Research Guides: Student Guide to Undergraduate Course Materials: Discovering OER

What are OERs?

Open Educational Resources (OER) can be any type of educational material— a class handout, an image, even a textbook, or an online course. OERs use open copyright licenses such as Creative Commons that allow for different degrees of openness and allow users, like faculty and students, to engage in one or more of the 5Rs:

A visual representation of the 5 R's. The term 5R is located inside a blue circle, and the words reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute circle around the middle image.

Retain: Make, own, and control your own copy of content
Reuse: Use the content as-is
Revise: Adapt, adjust, modify, update, or alter the content
Remix: Combine the original or revised content with other OER to create something new
Redistribute: Share your copies of the original content, revisions, or remixes with others

This material is adapted from David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

Where to Find OERs

There are a multitude of OER out there to choose from, including textbooks, courses, multimedia, data, and supplementary materials. These can be found by searching regular search engines (like Google) and using certain keywords, but it is much easier to find them through dedicated OER repositories or websites. Down below, you will find links to different repositories and databases that house Open Ed materials.

Image by Manfred Steger from Pixabay

The materials contained in the "Where to Find OER Material" tab are adapted in part from Adoption Guide - 2nd Edition by BCcampus and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

For more info on OERs

The UNM Libraries has an entire primer on open educational resources where you can learn more. Check out this libguide for more information. Down below we have included some information from that libguide about where to find OER.

Abbey Elder, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Repositories and Curated Lists

UNM has developed its own Faculty Guide to support your learning about OER, where you will find a comprehensive list of Resources and Materials.

B.C. Open Collection by BCcampus
This is BCcampus’ OER repository.
California Open Online Library for Education (COOL4Ed)
Open textbooks and course materials developed through the three State of California systems of higher education.
COERLL
The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL) is funded by the U.S. Department of Education to produce and disseminate OER on the topic of teaching and learning of foreign languages.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
DOAJ contains thousands of open access journals covering science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities.
Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories
This wiki collection focuses on best practice examples in OER.
Humanities Commons
A repository and network for humanities researchers and scholars.
JSTOR Open Access
Tool for finding open access articles and books.
LibreTexts Commons
An open textbook platform for the creating, customizing, and disseminating open educational resources (OER).
Mason Metafinder
A real-time federated discovery site that searches twenty-two different sources of open educational materials when you search. This one takes a little longer to search because of its scope, but it searches several of the sites listed on this libguide.
Merlot
This repository is, according to the site, “a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.”
MIT's OpenCourseWare
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare shares OER from MIT faculty. It is a free and open collection of material from thousands of courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum.
MyText from Central New Mexico Community College
The home for digital textbooks and OERs at Central New Mexico Community College
OER Commons
A large collection of a variety of types of OER, including textbooks, courses, and ancillary materials.
OERSI
Open Educational Resources Search Index (OERSI) is a search engine that connects higher education OER repositories of distributed state initiatives, institutional repositories of universities and libraries, and subject-specialized repositories for OER.
Open Educational Resources Initiative
A listing of Open Educational Resources by discipline curated by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC).
Open Textbook Library
A referatory maintained by the Open Education Network of more than 1300 open textbooks.
Open Washington's Open Resource Repository
This is a resource repository maintained by Open Washington and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.
Pressbooks Directory
Free, searchable catalog that includes 5,770 open access books published by 160 organizations and networks using Pressbooks.
Project Cora
Community of Online Research Assignments: an open access resource for faculty and librarians.
QUBES: Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis
The QUBES platform, a BioQUEST project, provides an open and inclusive virtual space for sharing STEM classroom activities and resources. It hosts hundreds of openly licensed teaching materials, reference materials, and cloud-based software.
SUNY OASIS
SUNY’s Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) metafinder pulls in content from multiple repositories.
UNM's Digital Repository
UNM’s Digital Repository is an open access institutional repository created to preserve, gather and disseminate scholarship, research and cultural works created by UNM faculty, staff, and students within UNM departments, centers, and programs.

Open Books

AU Press
Athabasca University’s AU Press publishes open access journals and books with a focus on Canada, the North American West, and the Circumpolar North.
BC OpenEd Resources
This site contains general information about OER and a list of textbooks that have been “created…or…re-created from existing [OER] by BC post-secondary faculty, reviewed by B.C. faculty and made available under a Creative Commons 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.
LibreTexts Commons
An open textbook platform for creating, customizing, and disseminating open educational resources (OER).
OAPEN
The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organization based in the Netherlands, with its registered office at the National Library in The Hague.
OpenStax
Supported by Rice University, OpenStax has a huge collection of open, peer-reviewed textbooks on a large variety of subjects.
Open Research Library
The Open Research Library (ORL) is a platform designed to connect people with Open Access book content across different platforms and publishers.
Open Textbook Library
Supported by the Open Education Network, the Open Textbook Library contains over 1,000 openly-licensed textbooks.
Pressbooks Directory
An index of books published across Pressbooks' networks.
Project Gutenberg
A collection of tens of thousands of digitized books available for download; audiobooks are also available.

Courses

Coursera
an educational platform partnered with dozens of prestigious universities and institutions (including MoMA, Stanford, Yale, the University of Toronto, and the University of London)
Khan Academy
A collection of instructional videos and practice exercises on topics including math, science, programming, history, English, economics, and standardized test prep.
Lumen Learning
Lumen publishes open educational resources and provides courseware at a reduced cost.
MIT OpenCourseWare
offers free access to almost all MIT course content
Open Course Library
"A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download."
Saylor Academy
a non-profit organization committed to providing free and open online courses

Multimedia

Flickr: Creative Commons
Flickr is an “online photo management and sharing application” and many photos are available under CC licenses; Flickr allows searching by type of license.
Getty Images
Getty is a global arts organization committed to exhibiting, conserving, and understanding the world’s artistic and cultural heritage. Images in its digital public collection are licensed CC0.
Morguefile
Over 350,000 high quality, high resolution photos. Free for commercial use. No attribution required.
Openverse
This repository was formerly known as Creative Commons Search. Creative Commons has joined together with the Wordpress open source project to offer hundreds of millions of open source materials.
PHET: Interactive Simulations for Science and Math
PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations.
Physics Force
The Physics Force is an outreach program run through the University of Minnesota.
Pixabay
Over 960,000 images released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty free for anything you like, even in commercial applications.
Unsplash
All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes.
Vimeo
The site contains some videos with a CC license, which can be found through Advanced Search options.
Wikimedia Commons
a collection of millions of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute

Student Guide to Undergraduate Course Materials