Open Educational Resources

There are several resources that might be useful to the instructor who would like to know more about the open education movement and how to teach with open education resources.

An Open Education Reader

This is a collection of readings on open education with commentary created for a graduate course at Brigham Young University and edited by David Wiley. It includes chapters on intellectual property, free software, open source, open content, open textbooks, and research in open education.

The Open Education Handbook

This handbook is a deliverable of the LinkedUp Project, and is a primer on the open education ecosystem, information about useful tools and software, references, a glossary of commonly used terms, case studies and examples, and answers to frequently asked questions. 

An Examination of the Lived Experience of Eleven Educators Who Have Implemented Open Textbooks in Their Teaching

A masters thesis by Danielle Paradis out of Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC. Of particular interest is Chapter 4, Results. It includes quotes from teachers on how they found out about OERs, their experience teaching with them, and motivations behind use. 

Making the Most of Open Educational Resources 

A series of videos by Contact North

Here is a list of online resources you can use to locate free teaching materials. Some of these databases are publishers of OER meaning they facilitate the creation of open materials and provide access, while other are repositories where material from other publishers/creators is housed:

OER Commons

• Provides college-level open textbooks from higher education institutions around the world. Search for the education level and subject area using the search features on the left side of the page.

OASIS (geneseo.edu)

• 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 115 different sources and contains 440,380 records.

Merlot

• The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.

LibreTexts

• All Libretexts libraries are accessible to everyone via the internet, completely free. We believe everyone should have access to knowledge.

Pressbooks Directory

• Pressbooks Directory provides an index of 5,033 books published across 143 Pressbooks networks. Pressbooks Directory is more powerful when paired with Pressbooks Create, which allows you to clone, revise, remix, and redistribute all of the openly licensed content found through this Directory.

OpenStax

• Initiated by Rice University, their free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed to ensure they meet the scope and sequence requirements of college courses.

OpenTextBookStore Catalog

• Collection of freely available open textbooks for download, online reading, and sharing.

Textbook Equity Open Education

• Creator, publisher, distributor, and seller of open textbooks and ancillary materials to college-level students.

Washington 45

• The Washington 45 are “courses selected from within the general education categories… at a public community, technical, four-year college or university in Washington state that will be able to transfer and apply a maximum of 45 quarter credits toward general education requirement(s) at any other public and most private higher education institutions in the state.” Read more information on the Washington 45.

Milne Open Textbooks

• With the initiative of the SUNY Libraries, Open SUNY Textbooks publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks for use in higher education.

Open Textbook Library

• The Open Textbook Library was started so that faculty could find open textbooks in one place. More technically, the Open Textbook Library is a comprehensive referatory that points to open textbooks by a variety of authors and publishers.

WikiBooks

• An online wiki-based collection of over two thousand open-content textbooks. Fully editable, published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

Directory of Open Access Books

• DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.

The Internet Archive

• Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
• Through the Boston Library Consortium, the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections digitized over 750 volumes from its collections and provides access to them through the Internet Archives. Titles include UMass Dartmouth's catalogs and yearbooks, and those of its predecessor schools, Bradford Durfee College of Technology, New Bedford Institute of Technology, Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute, Southeastern Massachusetts University, and the Swain School of Design. Other titles include local city directories, local histories, textile technology texts, and rare books published before 1923.

MIT Open Learning Library

• The MIT Open Learning Library is home to selected educational content from MIT OpenCourseWare and MITx courses, available for free to anyone in the world at any time. 

Harvard Free Courses

• Over 100 free courses offered on a variety of subjects 

MOOC.ORG

• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses available for anyone to enroll. MOOCs provide an affordable and flexible way to learn new skills, advance your career and deliver quality educational experiences at scale.

Academic Earth

• Free online lectures from universities such as Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.
• Subjects covered include: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, English, Entrepreneurship, History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, and Religion.

Internet Archive: OERs

• Provided by the Internet Archive library, hundreds of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and China. Many of these lectures are available for download.

Khan Academy

• An online collection of thousands of video tutorials on subjects such as mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics.

Mendeley

• Organize, share, and discover research papers
• Explore research trends and connect to other academics in your discipline

Open Courseware Consortium

• Free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.
• A collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a board and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.

Open Yale

• Another freely accessible, online collection of courseware, this from Yale University.
• Lectures and course material available through YouTube and iTunes; no registration required.

Wikiversity

• Another wiki-based resource containing thousands of open educational resources on the university level.

Wolfram|Alpha

• A free online computational knowledge engine. Highly useful for complex queries, high level mathematical computation, and statistical comparisons.

World Digital Library

• Primary materials from countries and cultures around the world, made available online free of charge.