Open Educational Resources: Use OER

When you find a relevant, high-quality OER that would be suitable to use in your course, you may decide to adopt it and use it as-is. Alternatively, you may choose to adapt the materials if the OER is dated, too broad, or contains information which is beyond the scope of your course.

Before adopting or adapting OER, check to make sure your use is covered under a license that permits that reuse. Many content creators apply Creative Commons licenses that allow users to remix, revise, and share their content.

FSU Libraries offer Alternative Textbook grants to support faculty and instructors in their efforts to replace commercial textbooks with open alternatives that are available at no cost to students.

Open licenses like Creative Commons (CC) licenses are often used to communicate what a user can do with a resource, and what rights its author would like to retain. These licenses allow for broad sharing and reuse of resources for purposes like education and research.

Creative Commons licenses do the following:

• Allow creators to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, reuse, and remix their work.
• Consist of six different licenses that allow creators to apply four different conditions: Attribution, Noncommerical, Share-alike, and No Derivatives.
• Displayed on the resource in the form of clickable icons.

Examples of Creative Commons icons: