Library Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Finding OER

Open Educational Resources

Getting Started

Here are some of the (many!) places you may wish to begin your search for open educational resources:

OER Commons
OER Commons “offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners.”
MERLOT
"Peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials. Share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues. Be recognized for your contributions to quality education.”
Open Textbook Hub (OER Commons)
Collection of open books and course materials across disciplines, curated by ISKME’s digital librarians.

Search Tools

The following are tools which allow for cross-searching multiple OER platforms and resources.

Mason OER Metafinder
Search for OER content across 21 resources, including the American Memory Project (Library of Congress), AMSER (Applied Math and Science Education Repository), BC Campus Textbooks, Digital Public Library of America, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), HathiTrust, MERLOT II, MIT OpenCourseware, OAOpen.org, OER Commons, OER at Internet Archive, Open Textbook Library, OpenStax CNX, Project Gutenberg, World Digital Library.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. Under development by SUNY Geneseo.
Creative Commons search tool
“Please note that search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations” that provide access to many Creative Commons-licensed materials. This tool is helpful when searching for a variety of media (music, video, images, etc.), but do make sure your results are openly licensed before using or remixing.

Repositories

Teaching Commons
“The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.”
AMSER (Applied Math & Science Education Repository)
“AMSER is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.”
OpenStax CNX Library
“[A] place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.”
TED-Ed
Freely accessible — though not open — platform that “allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson around the video.”
World Digital Library
“The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials” from countries and cultures from around the world.
CORE: Open Access for the Humanities 
“A nonprofit, interdisciplinary, broad-ranging alternative to commercial networks” and hub of Humanities resources.

Textbooks

BCcampus Open Textbooks
Over 300 open textbooks on a variety of subjects. An initiative from BCcampus, which “is a publicly funded organization that uses information technology to connect the expertise, programs, and resources of all British Columbia post-secondary institutions.”
Open SUNY Textbooks
“[A]n open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.”
Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota)
“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.”
Open Textbooks from MIT
An index to the online textbooks in MIT OpenCourseWare.
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books
Directory of over 10,000 open access books across disciplines and subjects, many of them highly technical. Ability to browse and search by title, subject, and publisher. Books available in many languages.

Video

Please note that while some repositories listed below contain public domain or Creative Commons-licensed videos, many include videos that are freely-accessible, but not issued with an open license for reuse or adaptation. In such cases the videos should be accessed by a link.

National Screening Room
Digitized video from the collections of the Library of Congress
Big Think
Interviews, presentations, and roundtable discussions with experts and public figures from a wide range of fields.
CosmoLearning
“CosmoLearning (CL) is an educational website committed to improving the quality of homeschooling, teaching and student excellence. Designed for educators and self-learners, organized according to traditional curriculum standards, CosmoLearning provides courses, video lectures, documentaries, images, books and other multimedia in dozens of subjects.”
Critical Commons
“A public media archive and fair use advocacy network that supports the transformative reuse of media in scholarly and creative contexts.” Users post video clips, often with written commentary.
Internet Archive - Video
“Moving Images library of free movies, films, and videos. This library contains over a million digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.”
Khan Academy
“Our library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer.”
Library of Congress Webcasts
Webcasts on a variety of topics across disciplines, along with links to LOC Webcasts Youtube page.
Medical Animation Library
A list of freely-accessible hubs of surgical/medical videos. (Penn Libraries)
Medline Plus Anatomy Videos
“These animated videos show the anatomy of body parts and organ systems and how diseases and conditions affect them.”

OER by Subject

BMCC OER by Academic Subject
A list of dozens of disciplinary and subject-specific open educational resources, from Anthropology to Women & Gender Studies.
Virtual Science Labs Resources
An extensive list of virtual labs useful for courses in Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Science, Math, and Physics.