LibGuides: Open Education: Finding & Using Open Educational Resources (OERs)

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources: the Basics (pdf)
A quick, 2-page primer on OER basics - if you take nothing else, take this.

7 Things You Should Know about Open Educational Resources (pdf)
From the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, a brief overview of Open Educational Resources (as opposed to Open Education).

Finding Education / OER Resources - Creative Commons
Selected list of locations for finding open content and tools, along with recommended strategies, grouped by type of content.

The Mason OER Metafinder searches seventeen targets in real-time, including well-known OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, MERLOT but also sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections where valuable but often overlooked open educational materials may be found.

OASIS is a meta search tool developed by SUNY Geneseo that searches across 52 different OER sources and includes a range of materials, including textbooks, courses and corresponding materials, interactive simulations, public domain books, audiobooks, modules, open access books, videos and podcasts on a variety of topics — from anthropology to zoology. OASIS also is the only tool that allows users to limit searches by creative commons licenses or by faculty review

Open Textbooks

OpenStax College
OpenStax College offers free, peer-reviewed textbooks in a select number of disciplines. These texts have been designed to meet course standards in scope and sequence.
Open Textbook Library
A searchable catalog of free open textbooks developed by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. Textbooks are reviewed by contributing faculty to ensure quality.
College Open Textbooks
College Open Textbooks is a large collaborative of non-profit and for-profit organizations designed to promote the use of open textbooks. The site has a collection more than 100 peer reviewed open texts available for classroom use.
BCCampus OpenEd Resouces
Funded by British Columbia’s Ministry of Advanced Education, BCCampus OpenEd has published over 40 open textbooks designed for use in first and second year undergraduate courses. Digital versions of the texts are freely downloadable.
OAPEN Library
OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the open access of academic books in a wide range of languages. The library is fully searchable and is mainly focused on collecting in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Open SUNY Textbooks
An initiative of the State University of New York libraries, Open SUNY Textbooks publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks for use in higher education.
eCampusOntario open textbooks
From eCampusOntario, a one-stop site that includes tips for finding, adopting, and adapting Open Textbooks.
The Global Text Project (GTP)
Currently managed by the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, the Global Text Project provides a fully searchable textbook library focused on first year undergraduate curriculum.
Find FREE and OPEN eTextbooks
A search service of the California State University System and MERLOT
InTech
A large open access publisher of books and journals in the fields of Science, Technology, and Medicine. The publisher currently has over 2000 books and 6 journals available for download.
smarthistory
A free and open, online, not-for-profit art history textbook with complete multimedia content.

OER Repositories

Merlot II
An initiative of the California State University system, Merlot is free peer reviewed collection of educational materials meant for use in higher education.
The collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific resources, course assignments, and contributor comments to guide instruction.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a freely accessible online collection of open educational resources. This fully searchable catalog includes hundreds of open textbooks for use in higher education.
Open Course Library
The Open Course Library is a collection of sharable educational materials that have been designed by college faculty, librarians, or other experts. Sponsored by the Washington State Board of Education, these resource have undergone assessment to ensure quality.
OpenStax CNX
OpenStax CNX, an initiative of Rice University, is a repository of free educational materials. The content is modular, allowing users to easily remix and customize the site’s educational resources.
SkillsCommons
A free and open digital library of Workforce Training Materials developed by TAACCT grantees.
nanoHUB
Provides over 1600 open teaching and learning resources: online presentations; course material; learning modules; podcasts; simulation tools. Created by the NSF-funded Network for Computational Nanotechnology.
OCW Educator
OCW Educator helps teachers search the vast library of MIT's Open CourseWare resources to find instructional approaches and teaching materials. You can search by subject, then facet by types of course content and specialty.
Open Case Studies
The Open Case Studies project at University of British Columbia brings together faculty and students from different disciplines to write, edit, and learn with case studies that are free and open.
Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA)
An open access database containing reliable and reproducible research assignments that do not live as isolated entities, but are enhanced by user feedback in order to build a rich corpus of best practices.
LibreTexts Library
A collection of textbooks, exercises, worksheets, and other OERs created by the LibreTexts Project.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Primary Source Sets
Drawing from online materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, the sets use letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more. Each set includes a topic overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide.

Open Courses

EdX
Except for professional education courses, edX courses are free for everyone. Some courses have a fee for verified certificates but are free to audit.
Coursera
Offers more than 1,000 free online courses.
MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world; materials have an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. OCW does not offer certificates of completion.
Open Yale Courses
Provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by Yale instructors. No course credit, degree, or certificate is available through the Open Yale Courses website.
Class Central
This site aggregates Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from more than 470 different universities, including Stanford, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It also offers a notification/reminder service called MOOC Tracker.
Lumen Learning Course Catalog
A selection of open courses on a variety of subjects.
Saylor Academy
Offers more than 300 free, self-paced courses. All required course resources—including textbooks, videos, webpages, and activities—are accessible at no charge. Saylor courses also contain a free final exam with the opportunity to earn a free course completion certificate.
Udacity
All Udacity courses offer free access to course materials, but some courses charge for the full course experience (including access to projects, code-review and feedback, a personal Coach, and verified certificates). The price varies depending on the course.
Khan Academy
Open educational courses (Primarily K-12) covering math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more
nanoHUB-U
Short courses accessible to students in any branch of science or engineering.
Open Learning Initiative
The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach.
UCI Open
UCI Open is an open education project launched by the University of California, Irvine, that supports the needs of learners and educators everywhere.
Open Chemistry (OpenChem)
Provides a full curriculum of recorded lectures covering undergraduate chemistry plus selected graduate topics. From UCI Open

Open Educational Resource Community Websites

WikiEducator
WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative: planning of education projects linked with the development of free content; development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning; work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs; networking on funding proposals developed as free content.
Open Educational Resources Toolkit
A toolkit from JISC Explaining open educational resources (OERs) and surrounding issues for senior managers, learning technologists, technical staff and educators interested in releasing OERs to the education community. (archived in 2016)
Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN)
A community designed to help TAACCCT grantees meet OER, accessibility, and quality requirements for grant deliverables in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College & Career Training (TAACCCT) program. Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Support areas include: - Open Educational Resources (OER) practices & policies; - Creative Commons (CC) licensing; - Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Accessibility; - evidence-based online technology use; - Effective course and learning design; - Help finding existing OER
Virginia Tech's Librarian OER Toolbox
The Librarian OER Toolbox is a collection of links to (mostly) open resources. It is designed for librarians, expert searchers, and people who "enjoy the hunt" through overwhelming volumes of information. This site represents the most comprehensive lists we have found of the places to look for open educational resources written in English.

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