Finding OER
Where to Find OER
There are a multitude of OERs on the internet: including open textbooks, courses, multimedia, data, and supplementary materials. Although they can be found easily by searching in regular search engines, there are some well-known resources that have quality OERs that you can use in your course material. Below you can find some examples.
Video from The Council of Chief State School Officers, licensed under CC by 4.0
Repositories
- OER Commons offers OER for a variety of subjects and levels.
- Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a program of the California State University Long Beach, which hosts a large array of teaching resources and reviews some of these resources to help you find the best resources in their catalog.
- While not every resource is an OER on the National Science Digital Library, there is a wealth of OER for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education on the site.
- Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) which was developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library is easily searchable by resource (textbooks, course materials, interactive simulations, etc.) to help you find the type of resource you are looking for.
- Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER) is a part of the National Science Digital Library and hosts applied math and science OER resources.
- Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA) offers OERs for both undergraduate and graduate level students based around information literacy topics.
- Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education offers a variety of OER for language learning in 23 different languages.
- A tool that searches simultaneously across 22 major sources of OER, created and maintained by George Mason University and the Mason Publishing Group.
Courses
- Since 2009, Rethink Education has been providing collegiate level courses in the humanities and sciences.
- Utah State provides open courses in a variety of subjects, including education, history, and theatre arts.
- The Open Course Library provides courses and course material in many subjects including American Sign Language, accounting, geology and more.
- Lumen Learning hosts OER for collegiate students in subjects ranging from business to mathematics.
- Saylor Academy is a nonprofit organization that offers open courses that use open content, with nearly 100 peer-reviewed college-level courses.
Open Textbooks
- Project Gutenberg offers over 60,000 eBooks, in epub and Kindle eBook formats. A majority of these books are within the public domain.
- Openstax offers OER textbooks in a variety of mathematics and scientific topics.
- Writing Spaces offers peer-reviewed essays about writing written for collegiate students.
- Portland State University offers OER textbooks in a variety of subjects including language studies, STEM, and the humanities.
- The American YAWP is a collaborative open US history textbook that covers from Indigenous America to the recent past.
- NOBA offers OER textbooks on a variety of topics within psychology.
- The American Institute of Mathematics offers a variety of textbooks on mathematics topics for undergraduate students.
- BC Campus is continually adding new OER textbooks in many different subject areas.
- The Open Textbook Library has over 850 OER textbooks available for educators to use.
- This resource offers both open-licensed electronic versions of print books and self-published online books in STEM topics.
- Initiated at the University of California, Davis, this resource offers texts in many subjects, including workforce education materials.
- A collection of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed within the State University of New York system, managed by Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo.
- Pressbooks is a platform by which many open textbook authors create and publish their textbooks (NYU Libraries offers Manifold for similar purposes). The Pressbooks Directory is an index of open textbooks published at the various institutions that provide that platform for its open textbook authors.
- Open4Us guides and collects the open resources of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College & Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program from the U.S. Department of Labor.
- Commonwealth for Learning hosts OERs from Commonwealth universities and educational institutions.
Media
- On Creative Commons you can search for images that have Creative Commons licenses or that are in the public domain.
- The Getty Search Gateway has a section where you can search for open content images of artistic works.
- The Smithsonian has collected millions of images that are open access into this database.
- Engineering Technology hosts engineering simulations for robotics, renewable energy, and more.
Open Data
- This database offers open data and datasets about Canada and the Canadian populace.
- Data Europa hosts datasets from various EU countries.
- This is the US’s federal government’s database and offers open datasets about the US.
Digital Communities
As it is sometimes difficult to find specific OER materials, it can be helpful to join OER Digital Communities.
- Holyoke Community College shares a handy list of open access “OER Listservs.”
- Rebus helps you connect to global OER communities. If you want to create an open textbook, you can schedule a consultation with their specialists and join their courses. Otherwise, you can participate in their Office Hours, follow their Webinars and online events or receive newsletters
Other
- The Avalon Project has law, history, and diplomatic documents from ancient times (4000bce-399) to the present-day (post-2000).
Go to: What is an Open Educational Resource (OER)? ; OER and its Benefits, or Evaluating OER