LibGuides: Clark Faculty : Open Educational Resources

About Open Educational Resources (OERs)

What is an Open Educational Resources (OER)?

UNESCO defines OERs as 'teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with intellectual property licenses that facilitate the free use, adaptation and distribution of resources.' To read more about UNESCO's work related to OER advocacy visit UNESCO Open Educational Resources

What are the benefits of using OERs in my course/curriculum?

The use of OERs in your course and curriculum can:

save students money, thereby making college more affordable and encouraging access to course materials.
enable greater representation of diverse perspectives through creation or adoption of resources not typically found in textbooks.
lead to greater student success through improved learning outcomes

See 'Readings and Research on OER' below to review selected studies.

How can the library support my use of OERS at Clark?

The library can assist you with identifying appropriate OERs for your course and can build a course guide for you than may be integrated into Moodle. Please contact library@clarku.edu or visit Goddard Library Online Help to ask a question or request a consultation with a librarian.

What are some examples of how I might use an OER in my course?

A Course Using Classic Literature or Primary Sources

When assigning classic literature an instructor might provide a link to a source in Archive.org along with links to scholarly articles on the work that are available digitally through Clark Libraries.

A STEM Course

an instructor may use an OER that shows representation of members of underrepresented groups in order to make course content relatable to a more diverse student population.

An American History Course

In a course focused on the history of the United States a faculty member may require readings from The American Yawp and link it through a Moodle site so that student will have easy and free access to a text that is continuously updated by scholars.

A Business Ethics Course

An instructor may opt to use an OpenStax version of a textbook rather than requiring students to purchase a textbook. The OpenStax version of Business Ethics can be easily embedded in Moodle.

Learn More About Open Education

OER Africa: Open Education Online Tutorials
Excellent tutorials openly available through OER Africa that cover a wide range of topics for instructors interested in learning about open education.

Mason OER Meta-Finder

The OER Metafinder is a great place to start your search for Open Educational Resources. This tool is unique and powerful as it simultaneously searches 22 different sources of Open Educational Resources and retrieves results updated to the minute! For more information, visit: About the Mason OER Metafinder

Other Large Open Education Resource Repositories

BC OpenCampus
A collection of 385 high quality open textbooks for a wide range of disciplines
Live Lingua
A collection of U.S. Government created public domain language eBooks and a/v resources for almost every language.
Merlot
A collection of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, all of which undergo review for retention in the collection, many resources undergoing a more extensive peer-review process.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier
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.
OpenStax
OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg has full-text copies of eBooks in the public domain. Some include scans of the original text, although most are in plain text format that can be used on all devices.

Search Various OER collections

The American Yawp
"A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook"
AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository)
AMSER is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.
ArtxHistory
A collection of Art History resources under creative commons licenses.
BC OpenCampus
A collection of 385 high quality open textbooks for a wide range of disciplines
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)
CALI is a non-profit consortium of law schools, law libraries, and related institutions which works in the area of legal education creating openly available tools and resources for instructors and students.
The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL)
The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL) is one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRC's) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America empowers people to learn, grow, and contribute to a diverse and better-functioning society. We do this by maximizing public access to our shared history, culture, and knowledge.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 398 billion archived web pages.
Live Lingua
A collection of U.S. Government created public domain language eBooks and a/v resources for almost every language.
Luminos
Luminos is the Open Access (OA) publishing program for the University of California Press. It makes digital editions of scholarly books available free of charge to anyone around the world.
The MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC)
The MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) aims to advance new efforts within and beyond MIT’s Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. The specially commissioned and peer-reviewed cases are brief and intended to be effective for undergraduate instruction across a range of classes and fields of study.
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)
OCW makes the materials used in the teaching of MIT's subjects available on the Web.
My Open Math
MyOpenMath is an online course management and assessment system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. They also recommend several open textbooks in various areas on "opentextbookstore.com"
Noba Project
Noba offers open, shareable, and adaptable education materials across the field of psychology, written by experts from around the globe
Open Book Publishers
Open Book Publishers a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics who are committed to making high-quality and prize-winning research available to all.
Open Course Library
A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.
Open Culture
Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community.
Open Michigan
Open Michigan enables the University of Michigan community to make the products of its research, teaching, and creative work available to the world beyond campus.
Open Oregon Educational Resources
Open Oregon Educational Resources promotes textbook affordability for community college and university students, and facilitates widespread adoption of open, low-cost, high-quality materials.
Open SUNY Textbooks
Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries
Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg has full-text copies of eBooks in the public domain. Some include scans of the original text, although most are in plain text format that can be used on all devices.
Project Muse Open Access
Search openly available content through Project Muse
Purdue University Press eBooks Old
Purdue University Press is making available a collection of books published since its foundation in 1960 as Open Access PDFs. These titles are free to read online, download, and print for non-commercial purposes.
Radical in Progress
Founded and Directed by Clark University Student Gari De Ramos, Radical in Progress Radical in Progress "currently exists as an educational website providing free study guides of must-read social justice literature...in hopes that we one day become synonymous with the phrase “educate yourself.”
SmartHistory: The Center for Public Art History
Smarthistory is a center for public art history with thousands of free videos and essays written by experts
Teaching Commons
The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities, including Clark University. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.
University of British Columbia Open Case Studies
The Open Case Studies project at the University of British Columbia brings together faculty and students from different disciplines to write, edit, and learn with case studies that are free and licensed to allow others to revise and reuse them.
University of California Press, eBook Collection 1982-2004
UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982-2004, is managed by the Publishing Group at the California Digital Library.
Collection contains almost 2,000 electronic editions of academic books, more than 25 percent of which are available for free to the public.
University of Pittsburgh Press, Digital Editions
The University of Pittsburgh Press and the University Library System (ULS) have formed a partnership to make books published by the Press available online. By digitizing these volumes and distributing them freely on the Internet, the University of Pittsburgh Press is enabling greater access to the material previously available only as print editions.
World Digital Library
The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.

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