LibGuides: Open Educational Resources &amp; Open Access: Evaluating, adopting &amp; collaborating with OERs

Copyright & OERs

Open Educational Resources differ from other commercial materials not only because they can be shared at no cost to the reader, but also because they employ an open licence that allows creators to grant adaptation rights and decide whether commercial use is permitted or not. A Creative Commons licence can be used for those purposes.

To know more about the different Creative Commons licences and how to use them, check the Creative Commons section in the navigation menu.

Using copyrighted materials in OERs

It is possible to use copyrighted material in the creation of OERs as long as the use is permitted under fair dealing or the author of the work has granted permission for the use. See the links below for best practices suggestions when using copyrighted materials in OERs.

CARL - Code of Best Practices in Fair Dealing for Open Educational Resources
The Code of Best Practices in Fair Dealing for Open Educational Resources: A Guide for Authors, Adapters & Adopters of Openly Licensed Teaching and Learning Materials in Canada was adapted from its U.S. counterpart, the Code of Best Practices in Fair
Use for Open Educational Resources.
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources
A Guide for Authors, Adapters &Adopters of Openly Licensed Teaching and Learning Materials
Strengthening Canadian User Rights through Shared Understanding
Adapting the Codes of Best Practices in Fair Use for Canada
Copyright Open Educational Resource for University Instructors and Staff

OERs at YukonU

OERs at Yukon University: a quick guide for exploration, adaptation, and creation
British Columbia/Yukon Open Authoring Platform
Campus Open Education has created a self-serve instance of Pressbooks. This is available for instructors and staff from post-secondary institutions in British Columbia and the Yukon. Please note, when signing up for an account, you must use your institutional email.
Scholarly Activity Grant (SAG)
YukonU Scholarly Activity Grant (SAG): if you are YukonU faculty and your OER project can be framed as a research project (e.g. open pedagogy projects may be aligned that way), you can apply for SAG.

Open Textbooks Platforms

Pressbooks Guide - BC Campus
Pressbooks is a book content management system that exports in multiple formats: ebooks, webbooks, print-ready PDF, and various XML flavours. It is one of the main platforms for the creation of open textbooks.

This Pressbooks Guide does not replicate information provided by the Pressbooks Userguide published by Pressbooks.com. Instead, in parts and chapters laid out to mimic the steps an author might take to create or modify an open textbook in Pressbooks, it redirects readers to pertinent chapters in the Pressbooks Userguide, supplements it with additional information, and includes instructions specific to post-secondary faculty and staff working in British Columbia and the Yukon.

Evaluating, Adopting & Creating

Remixing works with multiple CC licenses

All Creative Commons licenses allow users to make adaptations/remixes of works as long as attribution is provided and specific license terms are observed (for example, an NC license cannot be used for commercial purposes). There are, however, a few other considerations to keep in mind.

Is your work a collection -- meaning you are simply putting several works together, but without modifying them -- or an adaptation, in which you are making modification to one or more works? This can impact how you can use materials and which licence you can use for your own work. For more information about collections x adaptations, check this about collections and this page about adaptations.
When the work employs a NonDerivatives license (ND), for example, the work can still be adapted for personal use, but the resulting adaptation cannot be shared with the public.
For materials that have a ShareAlike (SA) license, the conditions will change depending on whether the work using that material is or not an adaptation. If the work is not considered an adaptation, the work may be shared under any license terms. However, if the work is an adaptation, the work must shared under the same SA licensing conditions of the original.
Not all CC licenses can be combined in an adaptation. The chart below demonstrates which licenses can be remixed, with compatible licenses marked by a green check mark.

CC License Compatibility Chart was created by Kennisland and is in the Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

OERs and Open Pedagogy

Open pedagogy, also known as open educational practices (OEP), is the use of open educational resources (OER) to support learning, or the open sharing of teaching practices with a goal of improving education and training at the institutional, professional, and individual level (BC Campus, n.d.).

Open Educational Resources & Open Access