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Open Educational Resources (OER): OER and Canvas

A guide for faculty and staff at Seattle Central College who wish to adopt or create OER materials

How to use the Open Attribution Builder tool in Canvas

On all the rich content boxes in our Canvas courses, we have access to an "Open Attribution Builder," located in the drop-down menu under the blue "V" icon along the content box editor. This makes it really easy to:

  1. Cite yourself by inserting a CC-license attribution for single pages or modules in Canvas
  2. Plus it's a way to easily cite content from others, like YouTube videos or CC-licensed images from Flickr or Pixabay, that you have integrated into your course.

Two in one!

Here's a 2-minute video with basic guidelines on how to use the "Open Attribution Builder" to license open materials you create or use in Canvas:

Video source: "Using the Open Attribution Builder to License Canvas Content" by Matthew Bloom, Standard YouTube license

Text source:  Adapted from "Sample CC license attribution statements to use on LS documents and course pages" by Jennifer Snoek-Brown, Tacoma Community College, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

How to openly license your courses in Canvas

By default, the courses we create in Canvas retain traditional, private copyright. But you can change that default setting to make your courses in Canvas openly licensed. This way, you are also contributing your own OER!

Below are condensed instructions for how to set a Creative Commons license for your courses in Canvas. You can read more in this Canvas Guide about the types of available content licenses, and more instructions and screenshots about setting a CC license for a course in this Canvas Guide.

1.  Open up your course and go to Settings. The "Course Details" tab should be the default Settings page.

2.  Scroll down to the License drop-down menu and select a license option, as seen in the screenshot below:

Canvas Course screenshot

3. Be sure to click the "Update Course Details" button at the bottom of this page, or your changes won't save!

4. Doublecheck your course's home page. Once you have updated your course details, go back to your course's home page. You should now see the relevant CC license statement automatically added to the bottom of the home page. Here's a sample below:

CC license statement in Canvas course home page

Text source:  Adapted from "How to make your LS courses openly licensed" by Jennifer Snoek-Brown, Tacoma Community College, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0