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Find and use Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) are digital and reusable learning/instructional objects produced through teaching and training activities. Below are a number of sources you can browse and use.

Finding OERs

UCL's OERs are published on OpenEd@UCL and the university's research is published on UCL Discovery as an integral part of its open access policy.

Other OERs related to higher education can be found on websites or specialist repositories for research, learning, and teaching resources.

UCL Collections
UCL on other platforms
UK
International
Images

Using OERs

Find OER and open content that is relevant and suitable for the teaching content you want to tailor and/or create. These can include diagrams which illustrate a certain point, or a presentation that you can adapt for your students.

Identify and understand licences

Once you have found an OER you want to use, you need to determine what permissions are needed to use that item and follow the terms of that items license.

Often, a resource will have a Creative Commons licence attributed to it; this will indicate whether the OER can be copied, and/or re/used for commercial purposes, and/or modified, and/or require attribution, and/or must be shared with the same licence.

Third-party content and obtaining permission

Third-party content is content that is licensed or owned by another person or organisation other than yourself. You can use third-party content in your OER as long as you have obtained permission to do so.

Where the licence and re/use information for an OER is not explicitly stated, you must obtain clarification and permission from the creator/owner of the teaching content before you use it.

It is your responsibility to retain permission information; the OER team and UCL Copyright Support Officer can provide support information.

Including attributions

If you are using an OER and need to attribute the author, the Creative Commons Wiki page details best practice for attribution. We recommend the following attributive text as a minimum citation.
Note: [italicised text within square brackets] defines properties must be selected and bold text indicates where hyperlinked information is required:

Attribution[s]: [Document/image/presentation/etc.] [adapted/copied] from "[document title]" by [Author name] (UCL), which is licensed under the [CC BY-SA 4.0/etc. licence].

You can also use this useful tool from Open Washington to create an attribution. You need to insert details such as the title, who created it, and which open licence is used, and the tool will build the attribution for you.