https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/

The University of Minnesota has created an Open Textbook Catalog as “a tool to help faculty find more affordable textbook options.” The site goes on to say that all textbooks in the catalog are:

• Openly Licensed. Acceptable licenses include Creative Commons Attribution, Attribution-Share Alike and Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike or similar. Some books may fall under a No-Derivatives license if the publisher offers an adequate customization program.
• Complete. Only complete books, similar to traditional textbooks currently on the market, are included. Materials such as lecture notes, online courses, or drafts, are provided only as supplements to textbooks listed in the catalog.
• Suitable for Adoption Outside the Author’s Institution.
• Available in Print. Because most students still prefer print textbooks to digital, all textbooks include a print option, generally for $40 or less. In some cases, textbooks without a print-on-demand option may be included if they are sufficiently easy and inexpensive to print locally.

http://www.konomark.org/

As if the world of open content licenses wasn’t confusing already, along comes another one, well, sort of.

Konomark isn’t actually a license, but instead a symbol which you can place on your website

“that lets visitors to your website know that you are generally willing to share your copyrighted content, such as photos, educational materials, music, etc., with folks like yourself, for free. The konomark is an invitation to e-mail you and ask you for permission.”

So slightl different than the Creative Commons approach but with similar ends. Konomark doesn’t remove all of the “friction” from sharing, but it does help you know when asking is worthwhile, and unlikely Creative Commons, very much insists a request be made and acknowledged before the reuse happens.

http://www.morguefile.com/.

Very handy site of free, high quality images that you are free to re-use with very little restrictions short of claiming ownership or reselling them “as is.”

http://eng.letscc.net/

There are many ways to search for only Creative Commons-licensed materials, but the new Let’s CC provides one of the most elegant integrated searches for CC materials that I have seen. It allows you to filter by audio, images, rich media or otherwise and searches a large number of sources for reusable material. – SWL