These are the slides from joint Copyright and Licensing training provided to staff and students at the University of Edinburgh by myself and Eugen Stoica (Scholarly Communications Team).

1. Open Educational Resources
Stephanie (Charlie) Farley
Open Education Resources
Learning, Teaching, and Web Services
University of Edinburgh

2. What is an OER?
An Open Educational Resource (OER) is a freely available and
openly licensed digital resource.
“OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside
in the public domain or have been released under an
intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-
purposing by others. Open educational resources include full
courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming
videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or
techniques used to support access to knowledge”
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

3. Definitions
Intellectual property rights (IPR):
Are the rights given to persons over the creations
of their minds (usually for a set period of time).
Image via Pixabay by geralt [Public Domain]

4. Is an area of IPR that covers the rights of authors
of creative works.
Copyright:
Image via Pixabay by Peggy_Marco [Public Domain]

5. is the permission,
or authorisation,
to re-use a
copyrighted work.
A licence:
Image via Pixabay by kartik27 [Public Domain]

6. By applying an open licence to a copyrighted
work, rights holders give permission for others
to copy or change their work in ways that would
otherwise infringe copyright law.
BUT you still retain copyright and can do
whatever you like with your work.

7. A Creative Commons (CC) licence is one of
several open licenses that enable the free
distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work.
Image via Pixabay by Kriemer [Public Domain]

8. Creative Commons licences

9. What is an OER?
Materials available on the web without explicit
copyright statement or open licence should not
be considered OERs.
• The absence of a copyright statement does not
necessarily mean that the material is free to
use or adapt.
• OERs should always display a licence containing
the terms of reuse.

10. Why use and share OER?
Why re-invent the wheel?
Teachers are responsible for creating great learning
experiences, not (necessarily) for creating all the resources
needed for this themselves. Reusing existing OER frees up time
that can be spent on other aspects of the teaching and learning
process. Their use can help you expand your range of teaching
materials.
Raising your profile
Getting your materials out there as an educator can both help
raise your profile and allow your resources to be improved by
other users. You will improve your profile and impact,
potentially collecting kudos/evidence towards promotion.

11. Take your resources with you
By making your teaching resources open you are also allowing
yourself to take these materials with you when you move from
one institution to another.
Improving your teaching
Creating OER will improve your practice by encouraging you to
reflect. You will find people interested in and teaching/learning
the same areas as you. Use and creation of OER facilitates looking
outside your immediate environment and getting broader and
different views on topic areas. You will learn new stuff which will
reinvigorate your teaching.
Why you should get involved with (using) OER (as an educator)? was re-mixed from The Open Education Handbook licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution (Unported) v3.0 (Attribution CC BY)
Why use and share OER?

12. OER align with the University’s mission
“Use, creation, and publication of OERs is consistent with the
University’s reputation, values and mission to ‘Make a significant,
sustainable and socially responsible contribution to Scotland, the
UK and the world, promoting health and economic and cultural
wellbeing.’”
Creation of OER has big benefits to individuals, educational
institutions and society as a whole.
OER is not just about access to materials, but about making it
easier to share materials and for more work to become visible.

13. Edinburgh's OER vision
1. For the common good: Teaching and learning
materials exchange to enrich the University and the
sector;
2. Edinburgh at its best: Showcasing openly the highest
quality learning and teaching;
3. Edinburgh’s treasures: Making available online a
significant collection of unique learning materials
available openly to Scotland, the UK and the world,
promoting health and economic and cultural well-
being.

14. OER Support Service
• Central OER support service:
- providing advice / staff & student training sessions /
awareness raising
• Learning & Teaching OER Policy http://edin.ac/2lMXM9L
• Open.Ed website http://www.open.ed.ac.uk
– Showcasing Edinburgh’s OERs / how-to guides / news and
information.

16. Creating an OER
When creating an OER, there are certain things you must do
and certain things you must avoid in order for the resource to
be fully open.
© T Douglas-Walker, released under CC BY licence

17. Seek Out Open Resources:
• If your resource includes images, use Wikimedia
Commons, Flickr etc. before using Google images.
• You can also use the Creative Commons meta-
search, and the new beta CC search engine.
• If you must use Google Images, it is possible to
change the settings so it only shows openly licenced
images:

20. CC Search provides a useful ‘meta-search’ over a
number of media platforms:
http://search.creativecommons.org/

21. You can also now search a number of cultural
institutions using the CC Beta Search.
https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/

22. It’s a good idea to keep track of attribution
information as you go (and keep it if possible).
But is that enough information?
Keep track of resources resources you
use
Attributing Creative Commons Materials by ccAustralia & CCI ARC, licensed under CC BY 2.5

23. Do not use a resource without
attribution when creating an OER
The main aspect of ALL Creative Commons licenses is the
BY (Attribution). Always ensure that the original creator is
credited. You wouldn’t quote or cite a paper without
proper attribution, don’t use someone’s resource without
doing the same.

24. An attribution should be easy to find: on the same page
as resource, perhaps even on the resource itself.
Figure 2: © Roseanne Smith under a CC BY licence
(Open.ed on Wikimedia Commons)© S Walker, released under a CC BY licence
(Open.ed on Wikimedia Commons)

25. The CC licence tells you to be reasonable:
“You may satisfy the conditions in (1) and (2) above in any
reasonable manner based on the medium, means and
context in which the Licensed Material is used. For
example, it may be reasonable to satisfy some or all of
the conditions by retaining a copyright notice, or by
providing a URI or hyperlink associated with the Licensed
Material, if the copyright notice or webpage includes
some or all of the required information.”
Attribution doesn’t need to be complicated

26. The good, the bad, and the ugly
The Creative Commons Wiki provides detailed information on
how to correctly attribute resources in a number of contexts:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Best_practices_for_attribution
Good: "Creative Commons 10th Birthday
Celebration San Francisco" by tvol is
licensed under CC BY 4.0
Average: Photo by tvol / CC BY
Incorrect: Photo: Creative Commons

27. Attributing Creative Commons Materials by ccAustralia & CCI ARC, licensed under CC BY 2.5

28. Sharing OERs
• Ensure that the material is your own work, or contains only openly licensed work shared
under the agreed terms. The copyright service will be able to help if you are unsure about
copyright issues (copyright@ed.ac.uk)
• Choose the most appropriate license for your material. The Creative Commons website
licence chooser is a useful tool for choosing & generating the licence text and image:
http://creativecommons.org/choose/. Some platforms allow you to choose and generate a
licence in the upload workflow (Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).
• University of Edinburgh should be stated as the licensor so that the resource can be correctly
attributed. An example of good attribution would be:
© [Author Name], University of Edinburgh 2016 CC BY
• More information can be found in the University’s Open Educational Resource Policy
(http://open.ed.ac.uk/about/

29. OER
Repository
MERLOT
Xpert
OERCommons
TESConnect
Social Media
Youtube
Flicker
iTunesU
Slideshare
SoundCloud
OpenCourseWare
MIT OpenCourseWare
OpenLearn
TU Delft OCW

30. Feedback and Follow Up
Stephanie.Farley@ed.ac.uk
http://Open.Ed.ac.uk
@OpenEdEdinburgh