I am not very original and I like to find materials on the web to ‘spice-up’ my hybrid and online courses. However, I frequently find things that are wonderful, but I am never sure as to their usability with regards to copyright and fair-use. Fortunately, there is a wealth of resources out there that are available under some very clear and user-friendly licensing. So, let me first briefly discuss Creative Commons licensing and then point you to some wonderful web sites that support either Creative Commons licensing or clearly stated licensing materials for use in your course.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has established some legal tools to allow content authors to share their creative works under six different licensing schemes. The schemes are outlined on the website. In the simplest of terms, all of the licenses require, as a minimum, attribution. This means you give credit to the author for the original creation. The rest of the licenses add on one or more of these attributes: NoDerivs, NonCommercial or ShareAlike. Rather than go into the detail, the site provides complete descriptions of the licenses in both a human-readable format (License Deed) or the less-friendly Legal Code. Below are a few sites where you can find some really great content licensed under CC.