Day 2: Searching – Licensed Resources

Neon 'Open' sign
Reading Time: 3 minutes

We have looked at open-licensed images, such as the Creative Commons licenses, pre-approved for reuse and sharing. The images used on this blog come with Creative Commons licensing terms – we know that we can use them, because their owners granted permission. Please note that using material available for free or licensed for reuse, should be rights cleared, and that you include an appropriate attribution.

Information

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 material for use online, is the uncertainty of how to source third party material copyright cleared for educational use. The most common infringement is the unauthorised copying and uploading of images and journal articles. In order to best protect yourself against unintended infringement, we recommend you take a look at the excellent list of resources available for reuse that the Library and Learning Centre (LLC) subscribes to.

Open - written in lights
Attribution: © Finn Hackshaw 2016, used under a Creative Commons Zero license – CC0 1.0 via Unsplash

Embedding video in Blackboard

While you may have found Blackboard’s ‘Mashup’ tool useful for Yuja (the University’s video service) and YouTube, it can be a bit more fiddly to embed other video tools. This video shows you how to use embed codes that bob and other licensed services use.

Finding relevant material

In this activity we would like you explore the library’s Types of Resources – electronic resources that includes e-books, e-journals as well as video, image and sound repositories. The subject guides are useful for pointing you to subject specific resources – but don’t ignore other subject areas, you might well find useful resources.

  1.  How might you re-use the material for your teaching or your own development?
  2. What are the advantages and disadvantages for using licensed material, in particular, what are the terms and conditions for re-use as these can vary and what are the restrictions for use in the VLE?
  3. How do you feel about searching for licensed images using the library’s collection as opposed to searching for material ‘out there’ on the web?

Please post a comment to share your views about one or two of the resources that you’ve looked at. You are encouraged to comment on each other’s entries and you may wish to take notes in your blog, tweet or anything related to this activity.

Note: While most content can be used via your Dundee authentication off campus wherever you are, some, e.g. bob  (Box of Broadcasts) are limited to the UK only.

LinkedIn learning (Lynda)

The University subscribes to LinkedIn Learning (used to be called Lynda). You can login using your University email address – note that it may ask you if you want to link it with your existing LinkedIn profile, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. While this predominantly covers Business, Creative and Technology courses, if you’re in other fields you may find that some of the Office 365 videos are useful to get a greater understanding of what you can do with the tools we have. For example, there’s one on using Office 365 teams

Resources and guides

Uploading e-journals and articles downloaded from the web into the VLE is not permitted. Instead of uploading articles create web links to the articles into your module or use the Library’s online Reading Lists service.

Link of the day

Instructables is a fun resource for exploring and for sharing resources on how to make things. Always read the terms and conditions for use.

Instructables – Explore. Share. Make.