OER@UCT

I often get asked,

How do I find openly licensed images that I can use in my teaching materials, which I can also use towards the creation of OER?

Openly licensed image repositories are quite commonplace these days.  With a few billion people taking photographs around the world, one can quite easily find a picture to match any need.  As more and more amateur photographers are adopting open licenses such as Creative Commons we can easily find an openly licensed photo using the right search engines. 

My personal favourite general image search engine is Compfight.com - compfight searches through Flickr (a widely adopted image hosting website) for images which were specifically designated under the Creative Commons (CC) license model, which means you can use these images under the approachable terms of the CC license. 

Here I have searched for Fynbos which brings up almost 1000 openly licensed images which I can use in my teaching material and for the creation of OER.  

 

If you are looking for images specific to Health Sciences the Gray's Anatomy database of images in Wikimedia is a fantastic place to start.  All of these images appear to be in the public domain so should be easy to use and share.  

Also for Health Sciences is the database of images from Patrick Lynch from Yale University which are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.  You are therefor free to use these images as long as you give attribution to Patrick Lynch. 

During our monthly tea we officially celebrated the completion of the OER UCT Project. Fortunately, the project shall continue on its trajectory, supporting and advising academics on sharing open educational resources, as we have funding to continue our work to ensure UCT can contribute to the growing global knowledge commons. 

Everyone from the Centre for Educational Technology wore their OpenContent t-shirt.  Look at those lovely t-shirts!!  Wouldn't you love one?  You can get one by being the next contributor to the OpenContent directory!  You will also receive a fancy coffee mug!

The OER UCT project team; from left, David Horwitz, Stephen Marquard, Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Michael Paskevicius, Shihaam Donnelly, Michelle Willmers, Roger Brown, and Haley McEwen, who miraculously made an appearance on her lunch break whilst teaching in the Eastern Cape.  ;)

I created the wordle above using the search terms which have been submitted to the UCT OpenContent website. The larger the word, the more often it is being searched in the directory.  I find it fascinating to see what people are searching for in the directory!

Most of these terms were likely submitted by UCT students and staff exploring the directory.  Many would have also been submitted by interested or potential students and other self learners around the world.

I was intrigued to see terms like 'reference' and 'referencing' come up quite often.  One can assume that students are looking for materials which would help them properly reference their writing!   I know that the wonderful UCT library has an excellent resource on referencing on their website.  Maybe we need to make that more discoverable by listing it in the OpenContent directory?

Also note that people are looking for materials on the environment, anthropology, corporate governance, and many more!  Departments take note!  We would love to see more open content from those subject areas which are in demand.