What kinds of materials can I use in my courses?
Faculty members interested in including copyrighted materials in their courses should consult with the faculty and staff in Brookens Library. They are the experts in ensuring that copyrighted content is used appropriately and can help point instructors to Open Educational Resources (OERs) when possible.
To get started, you can explore the following resources:
Materials that are part of the public domain either have expired copyrights or were never protected by copyright law. You do not need permission to use or copy public domain works. Examples include U.S. government works, laws, and work published in the U.S. prior to 1928.
Creative Commons (CC) licenses help creators of content to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some use of their work. Creative Commons licensing works with copyright--not in place of it--when you want to grant certain rights in your copyrighted work. All CC licenses require users to attribute the original creator of a work. Open Educational Resources (OERs) often fall under this kind of license and can be great additions to your courses.
Course Reserves are a way of placing documents on hold and linking them in your course for your students to observe for a short period of time. These items can supplement your online instruction and can offer your students a plethora of information that can enhance their online learning experience.
Ideas for including Course Reserves in your course include:
- Streaming media to offer examples of concepts
- Journal articles used for example and research
- Case studies for course application and assessment
OERs and Accessibility
In general, OERs are materials made by other instructors anywhere in the world who are willing to freely share those materials with others. Do you need to think about accessibility with OERs? Yes. However, it shouldn't be a stumbling block in your adoption of OERs.
If you adopt OERs for your class, they should be checked for accessibility, just as with any other materials. Running the accessibility checker for Word files, PowerPoints, or PDFs can tell you how accessible something is and how to fix it. Not sure how to do this or where to being? Reaching out to DART is a great first step to make sure you OER materials are accessible.
In most cases, academic materials which are termed "OER" are licensed under a Creative Commons (CC) license. There are six different licenses. Four of the licenses allow copies of the work, which means that you and UIS DART team can make the materials accessible, add materials, or edit materials without issue (so long as you credit the original author/licensor). However, if the license is included "no derivatives," then we are not able to edit the materials to make them accessible by default. Our only option is to reach out to the content creator to see if they might be open to other options.
