LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Find and Adopt OER

OER Meta-Search Tools and Repositories

Female and male at PC, by Mars Sector-6. Permission by Unsplash license. https://unsplash.com/photos/IgUR1iX0mqM.

OER meta-finders compile the collections of various OER repositories. Explore these to see find OERs ranging from textbooks and exercises to instructor-created materials.

OASIS
The Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS). Created and developed by Milne Library, SUNY Geneseo.
Mason OER Metafinder.
Simultaneously search OER repositories. Created and developed by George Mason University.

OER Repositories: See the following sites for OER in a variety of formats.

Open FL
A repository of open education resources used by Florida colleges and universities that include books, web pages and courses.
BC Campus OpenEd
This site includes texts written specifically for the BC OpenTextbook initiative, as well as books from other sources.
Cool4ed
The California Open Online Library for Education. Provides free and open online resources.
IOER
Illinois Open Educational Resources (IOER). Provides educational- and career-based OER.
MERLOT
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development resources and services contributed and used by an international education community. The platform offers a very powerful search tool for discovering appropriate resources.
OER Commons
Focuses on curriculum improvement. Browse by grade level, subject area, and material type. The Open Author tool lets instructors combine text, pictures, sound, files, and video.
Open Education Global
A global network of OER institutions. See the "Activities" tab, then "Find OER."
Open Oregon Educational Resources
A collection of open and free higher educational resources from the state of Oregon.
SOL*R
A repository that facilitates the discovery, sharing, remixing, and re-use of its large and growing collection OER sources.

OER Textbooks

OpenStax
OpenStax offers 27 college-level textbooks in the areas of math/statistics, science, sociology, psychology, economics, and history. Texts are peer-reviewed texts and written by professional content developers. Books feature supplemental resources for instructors, such as PowerPoint slides and solutions to end-of-chapter problems.
Open Textbook Library
A source of openly licensed textbooks curated by the University of Minnesota's Center for Open Education and supported by the Open Textbook Network. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.
Open Books
A repository of openly-licensed textbooks from UMass - Amherst. Click the Catalog button for a complete listing.
OpenEd (BCcampus)
Titles in Open Textbook Collection come in multiple formats. Many can be read online or delivered via PDF, EPUB (for most e-readers) and MOBI (for Kindle) format for free, or can be printed via our print-on-demand service for a nominal fee.

OpenCourseWare Resources

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 semester posted. Materials can include syllabi, written lectures, assignments, readings, videotaped lectures, and audio lectures.

Web Content

Florida Open Academic Library
A searchable, Florida state database of digital archives and resources held by state universities and colleges.
The Digital Public Library of America
Internet Archive OER
National Science Digital Library
The New York Public Library Digital Collection
Digital Scriptorium
Free Resources (Research Guide)
A curated list of various cultural, educational, organizational and governmental organizations that provide information and documents that may be reused as OER.
Search for Free-to-Use Images (Images Research Guide)

Public Domain Works

Public domain works are those that are free of copyright. They can be used without permission for teaching and scholarly purposes.

Recommended: check on any copyright information that may be available on any work of interest to be sure it is actually in the public domain, and document it.

Web Sites and Meta-Lists

Internet Archive
Find books, images, and various other public domain works.
OpenVerse (formerly Creative Commons Search)
Wikimedia Commons - Public Domain Search

Books and Texts

Digital Public Library of America
The DPLA contains metadata records—information describing an item—for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider’s website.
HathiTrust
Library of Congress Digital Collections
See their digital collections and other online exhibits. Check their copyright statements and dates of items to verify whether they are in the public domain.
Project Gutenberg

Images and Museums

Music (Sound, Sheet Music)

Maps