Open Content at Saylor Academy

Saylor Academy's main project is providing free, self-paced certificate and credit courses to students around the world (find out more).

But our courses are also open courseware (OCW) comprising open educational resources (OER). As such, most materials you find at Saylor Academy can be reused in some fashion.

Our courses are curated from free-to-use and OER content created by others. This content uses a variety of licenses. Original content that we create, including the structure of a course uniting all the learning materials, is typically licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

If you want to browse our materials, these links will be most immediately useful:

Reusing/Revising a Saylor Academy course

Licensing and Copyright

Think of a Saylor Academy course as a musical compilation album -- Saylor Academy produced the album and provided some of the tracks, but many of the tracks are from different artists and different labels and are included by license or permission. We give the album away for free and give permission to share or even remix it, but depending on what you want to do, you might not be able to use all of the same tracks.

If reusing or revising Saylor Academy content, it is your responsibility to identify, understand, and comply with all licensing terms.

Most original Saylor Academy content is licensed CC BY, including:

  • course structural elements (introduction, notes and instructions, sequence/outline, learning outcomes, etc.);
  • original learning resources created by Saylor Academy other than final exams;

You may find content in our courses such as logos from our partners institutions. These remain the intellectual property and/or trademark of their respective owners.

Final exam items (the questions and answers in our exam banks and/or an individual exam attempt) are not licensed for reuse. See our licensing information page for details.

We use many third-party learning materials that each have their own specific license and terms of use. We will identify ownership and rights information on the resource itself, in our description of the resource in a course, and/or on the terms of use page that accompanies every course.

When in doubt, it is safest to assume that a resource is "all rights reserved" and you should consult the original work or creator to determine whether your use of the work is permitted.

For example, you might revise a Saylor Academy course by keeping the structure/framing in place while replacing some or all of the learning materials. You might reuse a course as a whole after confirming that you have the same rights to use or link to the third party materials that Saylor Academy has.

Attribution

When reusing or adapting Saylor Academy's original content under the CC BY 4.0 license, you should provide attribution that, at a minimum, identifies Saylor Academy as the creator, links back to our site or to the materials, indicates the license, and describes modifications you have made.

Details on attribution for the CC BY license are in section 3.a of the license text.

Third party materials should be attributed in accordance with their respective owners and licenses.

Technical Considerations

We use the Moodle learning management system (LMS) to deliver our courses. Depending on which LMS your institution or organization uses and what kind of technical support you have available, you might be able to make use of the following to facilitate course re-use:

Course backup files on GitHub
We keep Moodle Backup (.mbz) and Common Cartridge (.cc) files for active courses in our Course Backups repository on GitHub. We can provide more recent files on request.

API
We maintain a Moodle API that provides access to course contents.