Open educational resources (OER) are developed to provide pedagogically meaningful, high-quality materials that can be used across different levels of education and in a variety of learning contexts. Openness supports accessible teaching, reduces the duplication of effort and facilitates the collaborative development of educational resources. Open practices help to ensure that teaching is transparent and shareable.
The national library of open educational resources (aoe.fi) is the recommended platform for publishing and accessing OER. The Tampere University Library has also published a guide titled Open education and open educational resources, which brings together information on open licences, the publication of educational resources, and the use of open resources.
How to make educational resources openly accessible
Select the resources (such as a presentation, assignment, instructions or video). Consider the target audience and briefly describe the purpose of the resources.
Verify authorship and ensure compliance with copyright restrictions. Ensure that you are authorised to make the resources openly accessible. This includes materials you have created, co-authored works, student outputs and any third-party content.
- The author determines whether to make the resources openly accessible and selects an appropriate licence, unless copyright has been transferred. Agree on co-authorship and the licence in advance, including in the case of student output. The original source must always be acknowledged, even when resources are made available under an open licence.
- Third-party content (such as images, tables, articles or recordings) may not be used without permission. Youi must obtain the necessary permissions or use materials released under an open licence instead.
- Read more about accounting for copyright when publishing OER.
Assess data protection and ethical considerations. OER must not include personal data or detailed information about students. It is important to comply with data protection and copyright requirements and the principles of research ethics.
- If the processing of personal data is necessary, you must identify the lawful basis for processing, adhere to the principle of data minimisation, and consider whether the data can be anonymised. Do not include sensitive data or any information that could lead to the identification of students in OER. Openness must be implemented in accordance with legal and ethical requirements.
- Read more about data protection.
Ensure the accessibility of the resources. Ensure the resources are clear, understandable and technically accessible. Higher education institutions have a legal obligation to comply with accessibility requirements. Accessibility improves usability for all users.
Select the appropriate license. A Creative Commons license indicates how others may use, edit and share your resources. The most commonly used licences for educational resources are CC BY (Attribution) and CC BY‑SA (Attribution-ShareAlike). Use the license chooser tool to select an appropriate open licence for your OER.
- If you want to enable broad reuse and adaptation, choose CC BY.
- If you want adapted versions to remain openly licensed, choose CC BY‑SA.
- If you want to restrict the use of your resources to non-commercial purposes only, include the NC condition. Please note that an overly restrictive license may limit the usability of your resources.
- Ensure that your resources include appropriate attribution, including the creator’s name, the licence and the source.
Ensure the high quality of the resources and provide metadata. High-quality OER are pedagogically coherent, up to date and clearly described.
- The expected learning outcomes, target audience and user instructions should be clearly stated.
- Appropriate metadata should be provided (including the title, authors, description, keywords, language, licence, version and date of publication).
- Provide an adaptable version of the resources, along with a list of references and citation instructions.
- Assess the quality of the resources against the national guidelines (available in Finnish only) and quality criteria.
- Read more about accounting for the quality of OER.
Publish the resources on a suitable platform. Aoe.fi is a national service for sharing, accessing and storing educational resources. OER can also be published via platforms such as Opin.fi, DigiCampus Moodle or TUNI Moodle.
- Opin.fi is a digital service maintained by Finnish universities and universities of applied sciences, showcasing their openly available study opportunities. The service enables users to search, compare and enrol in courses.
- The DigiCampus learning environment was developed to support collaboration between higher education institutions in Finland and to advance their shared educational goals. The platform is used for jointly delivered courses, openly accessible Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and collaborative projects and networks involving partner institutions and stakeholders.
- TUNI Moodle is a virtual learning environment used at Tampere Universities. It can also be used to host openly accessible online courses.
Provide an adaptable version of your resources (such as a file created in word processing or presentation software) alongside the PDF, so that your colleagues can further develop and adapt the content.
- You should also share the editable source file (such as .docx/.pptx) and use accessible file formats.
Promote the visibility of the resources and keep them up to date. Share a link to the resources on course pages and in your professional profiles, keep version information up to date, and respond to feedback.
