LibGuides: Open Education Resources (OER): Finding OERs/Open Textbooks & Courseware

Finding OERs

Open Educational Resources (OER) are "freely and publicly available teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others. They include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." --The Hewlett Foundation

OER's can be textbooks, assignments, videos, lesson plans, or entire courses.

BC Campus OpenEd Search for quality open textbooks and supplemental resources offered in a variety of digital formats. Search by subject and download them to your computer.
Europeana Provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for.
The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) From George Mason University comes a real-time, federated search, that searches 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 open educational materials may be found.
National Science Digital Library The NSDL collection contains structured descriptive information (metadata) about web-based educational resources held on other sites by their providers. These providers have contribute this metadata to NSDL for organized search and open access to educational resources via this website and its services.
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 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.
OER Commons Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost, and without needing to ask permission. Unlike copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights.
Open Education Consortium Non-profit, global, members-based network of open education institutions and organizations. OEC works with its members to build capacity to find, reuse, create and share Open Educational Resources (OER), develop open policy, create sustainable open education models, and enable international collaboration and innovation.
OpenStax From Rice University. High-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print
Open Washington Open Education Resources Network is a self-paced, non-affiliated training including multiple modules about OER.
Teaching Commons Educators and researchers can use the Teaching Commons to discover teaching materials, adopt content for their courses, or create and share their own work.

Open Textbooks

"Open textbooks are a subset of open educational resources (OER) and reside in the public domain — where copyrights have been waived by the copyright holder or copyright has expired — or have been released by the copyright holder under an open-copyright license." (BCCampus OpenEd)

American Institute of Mathematics The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) seeks to encourage the adoption of open source and open access mathematics textbooks. The AIM Editorial Board has developed evaluation criteria to identify the books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses.
arXiv.org Operated by Cornell University, arXIv.org provides open access to over one million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics.
BC Campus Open Ed Over 300 open textbooks made available across a range of disciplines.
Cool4Ed FREE and OPEN eTextbooks in the MERLOT collection and includes FREE and OPEN eTextbooks with a Creative Commons License.
Merlot The Multimedia Educational Resource for Online Teaching (MERLOT), developed by the California State University Center for Distributed Learning offers access to thousands of open educational materials and provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
OpenStax (Rice University) OpenStax textbooks are peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats. OpenStax is a non-profit ed-tech initiative based at Rice University.
Open Suny Textbooks The mission of Open SUNY Textbooks is to provide an academic-friendly publishing model and infrastructure which supports faculty adoption, remixing, and creation of open educational resources (OER) and courses. We are dedicated to improving student learning outcomes and addressing the affordability of course materials.
Open Textbook Library These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The library currently includes 714 textbooks, with more being added all the time.
Open Textbooks Curated collections of Open Textbooks for your OER classroom. Review dynamic content to inspire your own teaching and learning practice, this hub, organized by discipline and provider will help you discover the resources you need at your fingertips.
Open Textbook Store Provides freely and openly available math textbooks created by Washington CTC faculty.

OpenCourseWare (OCW)

OpenCourseWare consists primarily of teaching materials used by university faculty members in teaching their regular courses supplemented by lecture videos. There may also be videos and content from seminars, conferences, and other educational events that are not necessarily part of any formal course. Different faculty members provide different content (UCI Open)

BerkeleyX Browse free online courses in a variety of subjects. University of California, Berkeley courses found below can be audited free or students can choose to receive a verified certificate for a small fee. Select a course to learn more.
McGillX Browse free online courses in a variety of subjects. McGill courses found below can be audited free or students can choose to receive a verified certificate for a small fee.
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) 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.
Open Learning at Harvard A division of Harvard's Continuing Education Program, The Extension offers several free courses.
Open Michigan Open Michigan’s OER collection showcases teaching and learning resources and experiences from University of Michigan (U-M) faculty, students, staff, and partner institutions.
Open Yale Courses Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.
Oxford University Podcasts Oxford University provides open content under a Creative Commons licence free for reuse, remixing and redistribution in education worldwide. A number of open content projects under the OpenSpires umbrella have made thousands of high-quality materials available for the benefit of international education
University of California, Irvine (UCI) UCI Open and the OpenCourseWare movement are part of the University of California, Irvine's public mission. We publish course materials, including video lectures, for viewing, download, and reuse by institutions, professors, students and learners worldwide.