Open Education Resources (IU Indy)

Creating an OER allow you to tailor resources to your students' needs and learning outcomes while contributing to a more accessible and equitable educational environment. This section provides suggested OER creation tools and information on Creative Commons licensing to help guide you along the creation process.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that promotes the use of Open Educational Resources by providing copyright licenses that provide both protections for the content creator and permissions for those wanting to use that creator's content.  It is the application of a Creative Commons license that most clearly identifies an Open Educational Resource.  

There are currently six available Creative Commons licenses to choose from.  They are:

• Attribution (CC BY)  This license lets you distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the original work, even commercially, as long as you credit the original creation.  This is the most accommodating of licenses offered.
• Attribution-ShareAlike  (CC BY-SA)  This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon the original work even for commercial purposes as long as you credit the original work and license your new creations under the identical terms.  This license is often compared to 'copyleft' free and open source software licenses.  All new works based on the work should carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.  This is the license used by Wikipedia.
• Attribution-NoDerivs  (CC BY-ND)  This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the original work.
• Attribution-Noncommercial  (CC BY-NC)  This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon the original work non-commercially.  Your new works must be non-commercial and acknowledge the original work, but you don't have to license your derivative works on the same terms.
• Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)  This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon the original work non-commercially, as long as you credit the original work and license your new creations under the identical terms.
• Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)  This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing you to download the original work and share it with others as long as you credit the original work.  You can't change the original work in any way or use it commercially.