Most of the content shared on the Internet is protected by copyright; even if no © symbol, ‘all rights reserved’ statements or the word ‘copyright’ are explicitly used. That means you are not allowed to copy or reuse it. While in many countries there are exceptions to copyright for education and teaching (often known as ‘fair use‘), they are largely limited to closed environments (i.e. the physical classroom, virtual learning environments) and vary wildly from one jurisdiction to another. The best way of ensuring you can use and modify online content is to search for Open Educational Resources (OER), that are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions”. (2012 OER Paris Declaration). Read the Open Content definition by David Wiley to find out more about the principles underpinning this concept.

Several projects exist on how to organise Open Educational Resources, for example OER Commons, Connexions, Khan Academy and Saylor.org. In these platforms you can search, browse, and evaluate resources, exploring some curated collections of full university courses, interactive mini-lessons and simulations, adaptations of existing open work, open textbooks, and so on.

If you want to extend your search to the world wide web you can resort to Google advanced search functionalities. Google search offers various operators (highlighted in the following table) that allows you to define your search terms accurately. You can read more about advanced search operators here.