10-2 Free Stuff!

Who doesn’t love free stuff?

Perhaps a less controversial way to think of it is that truly great work is often built collaboratively, with content creators building on the insights and accomplishments of each other interdependently. There are many artists and designers who want you to use resources they’ve built!

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and re-use of creative works through copyright licenses permitting certain uses. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author’s work, so they don’t have to worry about copyright infringement – as long as they abide by the conditions of the specific license.

If you search for images in Google, click Search Tools on the right, and then click the Usage Rights menu, you’ll see an option to restrict search results to images that are licensed for reuse and modification. These images are generally either public domain or licensed using CC. Make sure that you save citations, including licensing information, for any image you download and use!

You can also search for CC licensed media directly from the Creative Commons search page.

Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources are freely accessible documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, assessment, and research purposes.

The OER Commons search is a portal to resources from around the world made freely available for everyone to use. Accessible assets include: full courses, modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab activities, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world.

While predominately used by educators, non-profits, and government organizations, others also utilize and contribute to OER materials.

Other Links to Free Stuff

(caveat: some of these are free to try, free with ads, free with limited functionality, etc.)

• List of free authoring tools
• Free e-learning templates from Articulate’s blog
• Free images from Pixabay (also displays some promoted images that require purchase)