A Complete Guide to Creative Commons Licenses for OER

If you’ve ever downloaded a lesson plan from the internet, reused an image in a presentation, or shared a textbook chapter with colleagues, you’ve likely encountered a Creative Commons (CC) license. These licenses are the backbone of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, giving educators clear, legal permissions to use, share, and adapt content without navigating complicated copyright negotiations. Understanding how CC licenses work is essential for any teacher or content creator who wants to participate in this growing ecosystem of freely accessible learning materials.

What is a Creative Commons license? 🔗

A Creative Commons license is a standardised legal tool that allows creators – from individual teachers to large institutions – to grant the public permission to use their work under specific conditions. Instead of the default “all rights reserved” approach of traditional copyright, CC licenses operate on a “some rights reserved” model. The creator retains ownership of their work but clearly states what others can and cannot do with it.

The system was designed by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig and activist Eric Eldred in 2001, and the first CC licenses were officially released in December 2002. The motivation was straightforward: there was a gap between full copyright protection and the public domain, and creators needed a simple way to share their work legally without giving up all their rights.

From a user’s perspective, seeing a CC license on a resource immediately answers the question: What can I do with this work? This clarity is especially valuable in education, where teachers routinely need to copy, adapt, translate, and redistribute learning materials for their classrooms.

Today, CC licenses have been used on over 2 billion copyrighted works worldwide. Major platforms and organisations – including Wikipedia, Flickr, Khan Academy, and OpenStreetMap – use them extensively.

The four building blocks of CC licenses 🔗

Before diving into the six license types, it helps to understand the four conditions (or “elements”) that make up every CC license. These are combined in different ways to create each specific license.

Attribution (BY): Every CC license requires this. Anyone who uses the work must give credit to the original creator. This is non-negotiable across all six license types.

ShareAlike (SA): If someone creates a new work based on the original (an adaptation), the new work must carry the same or a compatible license. This creates a “pay it forward” effect where openness spreads through derivative works.

NonCommercial (NC): The work may only be used for purposes that are not primarily aimed at commercial gain or financial compensation. It’s worth noting that the restriction is about the use, not the user – a for-profit company could potentially use NC-licensed material in a non-commercial way, and using OER in a tuition-based educational course may still count as non-commercial.

NoDerivatives (ND): The work can be shared and redistributed, but it must remain unchanged. No remixing, translating, or adapting is permitted. Even changing the colour of an image or translating a text into another language would count as creating a derivative.

The six types of Creative Commons licenses 🔗

These four elements are combined into six distinct licenses, arranged here from the most permissive to the most restrictive.

CC BY (Attribution) 🔗

This is the most open of all CC licenses. Others can copy, distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work – even for commercial purposes – as long as they credit you. There are no other restrictions. It’s the license most commonly recommended for educators who want their materials to reach the widest possible audience. The University of California Academic Senate, for example, strongly encourages researchers to use CC BY when depositing scholarly articles.

CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike) 🔗

This license allows the same broad freedoms as CC BY – including commercial use and the right to create adaptations. However, any new work built upon the original must be released under the same or a compatible license. This creates a growing pool of openly licensed content. Wikipedia uses this license, which is why all Wikipedia content and its derivatives remain freely available.

CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) 🔗

With this license, others can remix, adapt, and build upon your work, but only for non-commercial purposes. They must also credit you. However, people who create derivatives are not required to license their new works on the same terms – they can add further restrictions like SA or ND if they wish.

CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) 🔗

This combines three conditions: credit the creator, use it only for non-commercial purposes, and license any adaptations under the same terms. It’s a popular choice for educational content because it keeps materials free for teaching while ensuring that adapted versions also remain non-commercial and open. Most Khan Academy videos are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, and Yale Open Courses also uses this license for its lectures and course materials.

CC BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivatives) 🔗

This license allows redistribution – both commercial and non-commercial – but the work must be shared in its original, unmodified form. No remixes, translations, or adaptations are allowed. This is useful for creators who want their work to spread widely but want to maintain control over the integrity of the content.

CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) 🔗

This is the most restrictive of the six CC licenses. Others can download and share the work, but only if they credit you, don’t change it in any way, and don’t use it commercially. It provides the creator with maximum control while still allowing the public to access and share the resource freely.

It is worth noting that licenses containing the ND element are generally not considered true Open Educational Resources because they don’t allow the adaptation and remixing that is central to the OER philosophy.

Choosing the right Creative Commons license 🔗

Selecting the right license depends on your goals. Ask yourself two key questions: Why do I want to share this work? and How do I want others to use it?

Here’s a practical framework for decision-making:

Do you want maximum reach and impact? Go with CC BY. It removes the most barriers and allows anyone to use your work in any way, provided they give you credit. This is ideal for educators who want their materials adopted globally and translated into other languages.

Do you want to keep derivatives open too? Choose CC BY-SA. It ensures a chain of openness – any adaptation of your work must also be openly licensed.

Do you want to prevent commercial exploitation? Add the NC element. Licenses like CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-SA prevent publishers or companies from profiting off your work without your permission.

Do you want to prevent any modifications? Add the ND element. This is appropriate if you want your content shared exactly as you created it – for instance, a research report where accuracy and context are critical.

Creative Commons provides a free License Chooser tool on their website that walks you through these decisions step by step and generates the appropriate license code for your work.

How to apply a CC license to your OER 🔗

One of the best things about Creative Commons licensing is its simplicity. You do not need to register anywhere or contact Creative Commons. You simply choose a license and mark your work with it. Here are the practical steps:

Step 1: Confirm you hold the copyright 🔗

Before licensing, make sure you actually own or control the copyright to the work. If you created the material as part of your employment, your employer may be the copyright holder, and you may need their permission first. Similarly, if your resource includes third-party content (like images or text from other sources), ensure those components are either your own, in the public domain, or already openly licensed in a compatible way.

Step 2: Select your license 🔗

Use the Creative Commons License Chooser to determine which license fits your needs. The tool asks you a few questions about how you want your work used and then recommends the appropriate license.

Step 3: Mark your work clearly 🔗

Include a clear licensing statement on your work. For a document or presentation, this could be as simple as adding a line like: “© 2026. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License” – along with a hyperlink to the license deed on the Creative Commons website.

For websites and digital content, the License Chooser generates ready-to-use HTML code that includes the license icon, a link to the legal deed, and machine-readable metadata that helps search engines identify and filter your content by license type.

Step 4: Use platforms with built-in CC licensing 🔗

Many content-sharing platforms support CC licensing natively. YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons all allow you to select a Creative Commons license when uploading your work. This takes care of both the display and machine-readability of the license automatically.

Step 5: Understand that it’s irrevocable 🔗

Once you apply a CC license, it cannot be revoked. Anyone who received the work under that license can continue using it under those terms for as long as copyright applies, even if you later stop distributing the material. So choose carefully.

Examples of CC-licensed OER in practice 🔗

Creative Commons licenses power some of the world’s most recognised educational platforms. Here are a few notable examples.

MIT OpenCourseWare 🔗

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is one of the pioneering OER initiatives. It publishes materials from over 2,500 MIT courses online – including lecture notes, exams, and video recordings – all under Creative Commons licenses. The open licensing has enabled translations into at least 10 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Ukrainian, vastly expanding the reach of MIT’s educational content.

Khan Academy 🔗

Khan Academy offers thousands of tutorial videos covering subjects from mathematics and science to economics and art history. Most of its video content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, which means educators can share and adapt the videos for non-commercial educational purposes as long as they credit Khan Academy and license their adaptations under the same terms.

OpenStax 🔗

OpenStax is a nonprofit initiative based at Rice University that publishes free, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks. These textbooks are used by millions of students worldwide and help address the rising cost of educational materials. The open licenses allow institutions to customise the content for their own courses and contexts.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons 🔗

Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, operates entirely under the CC BY-SA license. This means anyone can reuse, edit, and redistribute its content, provided the new work carries the same license. Wikimedia Commons serves as a massive repository of openly licensed images, audio, and video that educators draw from constantly.

OER Commons 🔗

OER Commons functions as a central hub where educators can discover, create, and share open educational resources from multiple sources. Each resource on the platform displays its CC license clearly, helping users understand exactly how they can use the material.

Why Creative Commons matters for the future of education 🔗

The connection between CC licenses and OER is not just practical – it’s strategic. In 2019, 193 UNESCO member states unanimously adopted the OER Recommendation, urging governments to support openly licensed educational materials. Creative Commons was part of the drafting committee for this recommendation, and CC licenses are a core technical component of how OER works globally.

For teachers, CC licenses lower the cost of education by making high-quality materials freely available. For content creators, they provide a legal framework that protects authorship while enabling sharing. For institutions, they unlock the ability to localise, translate, and adapt resources to suit diverse learner needs.

The most important thing to remember is that Creative Commons licensing is not about giving up your rights. It’s about choosing which rights to share, so that your work can have a greater impact.

What do you think? If you were to apply a Creative Commons license to your teaching materials today, which license would you choose – and what factors would influence your decision? How might widespread adoption of CC-licensed OER change the way education is delivered in your context?

References

1. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license
3. https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/scholarly-publishing/creative-commons-licenses/
4. https://pose.open.ubc.ca/open-education/creative-commons/what-are-the-different-types-of-creative-commons-licenses/
5. https://answers.library.losrios.edu/crc-oer/faq/382718
6. https://www.openwa.org/khan-academy-page/
7. https://pressbooks.pub/oerbydiscipline/chapter/open-courseware-learning/
8. https://beckerguides.wustl.edu/c.php?g=299583&p=2000864
9. https://creativecommons.org/chooser/
10. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking_your_work_with_a_CC_license
11. https://pitt.libguides.com/openlicensing/cc-using
12. https://ocw.mit.edu/
13. https://creativecommons.org/about/education/education-oer-resources/
14. https://www.khanacademy.org/
15. https://oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/128904/overview
16. https://creativecommons.org/2019/11/28/coalition-to-support-unesco-oer-recommendation/