OER UCT: Sharing educational resources

The OER UCT project, currently run in the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT with the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation, aims to showcase the teaching efforts of UCT academics by encouraging the publication of resources as OER. Offering new visibility for teaching materials and global individual profiling on international OER sites, a directory listing the UCT Collection of OER will go live from early 2010. We'd like your resources to be included here, so join the global move to share, remix, improve and redistribute your teaching resources.

Understanding the OER movement

Key resources

  • InfoDev Briefing sheet: Quick guide: Open educational resources (
  • Open Educational Resources - Opportunities and Challenges for HE
  • OECD OER Handbook
  • A Review of the OER Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities
  • Cultural and Organisational Drivers of Open Educational Content – Malcolm Read

Finding OERs
Key portals and institutional repositories

  • Audio ( / (
  • Images (
  • Open Courses(
  • Research (
  • Text (
  • Video ( / (
    General
  • Open Learn (
  • Rice University’s Connexions (
  • Open Yale (
  • Open Culture (
  • Creative Commons website (
  • SlideShare (

Creating or re-mixing OER
Key resources

  • OLCOS Roadmap 2012 (
  • OER Handbook(
  • UNESCO OER Toolkit (
  • University of Manitoba – Free OER Online Course Module

Licensing OER
Key steps

  • Step 1: Ensure that you have copyright for the resource (if not, ask for written permission or find an alternative).
  • Step 2: Choose a licence (
  • Attribution: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
  • Share-alike:You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
  • Non-commercial:You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for non-commercial purposes only.
  • No Derivative Works:You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
  • Step 3: Include the licence details in the resource
  • Visit the Creative Commons Licence ( page and use their simple licence chooser to select a Creative Commons licence that indicates how others may use your creative content. (These responses to the questions will be used to automatically generate HTML text which includes all these details for an electronic version of the Creative Commons licence that you have chosen. The HTML code will display an icon as well as a link to the full license deed hosted at the Creative Commons site. Note that you also need to select a legal jurisdiction (country). South Africa is listed at the end of the drop down list).
  • For electronic works: Cut and paste this HTML text on your website.
  • For non-electronic works: Select the option "Mark a document not on the web, add this text to your work." (This is only available once you have chosen a licence.) In addition,it is recommended that you download the appropriate CC icon ( and paste it onto your word-processed document for a paper-based cc licence.

Sharing OER

Key steps

  • Publish on a website or VULA and make it publicly available.
  • Link to international portal (e.g. OER Commons) or institutional repository/directory (UCT in process of developing a directory).
  • Include metadata (see list on VULA site: Introduction to OER).

Useful contacts

General OER UCT queries

Michelle Willmers: –ext. 3477/3841(or) 082 229 4262

Michael Paskevicius: –ext.3477/3841

Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams: – ext 3411/5030

Vula queries

Roger Brown: –ext.4425/3841

Companion site on Vula:

OER UCT project blog: