commercial use not allowed, distributed on same terms

"What do the icons mean" from https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/   is licenced under CC BY 4.0

Choosing and evaluating open educational resources 

  1. Check licensing: Make sure the OER you choose has an open license, such as Creative Commons, which allows for reuse, adaptation and redistribution.
  2. Assess quality, currency and authority: Look for OER that has been peer-reviewed or vetted by reputable educational institutions, organizations, or experts. Check for reliable sources, updated content, and accurate information.
  3. Preview and Test: Before fully integrating an OER into your curriculum, preview and test the resource yourself. Ensure it aligns with your teaching style, meets your requirements, and engages learners effectively.

Tools to evaluate OERs:

Here are some ideas for modifying OER'S:

  • You might add Australian case studies into an existing OER (for instance, a textbook)
  • You might reuse parts of an existing OER, but in an entirely new context.
  • You might mix together different resources to create a new resource. For instance, text from one OER and photo's or graphs from another, as well as your own fresh content.

This text is recommended for further reading:

Schuwer, R., Baas, M. (2023). Reuse of OER, a Process Model Approach

Key Initiatives

initiate, plan, draft, design, review, publish, evaluate

  • DOAJ Australia and OASPA have a toolkit to support new and established open access journals in navigating the rapidly changing landscape (of open access publishing). 
  • The Toolkit enables empowered and informed decision-making and is intended for anyone involved in journal publishing. It will contribute to the advancement of scholarly publishing standards and best practices.

You can read more about the tool on the DOAJ blog

Open Access Journals toolkit

Further Information