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Open Educational Resources

This guide provides a basic understanding of Open Educational Resources (OER), including how to find, evaluate, and use OER materials for your own curriculum.

Image Websites

When developing OER curriculum, images may be desired. Some of these sites are completely open access, while other sites offer only selected images for open access. Be sure to read each site's conditions for use carefully – different images from the same site may have different use restrictions. 

Still Images

  • PublicDomainPictures.net is a repository for free public domain images. Download high quality HD photos or upload your own.  If you intend to use an image you find here for commercial use, please be aware that some photos do require a model or property release. Pictures featuring products should be used with care.
     
  • Creative Commons Image Search  CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset.
     
  • Public Domain Images  Public domain images, royalty free stock photos, copyright friendly free images. Not copyrighted, no rights reserved. All pictures on this site are explicitly placed in the public domain, free for any personal or commercial use.
     
  • Stock Exchange  Free stock photo's. The site contains thousands of free images that can be used. While many of the pictures are free some of the images do require written permission first.
     
  • Wikimedia Commons Fantastic media repository that is part of the Wikipedia umbrella project where users are free to use any of the sites photos, audio, videos, and other media freely.
     
  • Flickr: The Commons  A great feature from Flickr where institutes such as The Library Of Congress, Powerhouse Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and various users can post and share images that have no known copyright restrictions.
     
  • Art Images for College Teaching  Art and architecture images photographed by art historian and visual resources curator Allan Kohl.
     
  • Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Images from the Library of Congress, now in the public domain.
     
  • National Gallery of Art  Images of these works are available free of charge for any use.
     
  • Open-i - Open Access Biomedical Image Search Engine The Open-i project aims to provide image retrieval services from biomedical articles from full text collections such as PubMed Central.​
     
  • Digital Public Library of America Brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
     

Moving Images

  • Internet Archive   This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.
     
  • Museum of the Moving Image  The Moving Image Source Research Guide is a gateway to the best online resources related to film, television, and digital media.
     
  • Open Video Project   The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities.

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