Research Guides: Open Educational Resources, Copyright & Creative Commons: Start Here

OER Newsflash and Professional Development

Lumen Circles Fellowships: Learning Communities for Effective Teaching

Lumen Circles Fellowships provide opportunities to connect with other faculty members as you explore effective instructional practices that support student success and apply them in your own teaching. Through the fellowship you can learn, share ideas, and develop professionally in the areas you want to grow.

Lumen Circles Fellowships are available at NO COST to SUNY faculty and campuses.

Lumen Circles work well for any faculty member, in any discipline, at any stage of career. You do NOT need to use courseware to be eligible for this program.

Fellowships include:

9-week community of practice with faculty from multiple institutions
Weekly activities to explore, apply, and reflect on effective teaching practices (~2 hours/week)
Build on your strengths and develop skills to expand your teaching repertory
Set goals and track progress expanding your teaching practice profile
Work asynchronously in a virtual platform (website) to fit your own schedule
Earn a Lumen Circles Fellowship Certificate in Effective Teaching Practice

Real Chem
Calling all Chemistry Faculty! Gen Chem I and II courses are now available for piloting and contributing to openly-licensed content on the openly-licensed Torus platform.
Inclusive Access
You may have heard terms like "automatic textbook billing" or "All Access" or "First Day", but what does that mean?

Conference and Webinar Presentations- Upcoming and Recordings

2025 Foreign Language OER Conference- March 2025
The fifth annual Language OER Conference was held online on Saturday, March 8th 2025 and highlighted materials in Arabic, Chinese, English as a Second Language, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. The videos linked capture all of the presentations from the event and are listed in the order of presentation.
Open Education Week (OE Week) 2025
OE Week is a community-built, open forum where you can find inspiration from open educational practitioners around the world, as well as share your work. Recordings from sessions held virtually March 6-10 are available.
SUNY Open Ed Week- March 2025
Recordings from SUNY's Open Ed Week 2025 include presentations like "Group Work for Diverse Classrooms", "Using Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health Counseling Classes Online", and more.
2025 Oregon Virtual Statewide OER Symposium
The 2025 Oregon Virtual Statewide OER Symposium was held on May 2, 2025, showcasing open education projects and impacts across the state of Oregon. We are celebrating 10 years of Oregon's open education community of practice! We seek to inspire participants with takeaways to apply to their own work in open education.
"What is Open Pedagogy?: with Robin DeRosa
Beyond saving students’ money using free, open learning materials, what are the pedagogical approaches that have emerged in the Open Education movement?

OER and Pedagogy

MERLOT Pedagogy Community Portal
A collection of OER related to pedagogy, including teaching strategies, instructional design, learners and learning, teaching challenges, and assessment.

Creating and Publishing OER

OER Tools for Publishing & Development Initiatives
A list of 80 tools for OER publishing and development initiatives from the Open Education Database.

Top OER Sources

Khan Academy
Provides text, instructional videos, practice exercises, and more on a wide variety of subjects; especially strong in math, science, computer programming, history, art history, and economics.
LibreTexts
"The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society."
Hover over "Explore the Libraries" to select a subject area.
MERLOT
"MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community" (MERLOT website). Search keywords such as international education college* or global education college*, or specific geographic areas or languages, for lists of free educational materials, personal collections of website links compiled by MERLOT members about various topics, and peer reviews of MERLOT and other educational resources.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier.
OASIS was developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
OER Commons
Searchable and browsable collection of OER for arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, applied sciences and technology, and math.
Openverse
Explore and reuse works that have been created using Creative Commons. (Previously known as "CC Search".)

Creative Commons, Other IP Tools, and Copyright

Creative Commons Licenses
Largely in response to the restrictions and limitations of copyright law, numerous "open" intellectual property (IP) tools have been developed in recent years and are now one of the three main components of Open Educational Resources (OER). Of these IP tools, the licenses from the Creative Commons nonprofit organization have become the most utilized and helpful components for the OER movement. These licenses, which are easy for the average person to use and understand, are also legally solid, and machine readable, which also makes them a natural ally in finding OER. As a result, programmers have constructed Creative Commons (CC) filters for search tools.

Creative Commons and OER

Creative Commons licenses and OER. Image: Cable Green (2015) Taking OER Mainstream. CC-BY 4.0.

GNU General Public License is an example of another "open" software license. It originates from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and ensures that every user receives the essential freedoms that define "free" software, which is free of restrictions (see free software). Also called "GPL" and "GNU GPL," it was created to distribute the software of the GNU operating system. Approximately 70% of free software packages are released under this license, including most GNU programs and thousands of others. The GNU General Public License is also considered an open source license (see open source).

The Copyright information page for Cal State Chico contains general information about copyright in addition to Chico's copyright and intellectual property policy. Also see MCC Libraries' Copyright & Creative Commons guide.