If you are creating your own OER, you will need to decide what rights you will share with the people using your creation, and consequently, which Creative Commons license you should use. We recommend a CC BY or CC BY-SA license. However, the license needs to reflect the content you are re-using, because the license will dictate to a certain extent which content you can re-use.

Steps for choosing a license

Go to the Creative Commons license chooser. It will ask you two simple questions about how you want to share your materials, and then tell you which license to use.
Make sure the license you have chosen is compatible with the materials you will be reusing. This chart shows which licenses are compatible with each other:

CC license compatibility chart

For example, if your chosen license is CC BY-NC, but you are using a lot of text from Wikipedia, which is CC BY-SA, you can see that those two licenses are not compatible. For a clear video explanation of the concept of license compatibility, see this "Creating OER and Combining Licenses" video by Florida Virtual Campus beginning at 00:04:23. (This video carries a CC BY-SA license.)

Steps for Adding the License to Your Materials

Once you have chosen a license, you will need to add it to your content. The Creative Commons license chooser mentioned above will generate the correct icon and text for you to copy and paste into your materials.

It is best practice to include the following information when you add the license:

License icon (smaller or larger ), which can be downloaded on the Creative Commons website
License name
Link to license deed, which explains in simple language what the user's rights are (example)

For COERLL sponsored projects, please follow these standards when licensing your materials:

Each deliverable should be clearly marked with the CC license of the Project director’s choice, and refer to the authors and to COERLL.
Videos should end with the COERLL logo, UT logo, and Creative Commons bumper downloaded from the Creative Commons Wiki

Examples:

The following screenshot shows a lesson plan that is clearly licensed:

An example of well-licensed materials

The following video is clearly licensed:

Open licenses for local contexts

Local Contexts is an initiative to support Native, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous communities in the management of their intellectual property and cultural heritage specifically within the digital environment. This is useful because Creative Commons licenses may not always be appropriate for sharing protected cultural heritage. See also Creative Commons' statement on the topic.

Learn More about Creative Commons, Copyright, and Open Licensing

Check Your Knowledge

Go to the Finding & Using Open Educational Resources game created by David Wiley and BYU Independent Study. Play one round. What happened?

Please provide feedback on these modules by filling out this short survey.

Go to the next page to learn more about remixing and revising OER.