LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Finding OER

Finding OER

Open Educational Resources are proliferating across the internet at a growing rate. Large scale Open Course Platforms such as Coursera or Udacity are easy to find and adopt, as are open textbooks like the collections listed below, but many OER are created by teachers and professors operating at a much smaller scale and who are creating resources for specific subjects. These OER are intended to be adopted and edited by other educators, and are not as easy to discover as the larger, full-service platforms. These OER may be found through multidisciplinary OER repositories, or subject specific OER repositories like OER Commons and MERLOT. The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) from George Mason University searches across 22 large OER repositories, and other digital libraries like the Digital Public Library of America.

OER repositories

MERLOT -- Multimedia Educational Resource for Online Learning and Teaching
The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material.
WISC-Online Learning Objects
As a non-profit serving the private and public sectors, our products range from corporate learning solutions to free, publicly accessible instructional programs. Our award-winning learning objects have been providing student success and homework help for over a decade.
The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
A distinct feature of the Mason OER Metafinder is the scope of our discovery service. We’re searching 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 (and often “open”) educational materials may be found.
Teaching Commons
The Teaching Commons showcases high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities and makes them available to educators and students around the world. Curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 115 different sources and contains 455,492 records.
OER Commons
OER Commons offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners. From a single point of access in OER Commons, you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER.

OER Open Textbooks

The Open Textbook movement focuses on the creation of books that are built specifically for use as free or low-cost options for education. Each repository has a particular focus, and unique items you can't find in other collections.

British Columbia Open Campus Textbook list
The B.C. Open Collection is a curated selection of open educational resources (OER) that can be accessed by educators in B.C. and beyond to use in the classroom, in an institutional learning management system, or on other teaching and learning platforms. All materials are openly licensed. This means they are free to use, customize, and share. The collection includes courses and textbooks, and new resources are being added all the time.
College of the Canyons Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) Textbooks
This page provides access to open textbooks made available by the College of the Canyons, including some specializing in water technology.
DOAB - The Directory of Open Access Books
Over 74,000 academic peer-reviewed books, DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. Includes thousands of Open Access textbooks
FlatWorld Knowledge
"Bringing textbook prices back down to earth," FlatWorld provides faculty with customizable books for a low cost to students. FlatWorld is strongest in business but has content across many disciplines.
Grand Valley State University Open Textbooks
These free textbooks are authored by faculty members at the Grand Valley State University.
LibreTexts
An online textbook platform, LibreTexts offers over 2200 open textbooks and learning objects across disciplines.
Lumen Learning's Catalog
This page lists Lumen Learning's free online courses and the accompanying textbooks.
Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of OER and open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
National Academies Press
The National Academies Press (NAP) are the publications of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. NAP publishes more than 200 publications per year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative, independently researched information on important matters in science and health policy. Unlike some of the open textbook initiatives these books are publicly available but not openly licensed. You can link to the content, and even link directly to specific pages. However, you cannot remix and redistribute the content.
OAPEN - Open Access Publishing in European Networks
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN has books in multiple languages and covering a large variety of topics.
There is a range of licensing for the books, but each books is clearly marked with the license.
OpenStax
OpenStax books are developed following traditional textbook publishing methods, including peer review, editorial support, and creation of ancillary content. These books are available in multiple formats (PDF, print on demand, online) and are licensed to be revised and remixed by faculty who want create a custom solution for a course. OpenStax is a project supported by Rice University.
Open Textbook Library
Hosted by the Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota, the Open Textbook Network is a growing network of higher education institutions and systems supporting the library and the adoption of open textbooks. EIU is a member and every textbook in the Open Textbook Library can be found in the EIU library catalog.
Portland State University Open Access Textbooks
This is a collection of free, openly licensed textbooks published by the Portland State University Library.
Saylor Academy Open Textbooks
Nearly 100 textbooks across several disciplines used in conjunction with the Saylor Academy courseware. Saylor Academy hosts a collection of openly licensed textbooks and open online courses.
University System of Georgia Open Textbooks
With the facilitation of Affordable Learning Georgia, openly licensed textbooks on different subjects have been published by the University System of Georgia. Ancillary materials are also available.

Additional Resources

Adaptable OER Publishing Agreement
Creative Commons USA, the Rebus Community, and the Open Textbook Network worked together to create an Adaptable OER Publishing Agreement which has a Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY).

Incorporating OER into courses: An Instructors Guide
by Stacey Knight-Davis Last Updated Oct 7, 2023 23 views this year

Open Educational Resources Getting Started Toolkit
CARLI, The Consortium of Academic Libraries in Illinois provides a guide to OER including student and faculty surveys, and templates for faculty stipend sample agreements.

HathiTrust This link opens in a new window
Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.
Digital Public Library of America This link opens in a new window
Over 40 million images, texts, videos, and sounds | Contains digital material from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the United States | Browsable by topic and searchable

The MIT Press - open access @ PubPub
Open access titles from MIT Press.
National Academies Press
Reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Almost all items have a free PDF format available.
OAPEN Library
A central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books.
Project Gutenberg
Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy.
unglue.it: Free Books
Aggregates books that are distributed with an open license or are in the public domain.
University Press of Kentucky (UPK) Books
More than 1,000 titles published by UPK are freely accessible to the faculty and students of the University of Kentucky

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