Producing your own OER

We invite you not only to make use of OER created by others, but also to share your own teaching materials with others and, in this way, raise the profile of your teaching. There are a few points to bear in mind, which we have summarised here.

The authors of open educational resources specify the conditions for the use of the materials they have created by means of one of the Creative Commons licences, also known as CC licences. The most commonly used licences in the context of open content are:

• CC 0 (‘CC Zero’): no attribution required; allows use without any conditions (although German copyright law does not recognise a complete waiver of moral rights),

• CC BY: redistribution and adaptation provided the author’s name is credited,

• CC BY SA (“Share Alike”): distribution and adaptation provided the author’s name is credited and under the same conditions, i.e. the adapted material must be licensed under the same licence (CC BY SA); a licence more permissive than the original licence would not be permitted for the newly created material.

Detailed information on Creative Commons licences can be found here.

To correctly attribute your own open educational resources, the five requirements set out in the TULLU rule must be observed:

• Title (T) of the material in question,

• Attribution of authorship (A) with reference to the university,

• Licence (L) including version number,

• Link to the full licence text (L),

• Source (U): indication of where the work can be found.

To generate a correct and machine-readable licence containing the details required by the TULLU rule, the current legal text and a pictogram, we recommend the useful tool License Chooser. It generates the required information in just three steps.

There are many free, OER-compatible resources that you can access online and incorporate into your OER, for example:

• Wikimedia Commons with over 127 million media files, including photos, illustrations and graphics, videos and audio files

• The Noun Project: An extensive icon library with millions of symbols, based on two pricing models (free with attribution; a premium subscription allows use without attribution)

The ZLL team will be happy to help you label your materials correctly and can also advise on other aspects, such as the most suitable platform for your OER. You may also find the Canvas template for creating an open educational resource at Graz University of Technology helpful.