LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Introduction to Open Educational Resources

Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER)

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. OER form part of ‘Open Solutions’, alongside Free and Open Source software (FOSS), Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD) and crowdsourcing platforms. UNESCO

"Open Educational Resources: What and Why" by Jason Hardwick is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Find Open Educational Resources (OER)

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online 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.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a public digital library of tens of thousands open educational resources.
OpenStax
OpenStax is an initiative through Rice University which publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and available in print at low cost.

Search Other Collections of OER

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.
Directory of Open Access Books
DOAB is a discovery service for peer reviewed open access books and book publishers that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed books.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. I have limited the search to Worcester history.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard allowing for self-paced learning in and outside of the classroom covering: math, science, computing, history, art history, economics, and more.
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.
Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
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 Open Courseware
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
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 Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
Open University Courses
OpenLearn is a free learning platform, delivered by The Open University as part of its Royal Charter commitment to support the wellbeing of the community.
PHET (Physics Education Technology)
PhET provides free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. Simulations are tested and evaluated through student interviews and observation of simulation use in classrooms. The simulations are written in Java, Flash or HTML5. All simulations are open source.
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
Stanford History Education Group: OER Projects
The Stanford History Education Group is an award-winning research and development group seeking to improve education by conducting research, working with school districts, and reaching directly into classrooms with free materials for teachers and students.
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.
UNESCO Digital Library
The UNESCO Digital Library provides access to publications, documents and other materials either produced by UNESCO or pertaining to UNESCO’s fields of competence.
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 Minnesota-Open Textbook Library
Nearly 1,000, original, complete, and openly licensed textbooks (~60% have been reviewed, and more are reviewed during production). All textbooks included in this collection are in use at multiple higher education institutions, or affiliated with a higher education institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.
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.
Wisc Online
Award-winning openly available learning objects maintained by Fox Valley Technical College.
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.