Open Educational Resources (OER/ZTC)

Great places to begin searching:

Open Educational Resource repositories listed here cover a wide variety of educational disciplines.  They include OER targeted at both primary and secondary students. 

• Cool 4 ED - California Open Online Library for Education: The three State of California Higher Education Systems are working together to provide you with access to FREE and OPEN eTextbooks that everyone and anyone can use for teaching and learning.

• OER Commons (oercommons.org) Curating best in class learning materials from around the world since 2007.  The OER Commons is a single search source that pulls from multiple OER collections, including MERLOT and Connexions.  It is a great first step in an OER search, but often more results can be found by searching the specific collection.  

  • Users can create collections of existing content and create their own content pages to share.

  • The OER Commons is a supported by ISKME (the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education).

  • Recommended by OU Librarians for the Business, Education, History, Life Sciences, Psychology and Sociology subject areas.  

• OpenStax: Rice University’s initiative provides free, peer-reviewed textbooks that are written by experts. You can read the textbooks online, download a full-text PDF or order the low cost ($20-$40) print version.

• MERLOT (merlot.org) is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. MERLOT was opened in 1997 and is supported by the California State University System. 

  • MERLOT does not house content, but is a collection of links to other content.  The materials can be ranked and many are peer-reviewed.  There are discipline specific Communities that curate and review the content. 

  • You can create and share personal collections of content links.

  • Recommended by OU Librarians for the Business, Education, Music, Political Science and Sociology subject areas.  

Accessibility

Finding Open Materials

Below is a list of some of the many resources available that provide open materials: 

• BCcampus OpenEd Resources: ​Wide variety of open textbooks from the British Columbia Campus, a consortium of Canadian institutions of higher education

• Canadiana - Canadiana.org is a coalition of members dedicated to providing broad access to Canada's documentary heritage. Through our membership alliance, Canadian libraries share tools and capacity, partner on open-source projects, and spearhead digital preservation in Canada.

• College Open Textbooks: A collaborative of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 community and other two-year colleges.

• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER): Provides links to OER Repositories, Open Textbooks & Journals, Digital Media, and more. CCCOER also provides a rich source of information and networking opportunities.

• Cool 4 ED - California Open Online Library for Education: The three State of California Higher Education Systems are working together to provide you with access to FREE and OPEN eTextbooks that everyone and anyone can use for teaching and learning.

• Creative Commons: Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of educational materials, provided that proper credit is given to the originators.

• Directory of OpenAccess Books: This site is a clearinghouse of links to books hosted in various locations, and includes a large selection of international textbooks.

• Europeana – is a gateway to European cultural assets, through this one site you can search for artworks, cultural items, archival collections from participating institutions all around Europe.  This site is a gateway, and once you have selected the items you want you will be redirected to the website of the institution that owns the item, and often these sites will not have English translations.  To find an item with the Creative Commons licensing you prefer.

• GALILEO Open Learning Materials: Brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.

• HathiTrust: HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. HathiTrust materials can be searched through the OU Libraries.  

• LibreTexts: ​LibreTexts provides access to OER resources and a platform for faculty to curate and compile resources. LibreTexts is based at UC Davis.

• Lumen Learning: Lumen provides open courses in a variety of high-demand subjects and disciplines. These courses are collections of high-quality OER, not necessarily as a traditional textbook.  You can use them as-is or modify them to fit your instructional style and students’ needs.

• Lyrx: ​A limited collection of open texts for accounting, business math, economics, and math.

• Mason OER Metafinder: MOM provides a real-time federated search for OER content. The OER Metafinder performs a search across 18 different sources of open educational materials.

• MIT OpenCourseWare: Some of these online textbooks are open-licensed electronic versions of print books. Others are self-published online books, or course notes which are so thorough that they serve as an alternative to a conventional textbook.

• MERLOT: MERLOT (Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community.

• MyOpenMath: Are you an instructor who wants to adopt an open textbook, who feels online interactive homework is valuable, but doesn't want their students to have to pay an additional fee? Then read more about using MyOpenMath in the classroom.

• National Academies Press: Unlike some of the open textbook initiatives these books are publicly available but not openly licensed.  You can link to the content, and even link directly to specific pages.  However, you cannot remix and redistribute the content.

• OpenStax: Rice University’s initiative provides free, peer-reviewed textbooks that are written by experts. You can read the textbooks online, download a full-text PDF or order the low cost ($20-$40) print version.

• Open Access Publishing in European Networks (http://www.oapen.org/home) – The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences.  OAPEN has books in multiple languages and covering a large variety of topics. There is a range of licensing for the books, but each books is clearly marked with the license.

• Open Course Library (OCL): OCL materials were created through Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges grant, but are freely shared to the world with a Creative Commons Attribution-only license (CC-BY).

• Open Educational Resources Commons: OER Commons is a growing collection of teaching, learning and assessing materials created by individuals or organizations who retains few, if any, ownership rights.

• Open Education Consortium: The Open Education Consortium is a non-profit organization that supports openness, collaboration, innovation and free distribution of educational materials.

• 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: Established by State University of New York libraries, this initiative publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks available to educational institutions around the world.

• Open Textbook Library: Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. 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 711 textbooks, with more being added all the time.The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.

• Open Textbook Network (OTN): Hosted by the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, OTN provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.

• OpenWashington - is a site designed to help you understand the OER movement and find OER.  They have links for finding textbooks, content, images and video, as well as stories from faculty who have adopted OER in their classrooms.  

• Orange Grove: is a online library of openly available instructional resources for Florida's educators. The Orange Grove does not house content, but is a collection of links to other content. Only Florida educators are allowed to have registered accounts, but anyone can search for and use content linked in the Grove.  Some resources are only available to registered users. This site is predominantly focused on K-12 content but there are links to content useful for introductory courses.

• Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) – A volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works. Most items in this collection are digitized works from the public domain, making it a rich source for those in the Humanities

• Textbook Revolution: Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable online as e-books, or some are simply web sites containing course or multimedia content.

• Wikibook: The Wikibooks project was started in 2003, and has since become one of the largest free e-book websites in the world.

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement began in the United States with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. This movement is university driven, and is focused on making the educational course materials that have been created by faculty available outside of the institution.  The materials available vary by course, professor and even semester posed. Materials can include syllabi,  written lectures, assignments, readings, videotaped lectures, and audio lectures.

This is not a complete list, and this list will be periodically updated. 

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