Monday Connect: Complete College Photo Library- open licensed photos of real students/campuses

The Plaza
1

Where do you look to find open licensed images of teachers, students, learning situations? For today’s monday-connect we send you to the Complete College Photo Library – " a free, open-source photo library showing a representative view of authentic college students on real campuses" (see more information).

Each photo has full attribution, license details, a text description suitable for alternative text.

Asian female instructor working on an engine with a Hispanic male student in auto shop on a college campus.
Asian female instructor working on an engine with a Hispanic male student in auto shop on a college campus.1920×1281 493 KB

Photo by Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library CC BY-NC 4.0

You can browse collections or categories like Campus Life, Career and Technical Education, the Arts, to name a few, or via tags like adult learner, meeting, or tutoring center.

Note that these images are specifically from a set of six universities and community college in the USA, but still might be of use for other OER materials.

Explore the Complete College Photo Library and see/share if you can find an image that might be of use to you.

Or let us know where you go to to find open licensed images to represent teaching and learning in action- is it Unsplash or Pexels or somewhere else? Or does your institution or organization provide a set of media available to you? Ot maybe now you are relying on Generative AI for creating thee images you need.

Share your thoughts about finding/using images to show what education/learning/teaching looks like.

Also of interest is EDUimages by the Alliance for Excellent Education which offers a similar collection of openly licensed images of/from prek-12 students from seven US schools.

1 Like
2

What a great source of images! Sometimes it is hard to find photos of real people in real context. I use Unsplash often for some design purposes, but lacks images of people doing actions like students on campuses.

3

Glad to hear this might be useful. I agree that Unsplash is great for people photos, though sometimes they look a bit staged, like a bunch of smiling people sitting around a table pointing at a screen, and as you say, you might have to interpret if its a good fit to show a scene from education.

I was also reminded of a fabulous project from Thompson Rivers University, Indigenous People in Education a stock photo collection of learning in action, all shared Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

So again I wonder how many other institutions create their own photo collections for representing teaching and learning in real educational contexts.