LibGuides: Affordable Course Materials and Open Educational Resources (OER): Find OER

OER Websites and Search Tips

Instructors can find OER in a variety of resources. Most OER organizations or collaborations have a database or central list of resources that faculty have added. Some databases also feature annotations or faculty feedback. Additionally, many disciplines have their own OER websites. The list below is not comprehensive but can instead be used as a starting point for faculty doing interdisciplinary work or work in any discipline. Remember that not all of the learning materials in these repositories and sources are OER for modifying but most of the content is freely available under Fair Use and/or with attribution.

General Education Search/Prep. Resources

OER Commons
NROC Project
Canvas Commons
Exhibit - Xavier University Institutional Repository Exhibit, a digital repository provided by the Xavier University Library, gathers, preserves, and provides access to the scholarship, creative works, and records of the Xavier University community.

Recorded Lectures & Video Tutorials Search

MIT YouTube Channel
Coursera - Hundreds of free courses
Webcast.Berkeley
Khan Academy
HippoCampus.org Videos in 13 subject areas, including math, natural science, social science and humanities; one of the NROC Project programs

Open Textbook Search

Modular Course Components

Complete Courses

OER and OCW Search Engines

Open Education Consortium Search
Semantic Course Search (Serendipity)
Creative Commons Search
Teaching Commons The Teaching Commons showcases high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities and makes them available to educators and students around the world. Curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more. Educators and researchers can use the Teaching Commons to discover teaching materials, adopt content for their courses, or create and share their own work. The Teaching Commons is built on the Digital Commons platform, which offers authors a powerful set of tools-- including multimedia support, versioning, embedded comments, and geo-location, among others -- to support the large variety of publishing needs in this growing field.
Undergraduate Research Commons The Undergraduate Research Commons (URC) is a portal showcasing outstanding published works authored by thousands of undergraduate students. The portal was built to provide greater visibility to the exemplary student works that universities and colleges are publishing. You’ll find only publications published by universities and colleges here. In the URC, you can browse more than 700 undergraduate research publications including award-winning research, conferences, posters and presentations, fieldwork and class projects, honors theses and capstone projects, creative works, and research papers. The URC is also an index of undergraduate publishing outlets. Aspiring undergraduate authors can use this tool to find peer-reviewed journals and conferences in their fields of research. We invite undergraduate researchers interested in publishing an article in a scholarly journal to explore the commons, find the university publications that are open for submissions, and visit the publication's site to submit work for consideration.

Open Data Sets

Open Data

Square one for finding and properly using publicly available data in student projects.

Mathematics

My Open Math

Provides free problem sets for practice. Almost ten textbooks already designed for courses.

OER Commons Mathematics and Statistics Search

A search for all levels.

American Institute of Mathematics: Approved Open Textbooks List

Over 15 open textbooks covering different levels of calculus, algebra, and statistics.

Scottsdale (AZ) Community College Math Blog

Free links and pre-developed courses used at Scottsdale.

Stitz Zeager Open Source Mathematics

Complete and high quality textbooks for precalculus, college algebra, and college trigonometry. Includes LaTeX source code for custom texts.

WhyU

Animated tutorials covering math concepts for higher ed and K-12.

Computer Science

EngageCSEdu is a living collection of peer-reviewed course materials from the CS community. It provides a framework of research-based teaching practices that support diversity

History

What's Her Name Podcast What’sHerName women’s history podcast is hosted and produced by academic sisters Dr. Katie Nelson and Olivia Meikle. Committed to reclaiming forgotten history, What’sHerName tells the stories of fascinating women you’ve never heard of (but should have). Through compelling interviews with guest historians, writers, and scholars, Olivia and Katie bring to life the “lost” women of history. Fascinating and funny, thought-provoking and thoughtful, What’sHerName restores women’s voices to the conversation.
Smithsonian Learning Lab - The Lab is a free, interactive platform for discovering millions of authentic digital resources, creating content with online tools, and sharing in the Smithsonian's expansive community of knowledge and learning.

Humanities

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
A basic search for OA books, including OA textbooks.

Open Education Resources for the Digital Humanities
Compiled through UCL, these resources focus specifically on the digital/ technical application of humanities concepts or texts.

Open Humanities Press
Open books and journals, mostly on theoretical topics/ frameworks.

Art Images for College Teaching
University of Michigan compilation of images for teaching or assignment purposes.

OER Commons Music and Art Appreciation
A basic search for teaching with music/ art.
LIbreText Humanities Library. This Living Library is a principal hub of the LibreTexts project, which is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts

Boston College Digital Archive of Art
Paintings and sculptures organized by century.

Language Learning

Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning
Foreign language resources and activities -- more heavily covers the romance languages

Sciences

National Science Digital Library
Provides a robust search to limit by activity type, media format, and age level.
PLOS One
More advanced, specific science resources that are open and could be used in a classroom setting.
AMSER: Applied Math and Science Educational Repository
Funded by the NSF and organized by large LC headings.
The Chem Collective
Created by a group of faculty and staff at Carnegie Mellon to help those teaching/ learning Chemistry.
Scitable by Nature Education
A free science library and personal learning tool. Currently concentrates on genetics and cell biology.

Education

EDUCAUSE
Organization dedicated to helping IT leaders and strategic leaders in education, specifically higher education.

Social Sciences

Open Acess Publishing in European Networks
Contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Nursing and Allied Health

HEAL (Health Education Assets Library)

Images, videoclips, animations, presentations, and audio files that support healthcare education

Classics

Harvard Ancient Text Resources Includes: ancient texts, concordances, dictionaries, other text tools, translations.
Harvard Media Includes: Photos, slide collections, art images, maps, audio, video, and more.
Harvard Teaching Aids

We are a Social Enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. OBP publish monographs and textbooks in all areas, and offer the academic excellence of a traditional press, with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing.

Explore academic content on JSTOR that is open to everyone, everywhere. Search thousands of free journal articles and open access book chapters. http://www.jstor.org/open/?cid=dsp_j_oabooks_10_2017&utm_source=jstor&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=books_ad_10_2017

ROAD - Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources
ROAD, the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources, is a service offered by the ISSN International Centre with the support of the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO.
Digital Commons Network
Free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges around the world. The network includes peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings and other scholarly work.
Unpaywall
An open database of 27,257,784 free scholarly articles.
We harvest Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make it easy to find, track, and use.

IMAGES

There are several image and photograph sites which allow you to search for either public domain or CC licensed images. If you are looking for images, start with these:

OPEN AUDIO

In addition to using the search engines and repositories linked on this guide to find and locate OER, you can also use advanced search features when searching Google, YouTube or Flickr. You will still need to confirm the individual license of the object you select to assure it meets the appropriate CC license.

Google - Use the Advanced Search under Usage Rights select to limit your results to resources which are Free to use, modify or share. More from Google on Usage Rights.

YouTube - After searching by keyword in YouTube, use the Filters feature to filter your results to those videos with a Creative Commons License. Looking for more videos? View the Images, Audio & Video tab!

Flickr - After searching by keyword in Flickr, use the Any License filter feature to filter your results to the appropriate usage license which best suits your usage of the work. Looking for more images? View the Images, Audio & Video tab!

Creative Commons Search - Please note that search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations.

How the Library Can Help.

Librarians are experts in finding and evaluating resources. This includes Open Educational Resources (OER). The library has copyright/ author rights experts as well as librarians with subject expertise that can help you navigate this new and growing area. Please contact your subject librarian or the E xhibit Institutional Repository for more information. They will help you or direct you to someone that might know more about the resource. We also have the following guides:

Affordable Course Materials for Students
H elp A-Z
Copyright

Affordable Learning Ohio

A-Z Course Materials List
Find Course Material for the OER Grant Group courses

Ohio Open Educational Resources
The Ohio Open Ed Collaborative invites you to consider these course materials to adopt, adapt, assign and share - at no cost to your students. Selected , collected, reviewed and enhanced by faculty teams from Ohio colleges and universities., these materials are ready to use and adapt. All TAG and OTM outcomes have been mapped.

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
Simultaneously search OER repositories
You need only enter text in at least one field.
Add or remove checkboxes by sources to modify search targets.

Galileo Open Learning

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

This repository is administrated by Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of GALILEO and the University System of Georgia which aims to reduce the cost of textbooks to students and contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation. For more about Affordable Learning Georgia, visit Affordable Learning Georgia's website.

Affordable Course Materials and Open Educational Resources (OER): Find OER

OER Websites and Search Tips

How the Library Can Help.

Affordable Learning Ohio

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)

Galileo Open Learning

OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search)