Tagged for OEG Connect: Complete College Photo Library

OE Sharing Zone
1

What’s of interest? Complete College Photo Library

Tell me more!

The Complete College Photo Library provides a new view of higher education to shift how people see and understand the college experience.

The catalog of photos shows actual learning and student experiences in higher education. They represent the experiences of students, faculty, and staff on a variety of campuses from across the nation, illustrating real situations in authentic environments.

Complete College America (CCA) developed the image collection to address the limited number of open-source and affordable stock images, many of which are already overused, posed, and do not adequately illustrate real students in real situations, both inside and outside the classroom.

The higher education community has sought images that represent the experiences of students from historically excluded backgrounds, those attending community colleges, veterans earning a degree, working students on commuter campuses, first-generation students, those returning to school as adults, students at rural colleges, and Minority-Serving Institutions, including ANAPISISs, HBCUs, HSIs, TCUs, and more.

Where is it?: https://completecollegephotolibrary.org/

This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.

Or share it directly to the OEG Connect Sharing Zone

2 Likes
2

This is an extremely valuable source of open licensed photos especially for use in education, as the photos, locations are all real campus settings, not stock actors on a set, and also credit is given by name to the photographer.

I did find it interesting that the details on licensing are not anywhere in the descriptions, but as spelled out on a link on the main menu - all photos are licensed CC BY NC.

When you get to a page for a photo, here’s an example, it’s interesting as well the embedded image is watermarked, but you get the unwatermarked version after passing through the agreement statement from the download button.

Sample ohoto display page with a watermarked image, credit statement, license, tags, and caption - Multiracial group of students walking through an outdoor patio on a college campus.
Sample ohoto display page with a watermarked image, credit statement, license, tags, and caption - Multiracial group of students walking through an outdoor patio on a college campus.1920×1117 144 KB

Dialog box with I acknowledge that the photos I am using are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY_NC 4.0). Photo by Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library Agree and Download
Dialog box with I acknowledge that the photos I am using are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY_NC 4.0). Photo by Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library Agree and Download1176×1096 114 KB

The attribution is just text

Photo by Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library

so for my practice, creating the TASL format suggested by Creative Commons is a few more copy/pastes to include the license, the source link to the photo page. But I’m used to that.

I also noticed that the caption does work for a simple enough alternative text for the image, in this case:

Multiracial group of students walking through an outdoor patio on a college campus.

But curiously the web page code does not include any alt text, which one can make the case not needed as a screen reader would ignore the image and read the description below.

These are just a few observations, but I can say I would recommend and will use the Complete College Photo Library for photos of people in educational settings.

What do you think of this collection? Are there photos you can use that would be more useful than general photo collections?

3

Very cool, and reminds me of TRU’s Indigenous People in Education stock photos. I love resources like these because of the double duties they fill by both improving visual representations of what higher ed looks like, and by providing resources that facilitate OER creation without having to scour the internet and hope that the ‘openly licensed’ image one finds for use actually is.

4

Yes! I love that TRU resource. Both should be added to this linger topic of sources of diverse images of people