Hosting Your OER: Where to Share What You’ve Made

Creating an open educational resource is only half the job. Where you host it shapes how findable it is, who can access it, and how long it stays usable. This page helps you choose the right platform for your resource – just to clarify, we don’t host resources on this site; we promote them and help people find them on the platforms that they are hosted on.

When you’re considering where best to host your resource, think about these questions:

  • What type of resource is it? (video, document, dataset, image, interactive etc)
  • Who is your primary audience? (other educators, students, the public, researchers)
  • How likely is the content to change? (stable vs. regularly updated)
  • Do you want analytics, version control, or institutional branding?

Then choose the most appropriate platform to host your OER (this list is not exhaustive; if you find somewhere more appropriate, let us know and we can add it to the list!)

Platforms and what they’re suited to

Durham Research Online (DRO)

Best for: citable, stable resources that benefit from a persistent DOI and institutional affiliation.
Suited to: written materials, datasets, course packs.
Consideration: less visible to general web searches; better for academic audiences.

OER Commons

Best for: resources intended for reuse by other educators globally.
Suited to: teaching materials, lesson plans, assessments.
Consideration: requires clear metadata and licensing at point of upload.

YouTube / Vimeo

Best for: video content intended for wide reach.
Suited to: lectures, demonstrations, explainers.
Consideration: apply a Creative Commons licence at upload; YouTube’s default is ‘All Rights Reserved’ which locks your resource down completely and means nobody can legally reuse or adapt it, which rather misses the point of sharing it openly in the first place!

Flickr / Wikimedia Commons

Best for: images and photographs.
Suited to: visual resources, archival images, photography.
Consideration: Wikimedia Commons offers the highest discoverability for images intended for broad reuse.

GitHub / GitLab

Best for: code, data, and technically oriented resources.
Suited to: scripts, datasets, computational notebooks.
Consideration: versioning is built in; licences must be added manually via a LICENSE file.

Your own site or departmental blog

Best for: resources you want to contextualise or update regularly.
Suited to: reflective teaching resources, blog-format OERs, resource collections.
Consideration: discoverability depends on SEO; no persistent identifier unless you add one.

Sketchfab

Best for: 3D models, virtual tours, and spatial visualisations intended for open sharing and embedding.
Suited to: resources involving archaeological artefacts, anatomical models, geological specimens, architectural visualisations, or any teaching material that benefits from interactive 3D exploration.
Consideration: Sketchfab allows models to be embedded directly into web pages and VLEs, making it genuinely useful for teaching rather than just archiving. The free tier has limitations on model size and privacy settings; check whether your department has or needs a paid account before uploading. Creative Commons licences can be applied at the point of upload.

Zenodo

Best for: research-adjacent resources: datasets, computational notebooks, supplementary materials, and resources that benefit from a citable DOI and long-term preservation.
Suited to: academics who want their OER to be treated as a citable output, or where the resource sits at the boundary between teaching and research.
Consideration: Zenodo is run by CERN and funded by the European Commission, making it a stable, trustworthy host for long-term preservation. It is less discoverable to educators browsing for teaching materials than OER Commons or subject-specific repositories, so it works best alongside a listing on a directory like this one rather than as a standalone hosting choice.

A note for science and STEM staff

If you are working in a science or STEM discipline, the platforms listed above, particularly OER Commons and Zenodo, are the most reliable routes for hosting and sharing your resources. For physics and astronomy specifically, ComPADRE offers a subject-focused community where your resource can reach educators working in those fields.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)

Best for: extending the reach of a resource you have already hosted elsewhere, by making it discoverable to an international community of educators.
Suited to: any discipline. MERLOT covers arts, business, education, humanities, mathematics, science, technology, and social sciences across a wide range of resource types including presentations, tutorials, case studies, and simulations.
Consideration: MERLOT is a sharing and discovery platform, not a repository. It does not store or host your resource; instead, it links out to wherever your resource already lives. To use it, you register your resource by submitting its URL along with a title, description, and subject tags. Once listed, your resource becomes searchable by educators worldwide and can be peer reviewed by subject specialists, adding credibility and visibility. Think of it as a signpost rather than a storage solution: you need a hosting platform first, and MERLOT then helps people find it.

Licensing: don’t skip this step

All OERs shared under Durham’s policy should carry a Creative Commons licence. CC BY 4.0 is the recommended default – it allows maximum reuse while requiring attribution. If your resource includes third-party content, check permissions before applying an open licence.

→ Read the Durham OER Policy
→ Read more about Creative Commons licences

Need advice?

The Digital Education team in DCAD can advise on platform choice, licensing, and metadata before you publish.