Curating materials from existing content sources

It is usually easier to adapt or use existing materials than it is to design your own materials from scratch. Here are some repositories that may provide media or course materials that you can use in your course. Please keep in mind that just because something is on the internet that does not mean that it is free to use without attribution. Always verify the use requirements for anything you find online.

Be sure you are a careful curator – selecting only the best content for meeting your specific learning outcomes – and track the location of resources that you are interested in so that you can cite them.

Video Repositories

ABC Documentaries search for documentaries that aired on ABC in Australia.
Australian Screen contains information about and excerpts from a wide selection of Australian feature films, documentaries, television programs, newsreels, short films, animations, and home-movies produced over the last 100 years.
BigThink offers interviews and insight from the world’s most influential experts in business, entertainment, education, religion, and media.
Bloggingheads.tv offers split-screen video dialogues about politics and ideas.
Crash Course Videos are made by the author John Green, his brother Hank, and other subject matter experts. All videos in the series are free to use and licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license but you can support them if you like through Paetron.
Folkstreams.net has videos related to American roots culture.
Fora.tv streams free and pay-per-view programs from conferences, summits, public forums, university debates and think tanks across the globe.
EUscreen offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives from the early 1900s to the present.
The Global Oneness Project produces documentary films and interviews that explore ecological, economical, and social systems.
Learner.org is a video collection from Annenberg Media.
LinkTV gathers global and national news, documentaries, and cultural programs.
MITWorld hosts talks by innovative thinkers.
NFB.ca offers films produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
PBS Video offers a number of their original programs.
PeoplesArchive collects videos of people telling their stories.
Ri Channel features science videos created by the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
The Science Network has videos from a number of branches of science.
SnagFilms offers hundreds of full-length documentary films for free.
TED Talks contain videos of “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.”
UbuWeb hosts a large archive of online avant-garde media, including a film/video collection that features work by such artists as Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, and Allen Ginsberg.
UCTV is a non-commercial channel featuring programming from the University of California
Videolectures.net provides free access to video lectures presented by scholars from many fields of science.

Image Repositories

ARTStor has a digital library of nearly one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. Contact your campus library for free access.
Compfight is a Flickr search engine that lets you easily search for images licensed for reuse, attribution usually required.
Everystockphoto is a search engine for free photos.
Flickr Creative Commons lets you find images that Flickr users have chosen to offer under a Creative Commons license.
iStock Photo, by Getty Images, has millions of high-quality royalty-free photos, illustrations, videos, and audio files available for a small fee.
Morguefile is a free archive of images shared by photographers which can be used without attribution.
Openclipart is a repository of free clip art.
PDPhoto is a database of public domain photos.
Pics4Learning has images that are free for use in education.
Pixabay provides high-resolution images free for use without attribution.
Stockvault.net is a site where photographers and designers share their stock photos for free non-commercial use.
Stock.XCHNG has free stock photos, attribution required.
Wikimedia Commons offers freely usable images, audio, and videos, attribution required.
Imageafter is large online free photo collection.

Audio Repositories

ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons.
Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds (not songs).
PartnersInRhyme offers music across many genres for a small fee. It also has free and paid music and sound effects.
SoundSnap has free and paid sound effects and loops recorded by users.
UbuWeb’s sound page has music by avant-garde artists.
FreePlay is a music library. Freeplay Music allows free educational use. See point 5.(b) (2) in their terms of use. You can search for different styles and "feels".

Course Material Repositories

Academic Earth offers college-level online courses and videos.
The Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative offers open online courses.
Connexions offers free modules that you can incorporate into other materials.
The Internet Archive provides free access to its digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
Khan Academy has online video courses on a number of subjects.
MIT Open Courseware (OCW) provides free lecture notes, exams, and videos from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) has a searchable collection of free peer-reviewed online instructional materials.
The Open Courseware Consortium has open online courses from around the world.
Open Yale Courses provides free access to introductory courses taught by Yale faculty.
The World Digital Library (WDL) offers, free of charge and in multilingual format, primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

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