Open Educational Resources

If you have used or are using OER in your courses, let us know. Consider placing your OER materials into Digital Commons, our Institutional Repository. If you have questions, contact Carol Brigham, Associate Dean of Operations & Collection Management.

Adopting Open Educational Resources can seem daunting.

Start small - investigate existing OER materials.

Write a review for one of the works you discovered.

Use one resource "as is." 

Once you get a feel for the possibilities, most likely you will be able to create your own OER.

Question Mark Sign by Colin_K. CC BY 2.0

• Creative Commons Search 

  Creative Commons has created this really useful search engine that lets you search for resources that are CC licensed. The image search is the most useful.

• Guide to the Public Domain 

  We've put together this page on the Public Domain and how to find images and artwork that are in the Public Domain. Included are several resources for searching and finding images that are in the Public Domain.

• Smithsonian Open Access 

  You can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from the Smithsonian collections

• Unsplash 

  Over 1 million photos that can be freely downloaded and used for either commercial and non-commercial purposes, no permission needed (though attribution is appreciated!).

• OER guides by subject 

  These are Google Docs made by Portland Community College librarians in response to requests for help from instructors.

• Discipline-Specific OER from Virginia Tech 

  On these pages you will find openly licensed textbooks along with supplemental material, interactive simulations, and other resources.

• Subject Resources from University of New Hampshire 

  A collection of resources divided into humanities, social science, and STEM categories.

• Discipline-Specific Resources from VC/UHV Library 

  On this page, you will find the largest, most popular repositories of open educational resources separated by subject.

• OpenStax College 

  Rice Connexions is providing peer reviewed, quality open textbooks with interactive components. There are some amazing textbooks available here, with more in production.

• Open Textbook Library 

  Hundreds of complete, open college-level textbooks collected by the University of Minnesota.

• BC OpenEd 

  A curated collection of open textbooks, many reviewed by British Columbia faculty.

• WikiBooks 

  A project of the Wikimedia Foundation, this collection of group written textbooks in a variety of sources follows rules similar to Wikipedia.

• Project Gutenberg 

  Find the full text of classics and public domain works from the first massive ebook creating organization in existence. Nothing fancy here, just files with the full text.

• Google Books 

  Some books presented in this mass conglomeration of scanned books are fully available, most are excerpted.

• American Institute of Mathematics 

  A list of open textbooks in various subdisciplines of Mathematics approved by the AIM editorial board.

• Aviation Handbooks and Manuals 

  Open Textbooks on Aviation from the Federal Aviation Administration (US).

• FreeBooks4Doctors 

  Free medical textbooks.

• Lyryx Open Textbooks 

  Lyryx offers high-quality open textbooks in the fields of accounting, mathematics, and economics. They also have optional added (paid) resources such as homeworks and quizzes to accompany the open textbooks.

• Bloomsbury Academic 

  Bloomsbury is a well-respected and long time UK publisher who has released some of their academic titles for open access/open education.

• Academic Earth 

  Find lectures and videos from some of the most respected instructors in the world.

• Bridge to Success 

  Materials, mostly study skills, to support students transitioning to college.

• Coursera 

  Large library of MOOCs, some of which have material freely licensed for re-use.

• EdX 

  Library of college-level courses from a variety of high-profile universities. Some course materials are freely licensed for reuse.

• LearningSpace from Open University 

  All of the learning materials presented on this site are CC licensed, but don't confuse "Learning Spaces" with the full Open University- their licensing/copyrights are different.

• OCW Utah 

  Open education course materials aimed at a high school level.

• Miríadax 

  Miríadax is an Ibero-American MOOC platform with complete courses in Spanish for a variety of topics.

• Open Course Library 

  The WA Open Course Library project offers 81 of Washington's most enrolled courses. There are a lot of great readings in these course files. Great community college content

• Open Courseware 

  An independent search engine that indexes open education classes from places like MIT, Yale and UMass. Adds extension to your browser.

• Saylor.org 

  Saylor offers full courses online. It can be really helpful to use the reading lists from Saylor to find and organize your courses.

• Open Learning Initiative 

  Complete courses from Carnegie Mellon University

• Noba - Psychology Modules 

  A series of modules in the field of Psychology from Introductory courses to more advanced topics.

• OERu 

  OERu offers a number of full courses in fields like business, economics, digital literacy, and history from partner universities around the world.

• OASIS 

  A large user friendly OER search engine that allows for users to search by subject or by course material type (e.g. textbooks, simulations, audio).

• Mason OER Metafinder 

  This search engine from George Mason University is connected to 15 major OER repositories.

• Merlot 

  This repository is one of the biggest and more famous places to find and share teaching resources.

• Connexions 

  Large repository of individual teachers' content, some courses and lots of modular writings about a variety of topics.

• OER Commons 

  This resource seeks to collect and distribute a variety of OER at a variety of levels and subjects.

• Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) 

  This repository contains learning materials, software, data, and models for teaching quantitative skills in undergraduate biology courses. QUBES is developed in part by faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.

• Curriki 

  Open educational materials for K-12.

• AMSER 

  Materials in the Applied Math and Science Educational Repository are free for use and adaptation. Most resources are at the high school and community college levels.

• Edsitement! 

  Learning objects and lessons from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It offers a large collection of peer evaluated websites.

• Community of Online Research Assignments 

  Open resource for faculty and librarians about Research Assignments. A research assignment is anything that requires students to engage with information resources in a critical or reflective way. This most often includes finding, retrieving, analyzing and evaluating, using and integrating, or organizing the information in order to produce new knowledge.

• OpenCulture 

  This blog formatted repository seeks to bring together free resources on culture and education. The list of movies here is impressive.

• TED 

  Inspiring thinkers on a range of subjects present big ideas and lectures on a regular basis- completely CC licensed.

• Khan Academy 

  Hundreds of short educational videos covering many subjects; especially strong collections in science and math.

• PhET Science Simulations 

  These interactive tools from the University of Colorado at Boulder are mostly CC licensed.

• Wikimedia Commons 

  The thinkers behind Wikipedia bring you images, video and music all openly licensed or in the public domain.

• HippoCampus 

  HippoCampus, a project of the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education (MITE), is full of high-quality resources in a variety of subjects. It is aimed at high school and college level users.

• Jamendo 

  Songs by musicians who want to share their music.

• Vimeo 

  A social network of video producers. This is a great place to look for a wide variety of content- some is completely open for redistribution, some is open access.

• Critical Commons 

  A community of people who seek to promote the use of media in teaching. The materials posted here are mostly presented using Fair Use guidelines.