OERs are made available under open licences such as Creative Commons, giving you freedom to use them in many ways. To qualify as an OER, five freedoms must be permitted:
Retain: You may archive, store, or otherwise keep your own copy of the material in any form that you see fit. This would include being re-uploaded into UTS Online or other learning software; or being kept on your own computer for later use.
Reuse: You may use the material in any form you see fit. Feel free to take visual elements from the work and include them in a video, include sections in your lesson slides, or take sections and use them to produce worksheets.
Revise: You may edit the work as required. For example, you may wish to take an OER from overseas and then revise it to match the Australian context.
Remix: You may use more than one resource and combine them; provided that you adhere to the licences of both resources.
Redistribute: You may share this resource in any way you want.
While these rights must be present, some may come with a few strings attached. For example, some may be licensed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike licence which would require you to share any derivative works you create under the same license. However, this does not take away from the fact that OERs are incredibly powerful resources that can be used in any number of ways.
While not the only open licensing scheme available, Creative Commons (CC) is the most popular of them and the one most likely to govern open-educational resources. Understanding how they work is therefore important for using OERs.
There are a number of Creative Commons licences available:
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