Searching, Using & Sharing

When staff want to add materials to learning resources, whether they are resources they’re intending to use in class, or material to supplement learning that they want to put into My Dundee, they are used to checking the materials to ensure their accuracy. However, a big concern of staff at present, is ensuring they have…

Over recent years many people and organisations have started to take advantage of Creative Commons, a set of free licences that allow individuals to licence their works for reuse under certain conditions or to put them into the public domain.

The focus of today is on introducing tips to searching and reusing high quality resources that are licensed but available for your teaching. One of the challenges that many academics face when preparing online material in the VLE, is the uncertainty of how to source third party material copyright cleared for educational use.

Over the last two days, we have concentrated primarily on images; both those that are creative commons, and those that are licensed via the University. However, many staff want resources that aren't images to support their learning resources. If you looked at the State of the Commons report in the first day of this course, then you'll know that Creative Commons licences are applied to all media types. We will be looking at some of these today.

There are a lot of ways to publish and share content. Where you decide to publish your work will depend on the type of content and the audience that you want to reach and how you want to licence it. Photographs, pieces of writing, videos, presentations, data and 3D models can all be shared in different places, with some platforms better suited to particular types of content. It’s important review the terms and conditions of any publishing platform you choose to make sure that you’re not transferring or losing the rights to your own work.

Once you’ve found content you’re going to want to use and today we’ll begin to explore some ways that you might do that that which are a bit more appealing than giving students a list of links in a Word document or in the VLE.