Easy re-use

Under enormous time pressure, suddenly all lecturers in the Netherlands and abroad have to offer their education online. Of course, they use materials that they already have or maybe they attempt to find materials from others that they can reuse or adapt to their own context. Of course, during these crazy times, everyone understands if you will not pay attention to whether you can actually use everything just like that. However, if you go through the following steps, you can easily and quickly meet the requirements for the re-use of other people's materials and you will not run into problems later concerning the misuse of materials.

Step 1. Search & find: of course you can just use search engines like Google or Yahoo. Make sure you search for materials that can be re-used. You can do this on Google via Advanced search > Use rights. There are also several educational search engines and repositories that contain interesting, up-to-date collections of educational resources.

Step 2. Assess: when you have found educational resources that you think are useful, you have to assess them. You delve further into the content, but it is also important to see what you can do with the materials. For that you need to check the licenses. If the material has an open license, you may probably use it immediately. Check what the licenses mean and what conditions you must meet on What are open learning materials.

Stept 3. Adapt: if you are going to use the material you found in your online education, make sure to state the correct sources. Add at least:

• author
• publication year or date of visit
• title source
• link to the source

Also, don’t forget to add a license to your newly made or modified material!

All these steps are described in detail in the step "Using other people’s open educational resources" in the step-by-step plan Introduction to open educational resources. In the Introduction to open learning materials you can read what open educational resources are, how you can use them in your own education and how you can set up your own materials in such a way that others can make optimal use of them.

If you have any questions about using open educational resources in your online education, please contact us!