Where To Find Open Educational Resources

OERs should be findable - on the web without a password, with clear titles and ample descriptions. They should also have appropriate metadata to help search engines identify them.This is the ideal, and reality doesn't always live up to it. In general, you will find Open Educational Resources:

1. In searchable repositories. The files may be stored right there, or they may just be linked to. There may be ratings, rankings, and peer review. There may be version control.
2. All over the web in places like YouTube, Flickr, and Wikimedia Commons; as well as on government and NGO web sites; museum, library, school, and university web sites; personal web sites and blogs, etc. They are sometimes found mixed in with resources that are not OERs. Google has a search function that can detect the metadata of a Creative Commons license and present you with those search results, as you saw before in this video.

Google

As you might expect, Google is the primary tool for ferreting out Open Educational Resources wherever they are being kept on the Web. Read How To Google Like A Boss, which explains some little-known tricks for searching within a particular web site, searching an exact phrase, expanding your search to include potentially related terms, etc.

But you are not just searching for anything on Google. You're searching for Open Educational Resources. That means you need to use Google Advanced Search, which lets you limit your search to content with a Creative Commons license. It's the bottom option on the page. 

Notice that it doesn't use the actual names of the Creative Commons licenses. That's a little annoying, but here's the translation:

• Free to use or share means CC Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works. This is not so good for OER because you can't adapt or revise it. And if you're not a non-profit, or if you might somehow make money off of it, you can't use it.

• Free to use or share, even commercially means CC Attribution, No Derivative Works. Again, not so good for OER because you can only use it as is.

• Free to use, share, or modify means CC Attribution, Non-Commercial. This is adequate for OER but not the best, because it restricts commercial use - this license precludes making copies of the OER and selling them for the cost of printing, and it also prevents for-profit schools (the only viable option in parts of the world) from using them.

• Free to use, share, or modify even commercially means CC Attribution. This is the best license for OER.

The Google descriptions of the licenses are listed from least permissive at the top, to most permissive at the bottom. If you search the least permissive one, it will bring up content with that restrictive set of permissions, but also content with LESS restrictive permissions. In other words, if you search for CC BY ND NC, you will also get content that is CC BY, CC ND, and CC NC.

When in doubt, select "free to use or share," and then look carefully at the license of the particular content that you want to use to see if the license allows you to do what you need to. 

OER Repositories and Lists

Open Educational Resource repositories and lists are meant to be as comprehensive and exhaustive as their staff can make them, and they often provide extra services like peer review, rating and comment systems, or help with creation or technical integration of OERs.

• There are lists, which link to the OER wherever it is. Lists tend to contain content from many different sources, and the content may be carefully curated, or a catch-all.
• Repositories keep a copy of each OER, preferably including the source file. Repositories generally contain content created by members of a certain institution, agency, organization, or association.
• In practices, many lists are called repositories.