Sources for Supplementary Course Material

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Why use supplementary material?

While most Course creators will create original content for most of their course, it can be beneficial to incorporate ready made content from other sources rather than reinventing the wheel.

Provided you respect any attached copyright and distribution restrictions, many educators are happy for their content to be shared to a broader audience.

This set of notes gives you guidelines on sourcing and evaluating online content that may be useful as supplementary course material.

You can decide how important this is to your course and design your course around this material, or include it as optional material for your learners.

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Images

There are images all over the internet - you can see them, but that doesn't mean that you can use them! Images will often be copyrighted even if it does not explicitly say so. However photographers or artists who want others to use their images will often share them with a Creative Commons License.

Some Creative Commons Licenses have strict conditions attached - for example, that you cannot edit or alter the image, or that you must provide attribution to the image creator. However one license has no such conditions attached. It's the CC0 license from Creative Commons - you can CC0 images in whatever ways you want, without attribution.

All CC0 images are in the 'public domain'. but the public domain is more expansive than this. Public

domain also includes work where the copyright has not been renewed or has expired . Copyright expiration varies by jurisdiction - in the US it’s

currently the lifetime of the author + 70 years copyright has not been renewed or has

expired

So, how do you find public domain images? We have compiled this list of websites to help you out!

Pixabay has a large

amount of CC0 photos.

New York Public

Library The NYPL has a large image collection and you can easily

check a box to limit your search to public domain. These are mostly old photos

and historic documents.

Unsplash all CC0 photos, and a nice interface.

Stockography free stock photos.

Flickr General Search with “No known copyright restrictions” for CC0 and public domain. You may also search for “All Creative Commons” and use CC BY, CC BY-SA, or CC BY-ND, provided you follow the license terms. There are also public domain Flickr groups.

Flickr Commons Collection of institutions

with publicly available images – be careful though – not all images from all

institutions are CC0 or public domain.

The Getty

Institute Mostly art and historical images. Search with filter “open

content images” .

Wikimedia

Commons includes CC0 and public domain but also many more restricted

CC licenses – use with caution.

Totallyfreeimages.com All images are in the public domain

Google Image

Search Advanced image search allows you to filter by labelled for

commercial use, but not by type o f license, so you still have to check the

source. It will almost always be more efficient to use a search that allows you

to filter by license.

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Video

YouTube and Vimeo are great sources for videos, but it can be hard to find what your looking for. Here are some suggestions for how to find great educational content:

WatchKnowLearn curates and organises free videos from all over the web, sorting by subject matter and age/ grade level

RSA Animate features really engaging videos with cartoons illustrating the key points of lectures on topics such as 'The Power of Networks' and 'Left Brain, Right Brain'

The National Geographic YouTube channel features thousands of videos on science, nature, and history

Khan Academy has thousands of free videos on school subjects

TED Talks have become famous for their engaging speakers and variety of topics

TED ED features short animated videos, made especially for education

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GoConqr Resources

GoConqr provides great tools for free, and users who don't want to keep their content private share it with other users in our content library. As we have over 3 million registered members someone has probably made a resource on the topic you are interested in.

It couldn't be easier to find - simply type in the keywords you are looking for, and you can filter my resource type: find the perfect Mind Map, Notes, Slides, Quiz, Flowchart or Flashcard deck. Then you can easily embed in a Course and add context using the Resource + Text templates.

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Public Domain Texts

Like with images, many texts are in the public domain, because the authors have chosen to make them available, or because the copyright has expired.

Here are places you can find public domain texts you can link to or share in your course

Project Gutenberg digitises texts that are in the public domain and makes them available as free ebooks. There are over 50,000 available on the site and you can search by keyword, or browse the subject based 'bookshelves'.

The Public Domain Review features a collection of public domain books (and other materials) and also posts articles and discussions about the public domain. Books can be downloaded as PDFs.

The Online Books Page is a collection of links to free books around the web, some of which can be downloaded as PDFs. The website is an index of links and does not store the books.