Open Educational Resources: For Students

There are two ways for students to find classes that use low (under $40) or no-cost course materials:

• Search for classes on the PCC website class schedule page, putting a checkmark in the "show classes with low cost materials only"  box.

          pcc.edu/schedule

• When searching/registering for classes via MyPCC, use the "Advanced search" when entering your search criteria, and select "Low cost textbooks" in the "Attribute" field.
  
  

Where to find openly-licensed images

Openverse 
Openverse brings together many freely-available image collections from the web (such as Flickr and Wikimedia), making them searchable in one place. Openverse makes it easy to attribute (cite) the image as well by providing an attribution tab for each image.

Google Image Search
Use Google's image search feature to find images that have Creative Commons licenses (open licenses). After searching for images by keyword(s), use the "Tools" menu to find "Usage Rights" options, and choose "Creative Commons licenses", as shown below:

Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons is a repository of images, videos, sounds, and 3D models that are all freely-usable. 

Flickr
Flickr hosts many openly-licensed images and videos. Not all of the content on Flickr has an open license - once you've searched by keyword, click the "Any license" drop down menu, and choose "all creative commons" to limit results to openly-licensed images.
 

A note about licenses and attribution
Make sure the image's license allows for the way you're using it. For example, some open licenses allow you to edit or alter an image, while some do not. 

"Attribute" and "cite" mean the same thing. Attribution is a central value of open-licensing. Be sure to give proper attribution to any openly-licensed image you use. See the "how to cite OER" box to the right if you have questions about citing.

Ask a PCC librarian if you have questions about finding or citing openly-licensed materials. We are happy to help!

The PCC Student Toolkit for Textbook Affordability and Open Educational Resources (OER) is a great way to learn more about the OER and affordable-textbook movements, and is full of excellent ideas for ways students can increase awareness and use of OER at PCC. 

ASPCC, PCC's student government, is active in supporting and advocating for affordable textbooks costs for students, including the use of OER at the college, and several ASPCC members serve on the OER steering committee. Connecting with ASPCC is another great way to get involved in OER advocacy at PCC.

Want to advocate, but need help with talking points and what to say? Check out these sample scripts from Open Oregon's toolkit for students.

Citing an open educational resource is the same as citing any other source: if your instructor asks for a specific citation style, such as APA or MLA, cite the OER the same way you would any other book, ebook, webpage, etc, following the formatting for that particular style. A citation creation tool can be useful.

Alternately, when not required to use a specific citation style, try using the TASL method for citing your OER material. Designed by Creative Commons as a way to cite openly-licensed materials, TASL is easy to do. The four parts are:

Title of the work
Author(s) of the work
Source of the work (usually a link to the work, can be hyperlinked to the title)
License used by the work (the type of open license).

See an example of a TASL citation below this image:

Lioness2010 by Ltshears is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Give others permission to share and use your own creative work by adding a Creative Commons license to photos, videos, writing, songs and more. Creative Commons licenses vary - you get to choose the license that best matches how you would like for others to be able to use your work. The Creative Commons license chooser makes it easy to figure out which license might work best, and gives pre-formatted licensing statements that are ready to be added to your work.

Adding open licensing (like Creative Commons) to your work contributes to a culture of creativity, accessibility, sharing, and collaboration. 

Ask a PCC librarian if you have questions about adding a CC license to your work. We are happy to help!