Where and How to Share Your Open Educational Resources

Creating an open educational resource (OER) is only half the job. The other half – and arguably the more impactful part – is getting it into the hands of other educators and learners. Sharing your OER effectively means choosing the right platforms, applying the correct open licences, and using distribution strategies that maximise reach. This post walks you through the main channels and practical steps for sharing your open educational resources with the world.

Why sharing OER matters 🔗

The entire philosophy behind OER rests on the idea that educational materials should be freely accessible, reusable, and adaptable. The UNESCO Recommendation on OER, adopted in 2019, was the first international normative instrument dedicated to openly licensed educational materials. It explicitly encourages member states to support the creation, sharing, and redistribution of OER to promote equitable, inclusive, and quality education globally. But policy support means little if educators do not know where and how to share what they create. The good news is that there are now several well-established platforms – from dedicated repositories to mainstream social media channels – that make the process straightforward.

Platforms for sharing OER 🔗

There is no single centralised place where all OER must live. Instead, educators can use a mix of platforms depending on their audience, content type, and institutional context. These platforms broadly fall into four categories: institutional websites, personal websites and blogs, dedicated OER repositories, and social media platforms.

Institutional websites and repositories 🔗

Many universities and educational organisations maintain their own OER collections. For example, MIT OpenCourseWare publishes course materials from across the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The University of Michigan’s Open Michigan initiative makes research, teaching, and creative outputs available to the wider world. If your institution has an OER policy or a digital repository, that should typically be your first point of sharing. Institutional hosting lends credibility to the resource and often comes with built-in discoverability through the institution’s website and library catalogue.

Personal websites and blogs 🔗

Not every educator works at an institution with an OER infrastructure. A personal website or blog – built on platforms like WordPress or similar content management systems – is a perfectly valid place to host and share OER. The key is to clearly attach a Creative Commons licence to your materials so that others know exactly how they can reuse, adapt, and redistribute your work. A WordPress blog, for instance, allows you to add open licence information in the footer or on individual resource pages, making the usage rights immediately visible to visitors.

Dedicated OER repositories 🔗

The most reliable way to ensure your OER reaches a global audience of educators is to upload it to a well-known OER repository. These repositories are specifically built to catalogue, host, and make educational resources searchable. We will look at the major ones in detail in the next section.

Popular OER repositories you should know 🔗

Several established repositories serve as go-to hubs for educators looking for and sharing open resources. Here are some of the most widely used ones.

OER Commons 🔗

OER Commons is one of the largest and most recognised public digital libraries for open educational resources. It allows educators to search, discover, create, and share OER from a wide range of disciplines and education levels. OER Commons provides an Open Author tool that lets you build resources directly on the platform with both instructor-facing and student-facing views. It also supports a Groups feature, which gives teams of educators a flexible space to organise, discuss, and collaboratively develop resources. OER Commons partners with over 120 content providers to aggregate a growing collection of more than 50,000 resources.

MERLOT 🔗

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a free, open community designed primarily for higher education. Faculty, staff, and students worldwide can contribute learning materials and access peer-reviewed resources. MERLOT stands out for its peer review system, which helps maintain quality across its vast collection. If you want your OER to reach a higher education audience and benefit from community evaluation, MERLOT is an excellent choice.

OpenStax 🔗

OpenStax, based at Rice University, is a nonprofit that produces free, peer-reviewed textbooks. While it is mainly known for its own openly licensed textbooks, it also functions as a repository where educators can find high-quality materials aligned with common course structures. OpenStax textbooks are released under Creative Commons licences, allowing you to adapt and redistribute them freely.

OASIS 🔗

The Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) tool does not host resources itself but searches across dozens of open content sources simultaneously. Having your OER listed in a repository that OASIS indexes means it becomes discoverable through this meta-search tool, significantly expanding your reach.

A note on JORUM 🔗

JORUM was a well-known UK-based OER repository managed by Jisc. It hosted thousands of free learning and teaching resources from UK higher and further education institutions. However, JORUM has since been retired, and its content has been migrated or archived. Educators previously using JORUM are now encouraged to explore alternatives like OER Commons, MERLOT, or institutional repositories for hosting and sharing.

Steps for hosting your OER on a repository 🔗

The exact process varies from platform to platform, but the general workflow for uploading and sharing your OER on a repository like OER Commons follows a consistent pattern.

Step 1: Register and create an account 🔗

Start by creating a free account on the repository. On OER Commons, for instance, registration gives you access to the Open Author tool and your personal “My Items” dashboard where you can manage drafts and published resources.

Step 2: Create or submit your content 🔗

Most repositories give you two options: create content directly on the platform using built-in authoring tools, or submit an existing resource hosted elsewhere by providing its URL. On OER Commons, if you choose to submit a web-hosted resource, you enter the URL, and the system automatically suggests metadata fields like title, description, and subject area. If you use the Open Author tool, you build the resource in three stages: a Write mode for adding content, a Describe mode for entering metadata and aligning with standards, and a Publish mode for selecting your licence and making it live.

Step 3: Add accurate metadata 🔗

Metadata is what makes your OER findable. Fill in the title, a clear description, subject areas, education level, material type (e.g., lesson plan, textbook, activity), and keywords. Good metadata dramatically increases the chance that other educators will discover your resource through search.

Step 4: Choose a Creative Commons licence 🔗

Selecting the right Creative Commons licence is a critical step. The licence determines how others may use your work – whether they can modify it, share it commercially, or must share derivative works under the same terms. The most permissive option is CC BY (Attribution), which allows any reuse as long as you are credited. More restrictive options include CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike), CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial), and CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives).

Step 5: Submit for review 🔗

On platforms like OER Commons, your submitted resource goes through a review by the platform’s librarians, who verify the licensing information and metadata accuracy. This review typically takes 24-48 hours. Once approved, the resource becomes publicly searchable.

Collaborative OER development with WikiEducator 🔗

Not all OER needs to be created by a single educator working alone. Collaborative development can produce richer, more comprehensive resources – and WikiEducator is one of the best platforms for this approach.

WikiEducator is an international online community project dedicated to the collaborative development of learning materials that educators are free to reuse, adapt, and share without restriction. It was launched in 2006 with the support of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and is now maintained by the OER Foundation, headquartered at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand. The platform runs on MediaWiki – the same software that powers Wikipedia – making it familiar and accessible to anyone who has edited a wiki before.

How WikiEducator works 🔗

WikiEducator hosts a range of educational content: lesson plans, full courses, school portals, and funding proposals. Educators can create an account for free and begin editing or contributing to any existing resource. The platform’s collaborative model means that multiple contributors can work on the same course or learning module, refining it over time through peer editing.

WikiEducator also runs a training programme called Learning4Content (L4C). Through this initiative, educators receive free training in wiki editing skills. In return, participants commit to developing and contributing at least one free learning resource back to the community. This model has trained thousands of teachers from over 113 countries. WikiEducator also serves as the primary authoring platform for the OERu (Open Education Resource universitas), a collaboration of institutions offering free learning pathways using OER with options for learners to earn formal academic credit.

Other collaborative tools 🔗

Beyond WikiEducator, platforms like Wikiversity (a Wikimedia project for learning resources at all levels) and Google Docs (for co-authoring and sharing materials with a public link) also support collaborative OER creation. The choice depends on the level of collaboration you need and the audience you are targeting.

Using social media for OER distribution 🔗

Dedicated repositories are essential for archiving and cataloguing, but social media is where you can generate awareness, spark conversations, and reach educators who might never browse a formal repository. Social platforms are particularly useful for promoting newly created OER and building a community around your work.

YouTube 🔗

YouTube is the obvious choice for sharing video-based OER such as recorded lectures, tutorials, explainer videos, and demonstrations. A key feature for OER creators is that YouTube supports Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licensing. When uploading a video, you can select the CC BY licence instead of the standard YouTube licence, which explicitly permits others to copy, redistribute, and build upon your video. This makes your educational content truly open. One caveat: YouTube is blocked in some countries, so relying on it as the sole distribution channel may limit accessibility in certain regions.

Flickr 🔗

Flickr remains a valuable platform for sharing educational images, infographics, diagrams, and photographs. Flickr supports the full range of Creative Commons licences, and its dedicated Creative Commons section makes it easy for users to find openly licensed images. Educators can upload visual resources, tag them with relevant keywords, and apply an appropriate CC licence. Other educators can then search Flickr by licence type to find images they can freely use and adapt in their own teaching materials.

X (formerly Twitter) and other microblogging platforms 🔗

Microblogging platforms like X (formerly Twitter) are not hosting platforms for OER content, but they are powerful tools for promoting and distributing links to your resources. Sharing a link to your OER on a repository, accompanied by relevant hashtags like #OER, #OpenEducation, or #EdTech, can quickly connect you with a global network of educators. Many OER communities, institutional OER services, and educational organisations actively use X to highlight and amplify open resources. For instance, the University of Edinburgh’s OER Service regularly promotes resources through its dedicated social media channels.

SlideShare and SoundCloud 🔗

For presentation-based resources, SlideShare allows you to upload and share slide decks under Creative Commons licences. Similarly, SoundCloud supports CC licensing for audio content – making it suitable for sharing podcasts, audio lectures, recorded discussions, and language learning materials. Both platforms make it easy to specify the licence type during the upload process.

Best practices for social media sharing 🔗

When sharing OER on social media, keep a few things in mind. Always include the licence information – even a brief mention like “CC BY 4.0” in the description helps. Provide a direct link to the resource or the repository where it is hosted. Use descriptive hashtags and tag relevant communities or organisations to increase visibility. And remember that social media posts are ephemeral, so the actual resource should always be housed on a stable platform (like a repository or institutional website) that the social media link points to.

Choosing the right licence before you share 🔗

No matter which platform you use, the Creative Commons licence you attach to your resource is what legally defines it as “open.” Without an open licence, your work remains under default copyright, meaning others cannot freely reuse or adapt it – even if you intend for them to. The Creative Commons licence chooser is a simple online tool that helps you select the right licence based on how you want your work to be used. At a minimum, most OER use a CC BY licence, which requires only that users credit you. If you want to prevent commercial use or require derivative works to carry the same licence, there are more restrictive options available.

Getting the licence right before sharing is important because changing it after the resource is already circulating can create confusion. Take a few minutes to understand the options, and apply the licence clearly on the resource itself and in all metadata fields when uploading.

Putting it all together: a sharing strategy 🔗

The most effective approach is to use a combination of platforms. Host your resource on a dedicated repository like OER Commons or MERLOT for long-term discoverability and proper cataloguing. If your institution has an OER repository or digital library, submit it there as well. Then, use social media – YouTube for videos, Flickr for images, X for promotion – to drive awareness and traffic. If your resource is the kind that benefits from ongoing updates and contributions from others, consider developing it on a collaborative platform like WikiEducator.

The goal is to make your OER as easy to find, access, and reuse as possible. The more places it exists and the more clearly it is licensed, the greater its impact will be.

What do you think? Have you shared any of your teaching resources as OER, and if so, which platform worked best for reaching other educators? What barriers, if any, have prevented you from sharing your educational materials openly?

References

1. https://www.unesco.org/en/open-educational-resources
2. https://ocw.mit.edu/
3. https://creativecommons.org/about/education/education-oer-resources/
4. https://oercommons.org/
5. https://www.merlot.org/
6. https://openstax.org/
7. https://help.oercommons.org/support/solutions/articles/42000046849-submit-oer
8. https://creativecommons.org/
9. https://wikieducator.org/
10. https://www.col.org/
11. https://www.wikiversity.org/
12. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468
13. https://www.flickr.com/
14. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/