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.
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.
Find FREE and OPEN eTextbooks
A search service of the California State University System and MERLOT
Open Textbooks for Engineering
The Scholarly Communications Committee from the Engineering Libraries Division of the American Society for Engineering Education has created this resource, which aggregates information from around 20 different OER websites and organizes it by engineering discipline and, in some cases, by subdiscipline. Currently limited to open textbooks.
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.

Finding Open Content

Unpaywall
A browser extension that searches across thousands of open access repositories and journals to find open access versions of articles.
Open Access Button
A search interface and browser extension that searches thousands of sources with millions of articles to link you to free, legal, full text scholarly articles instantly. It also provides an option to request a version from the author if an article is not available.
Openverse
Search portal to help locate CC-licensed content from a variety of sources - useful for images, video, and music.
Open Access Resources Library Guide
A collection of open access resources, sorted by discipline
Science.gov
Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites to provide users with access to more than 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information including research and development results.
Find Public Domain and Openly Licensed Materials
From OSU Libraries' Copyright Services - provides several suggestions for locating different types of content.
Free to Use and Reuse Sets
Items from the Library of Congress's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.
Wikimedia Commons
Database of freely usable media files.
Directory of Open Access Books
Over 3000 academic peer-reviewed books from 107 publishers
Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
Internet Archive: eBooks and Texts
Over 8,000,000 fully accessible public domain eBooks.
New York Public Library Public Domain Collections
Materials from the New York Public Library that are in the public domain, available for use and reuse.
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.
Hathi Trust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a collaborative partnership of major research institutions and libraries worldwide. It is a shared digital repository of library books and journals converted from print owned by research institutions.
Project Gutenberg
Over 54,000 free ebooks, most in the public domain (in general, published before 1923). Available in epub, kindle, PDF or to be read online. Over 50 languages. Great source for classics and historical works.
International Music Score Library Project
A collection of public domain music works - includes scores and some recordings.
Mutopia Project
Sheet music editions of public domain classical music, with some contemporary works contributed by the copyright holders.

CCMixter
A community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses. Over 38,000 (and growing) pieces of music are available.
Legal Music For Videos - Creative Commons
A roundup of sites that collect Creative Commons-licensed music.
Internet Archive: Audio
A massive collection of freely available audio material that ranges from the Grateful Dead to old time radio shows, news programming, poetry and more.
The Free Music Archive
The FMA is a collection of high-quality, legal audio material curated by WFMU. All material on the site contains a Creative Commons license so is available to use for free.
Musopen
A non-profit organization that provides recordings, sheet music, and textbooks for free, without copyright restrictions.
Public Domain Project: Audio
Thousands of audio, image, and video files in the public domain from the collection of the Pond5 stock footage company.
YouTube Audio Library
A collection of free downloadable music for use in video or audio projects. Must sign into YouTube to use.
Bandcamp
Music uploaded to Bandcamp with a Creative Commons license.
Freesound
A collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, and more.
World Hip Hop Beats
A collection of Creative Commons licensed hip hop beats.

Best Practices for image use
From the University of Arizona Libraries, a list of best practices included finding, citing, and image use.
ImgOps
A meta tool for finding out information about images.
TinEye
Search for information about images you've already found. Upload file or paste URL to find image source, license info, higher resolutions, and modified versions.
Openverse
Openverse searches across more than 300 million images. It collects results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
Finding Public Domain & Creative Commons Media
This guide will help you find and correctly attribute public domain and Creative Commons media.
Flickr: Creative Commons
A collection of images published on Flickr using a Creative Commons license.
Wikimedia Commons
Database of freely usable media files.
Openly Licensed Image Sources
From the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Open Educational Resources Initiative - a collection of other image sources
Pixabay
All images and videos on Pixabay are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0.
Unsplash
Freely licensed photography site.
Free media resources/Photography
A giant list of image sources providing freely licensed or public domain images.

Diverse Image Sources

BC Campus: Stock photos focused around diversity, equity and inclusion
Great list of diverse image sources. The licenses vary per site so please be sure to check their agreements directly.
What are good resources for finding diverse images of people?
A list created by OEGlobal Connect of EDI-focused image sites (some of which are listed below)
Nappy
CC0 licensed stock photos featuring people of color
Diversity In Tech Collection
Noun Project partnered with All Raise, AnitaB.org, Blavity, Grid110, and Latinas in Tech to champion more diverse representation in tech.
Queer in Tech stock photos
This photo set was created to promote the visibility of queer and gender non-conforming people working in technology. These photos are licensed CC-BY 3.0.
Black Illustrations
Illustrations of black people released freely available for use, reuse, and modification for personal and commercial use.
Jopwell Collection
These images can be copied, distributed and displayed freely as long as visible attribution to Jopwell is provided.
Picnoi
Diverse photos of people of color, released under a CC-BY license
Images of Empowerment
A free library of images celebrating women’s lives and their work in 11 countries around the world
The Gender Spectrum Collection
The Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities. While the collection is released under a CC-BY-NC-ND license, please also read the guidelines for recommended usage: https://broadlygenderphotos.vice.com/guidelines
Disabled And Here Collection
This stock collection is a disability-led effort to provide free and inclusive images from our own perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
Rudd Center Media Gallery Combating Weight Bias
Aims to "challenge harmful weight-based stereotypes." Can freely use for non-commercial, educational purposes with credit to UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity.
Age-positive image library
Created by the Centre for Aging Better, this library contains over 2,000 images and shows positive and realistic images of over 50s in a bid to challenge negative and stereotypical views of older age. All images are released under a CC0 license

Public Domain & Museum Collections

Public Domain Project: Images
63,881 public domain images files from the collection of the Pond5 stock footage company.
NASA Image and Video Library
NASA content - images, audio, video, and computer files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models, such as texture maps and polygon data in any format - generally are not copyrighted. You may use this material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits, computer graphical simulations and Internet Web pages.
Smithsonian Open Access Collection
Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Internet Archive's Guggenheim Collection
Over 200 openly available art books and exhibition catalogs released by the Guggenheim Museum.
Getty Open Content Images
Search over 10,000 images from Getty Museum and Research Institute collections made available for download.
Wellcome Images
One of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.
Free to Use or Reuse Sets: The Library of Congress
This page features items from the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.
Old Book Illustrations
Public domain collections of illustrations and engravings from books, particularly Victorian and French Romantic illustrations—we understand French Romanticism in its broadest sense and draw its final line, at least in the realm of book illustration, at the death of Gustave Doré.
The many links organizing content by artist, language, publisher, date of birth, and more are designed to make searching easier and indecision rewarding.

Clipart, Icons, and other types of images

The Greats
The Greats is a free vault with carefully curated socially engaged visual content open to anyone to use or adapt non-commercially. All artworks published on The Greats can be used for free under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
Open Clipart
Each artist at Openclipart releases all rights under the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain License for the images they share at Openclipart.
Noun Project
Creative Commons licensed icons. Requires free registration to download.
Icon Archive
A professional tag based icon search engine with more than 600,000 icons, many of which have open licenses.
Dimensions.Guide
Dimensions.Guide is a comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.Guide is a free platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.
unDraw
A constantly updated collection of beautiful svg images that you can use completely free and without attribution.
Open Peeps
A hand-drawn illustration library, released under a CC0 license.

Internet Archive - Moving Image Archive
Over 1.5 million digitized videos and clips, including cartoons, commercials and classic films, many public domain or available via Creative Commons license.
The Open Video Project
A repository of open access digitized videos for education and learning purposes.
Selections from the National Film Registry Collection: Library of Congress
The National Film Registry is a list of movies deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" that are earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress. The majority of movies in Selections from the National Film Registry are freely available as both 5 mb MP4 and ProRes 422 MOV downloads.
Prelinger Archives
New York’s Prelinger Archives hold more than 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films.