The following lists provide links to OER projects and resources on the web. This is by no means a comprehensive list of every OER project or resource available, rather it is meant to be a starting point for faculty looking to find, adapt, and/or adopt OER for their courses.
Types of Resources:
Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) OER Initiatives (OERI)
The mission of the ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI) is to reduce the cost of educational resources for students by expanding the availability and adoption of high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER). OERI facilitates and coordinates the curation and development of OER texts, ancillaries, and support systems.Through recommendations to the ASCCC Executive Committee, OERI supports local OER implementation efforts through the provision of professional development, technical support, and technical resources. Additional information can be found on their website here.
Based in British Columbia, Canada, BC Campus is using open technologies to facilitate, evaluate, and create open educational resources to share across Canada and around the world. You can browse their discipline based collection of OER, or utilize their self-publishing guide to help you plan, prepare, write, and publish your own open textbook. FInd out more at the BC Campus website here.
The California Open Online Library for Education (COOL4Ed) is a joint project from the California State University (CSU) Affordable Learning Solutions (ALS) initiative, the University of California (UC), and the California Community Colleges. The project was funded by California SB 1053 which required the creation of a California Digital Open Source Library by the CSU (COOL4Ed). The COOL4Ed website includes faculty showcases, free and open courses, accessibility evaluation methods, OER resources, and more. Additional information about this project can be found on the COOL4Ed website here.
GALILEO Open Learning Materials
GALILEO Open Learning Materials is a virtual library established by the University System of Georgia's Affordable Learning Georgia initiative to promote student success by promoting OER as alternatives to commercial textbooks. Additional information can be found on their website here.
Started in 2008 as the ChemWiki, LibreTexts is the largest collection of OER online. Home to 13 discipline based living libraries, nearly 400 open textbooks, textmaps, and LibreTexts, the LibreTexts platform also includes a Remixer tool which allows faculty to remix OER content to create new open resources for their courses. The recipient of the pilot Open Textbook Pilot grant from the US Department of Education, the LibreTexts project continues to grow, adding new features and technologies on a regular basis, including low cost printing options, a new homework system with H5P capabilities, embedded multimedia functionality, and more. Learn more about the LibreTexts project here.
A project from the California State University's Affordable Learning Solutions (ALS) initiative, MERLOT provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers. You can browse OER by discipline, submit new resources to the collection, and create new materials or an electronic course portfolio. For more information, check out the MERLOT website.
Started in 2007 by ISKME, and independent educational non-profit, OER Commons allows you to search, browse, and evaluate resources in growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER. You can also create your own open resources using their Open Author tool. Additional information can be found on their website here.
Open Oregon Educational Resources
Funded by the Higher Education Coordinating Commission and the Oregon State Legislature, with additional support from the Oregon Community College Distance Learning Association, Open Oregon promotes textbook affordability for community college and university students, and facilitates widespread adoption of open, low-cost, high-quality materials. For more information visit their website here.
One of the most well-known open education projects to date, OpenStax is a non-profit educational initiative from Rice University in Houston, Texas. OpenStax publishes discipline specific, peer-reviewed open textbooks that are freely available online or in print for reduced cost when compared to commercial textbooks alternatives. For additional information check out their website here.
Started in 2012, OpenSUNY is an open textbook publishing initiative from State University of New York libraries, and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants and SUNY Geneseo. Textbooks are authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff. Find out more at the OpenSUNY website.
The Open Textbook Library is a repository of discipline based OER curated by the Open Textbook Network (OTN) from the University of Minnesota's Center for Open Education. The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. More information about the OTN and the services they provide can be found on their website.
Started in 2008, Academic Earth is a curated collection of free online courses from the world's top universities. Also included are original videos spanning a number of different disciplines. Additional information can be found on their website here.
Lumen provides OER based courses for over 50 high enrollment college courses. Their Waymaker technology combines enriched OER with personalized learning tools that improve faculty-student connections, while their OHM system provides online homework and other learning resources at a low cost. To learn more visit the Lumen website here.
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology makes the teaching and learning materials used in almost all of MIT's courses available online, free of charge. With more than 2,400 courses available, OCW is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge. Learn more at the OCW website here.
MyOpenMath is a free, open source, online course management system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. MyOpenMath's primary emphasis is to facilitate the creation and implementation of online homework and assessment, although it also supports content delivery on a limited basis. More information can be found on their website here.
Managed by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts. Some OER are paired with low cost textbooks ($30 or less). Many of the courses can be taught at no cost to students. Unless otherwise noted, all materials are shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license. OCL courses and materials have undergone testing for accessibility and have been designed using the industry-standard Quality Matters (QM) rubric for assessing the quality of online courses. For more information visit their website here.
Open Education Database (OEDb)
Started in 2007, the Open Education Database (OEDb) is a comprehensive collection of online college rankings and free courses. Courses are geared toward learners of all levels. OEDb releases its online college rankings each January and now features a collection of over 10,000 free open courses and interactive resources from top universities worldwide. Find out more on the OEDb website here.
Open Learning Initiative (OLI)
A project from Carnegie Mellon University, the Open Learning Initiative provides three levels of course support: Academic, Independent and Paid, and Free and Open. Academic support provides teaching faculty with textbook alternatives coupled with assessment options for a modest fee. Independent and Paid courses are entirely self-guided and self-paced, with no instructors, no start or end dates, no college credit, and no certification of completion. Open and Free courses make top-quality educational materials available to anyone in the world with an internet connection; they also have no instructors, no start or end dates, no college credit and no certification of completion, as well as no tests and self-service support. For addition information visit their website here.
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by teachers and scholars at Yale University. All lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available in video, audio, and text transcript formats. No rregistration is required. For additional information visit the Open Yale Courses website here.
Started in 2008, Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working to offer free and open online courses available to anyone online. They offer nearly 100 full-length cost free courses at the college and professional levels that can be completed at your own pace, and on your schedule. Find out more at the Saylor website here.
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. For additional information check out their website here.
A comprehensive, peer-reviewed, multi-authored OER for introductory biological anthropology courses. This book chapters explore evolutionary theory, genetics, nonhuman primates origin/evolution, hominin origin/evolution, human adaptation, and other topics.
Introduction to Physical Anthropology
Developed by a CCC faculty member, this is an introductory biological anthropology OER textbook. The text (except quotations) is licensed under CC-BY-NC, but the author notes "be careful with the graphics."
Second edition of the first peer-reviewed open access textbook for cultural anthropology courses. Produced by the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges and available free of charge for use in any setting.
Smarthistory’s free digital content unlocks the expertise of hundreds of leading scholars, making the history of art accessible and engaging to more people, in more places. Additional information can be found on their website here.
The teaching business case studies available on LearningEdge include: entrepreneurship, leadership/ethics, operations management, strategy, sustainability, and system dynamics. They are narratives that facilitate class discussion about a particular business or management issue, and are meant to spur debate among students rather than promote a particular point of view or steer students in a specific direction. Additional information can be found here.
One of LibreTexts 13 living libraries, the Workforce library covers topics from agriculture to allied health, construction and electronics technology and more.
Online collection of workforce training materials for job-driven workforce development. Created by the US Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program, the $1.9 billion investment by the US Department of Labor produced a comprehensive collection of workforce-related OER created by over 700 community colleges across the nation. SkillsCommons.org is designed and managed by the California State University and its MERLOT program for the Department of Labor’s TAACCCT program under a 4+ year cooperative agreement. For more information visit the Skillscommon website here.
Started as the ChemWiki in 2008, the LibreTexts Chemistry library is the largest collection of Chemistry OER online. Here you can find Chemistry courses developed by other institutions of higher education, as well as textbooks and textmaps (OER texts mapped to commercial publisher textbooks).
List of Communication specific OER compiled and maintained by San Bernadino Valley College.
This site links to free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes hosted on author or publisher websites. For more information check out their website here.
Writing Commons offers over 1,000 original, peer-reviewed articles organized around 9 topics: composing, courses, genre, information, literacy, mindset, research, rhetoric, style, and writing studies. For additional information visit their website here.
Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing is a book series containing peer-reviewed collections of essays, all composed by teachers for students, with each volume freely available for download under a Creative Commons license. Find out more about the project on their website here.
This is a course of lessons and practice on the system of English. It is divided into eighty-six sections. Each section covers an area of basic grammar and contains a number of exercises. Additional information can be found here.
The American Yawp offers a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses. For additional information visit their website here.
OER Commons hub for Arabic language learning.
University of Texas at Austin's Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) list of language learning OER. Funded by the US Department of Education. Learn more on the COERLL website here.
LibreTexts Humanities library section on learning languages.
Geospatial data from University of Texas at Austin collections, as well as the shared collections of other universities intended for researchers, scholars, educators, and the general public. Includes a wide variety of data types available for download: georeferenced scanned maps from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, vector datasets developed from collections in the Alexander Architectural Archives, geospatial data from the Benson Latin American Collection, and more. These datasets represent just some of the geospatial resources found in the UT Libraries’ collections. Additional datasets will continue to be added to this portal as they are processed. For more information visit the UT Austin website here.
The Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) is a collection of over 22,000 freely available digital materials for health sciences education. The collection is now housed at the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Digital Library. Funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Library of Medicine.
Home to almost 1500 health sciences related OER, IntechOpen’s Academic editors and authors are members of a growing scientific community focused on quality, peer-reviewed research, and the dissemination of knowledge. For more information visit their website here.
OPENPediatrics is an open access online community of healthcare professionals sharing best practices from all resource settings around the world through innovative collaboration and digital learning technologies. Find out more about this project on their website here.
Co-recipient of the second Open Textbook Pilot Grant from the US Department of Education, the OpenRN project from Chippewa Valley Technical College in Wisconsin is creating 5 OER Nursing Textbooks with 25 associated Virtual Reality scenarios. Find out more about their 3 year project here.
The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) mission is to advance mathematical knowledge through collaboration, to broaden participation in the mathematical endeavor, and to increase the awareness of the contributions of the mathematical sciences to society. This is a link to their approved textbooks. Additional information about AIM can be found here.
LibreTexts Mathematics library includes texts that are curated by the LibreTexts Development team and can be used either directly or as content for building customized remixes (i.e., texts that are generated from existing content often with customized editing and/or content interspersed) for use in campus Course Shells (campus- and faculty-specific course areas).
Started in 2000 to create affordable learning materials, three years later in 2013 Lyryx began developing high-quality OER introductory courses in Math, and Macro and Microeconomics under the "Lyryx with Open Texts" name. Find out more about Lyryx Learning on their website here.
MyOpenMath is a free, open source, online course management system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. MyOpenMath's primary emphasis is to facilitate the creation and implementation of online homework and assessment, although it also supports content delivery on a limited basis. More information can be found on their website here.
The CalSWEC Network Hub is a space where social work educators, trainers, practitioners, students, and community can share, use, or adapt educational or professional development resources. Hosted by OER Commons, based at UC Berkeley's School of Social Welfare. Additional information ca be found on the hub's website here.
The Noba catalog covers the traditional scope of introductory psychology and more with 104 modules (and counting). Use Noba books as a starting point, add additional modules from their catalog, remove any that don't fit your course, or build a textbook that's all your own. Find out more on their website here.
The mission of the Encyclopedia of Life is to increase awareness and understanding of living nature by providing an open, freely accessible, and trusted digital resource that gathers, generates, and shares knowledge. Learn more on their website here.
Home to over 3000 physical sciences, engineering and technology, and life sciences related OER, IntechOpen’s Academic editors and authors are members of a growing scientific community focused on quality, peer-reviewed research, and the dissemination of knowledge. For more information visit their website here.
The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines—both formal and informal, institutional and individual, in local, state, national, and international educational settings. Most resources in the library adhere to principles of OER, although some are restricted to provider site membership, or may have a cost associated with them (indicated in the full record of the resource). Additional information can be found on their website here.
Achieve Rubrics for Evaluating OER
To help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of Open Educational Resources (OER) to college- and career-ready standards and to determine other aspects of quality of OER, Achieve has developed eight rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community. Achieve partnered with OER Commons to develop an online evaluation tool to allow users to apply these rubrics and evaluate the quality of instructional resources. For more inforamtion visit their website here.
OER evaluation criteria from Affordable Learning Georgia.
Google Search for Creative Commons Images
Step by step instructions for searching Google for openly licensed images.
The LibreTexts OER Remixer tool allows users to create customized remixes using OER from across all 13 of LibreTexts discipline specific libraries. Additional information can be found in Chapter 7 of the LibreTexts Construction Guide.
OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search)
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool developed by SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources and contains over 385,000 records.
Copyright & Open Licensing FAQs
List of frequently asked questions regarding copyright and open licensing from Open Washington.
Copyright and Public Domain PDF (Cornell University)
Chart listing copyright term and pubic domain in the United States.
Creative Commons-Licensing (General Information)
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. They make it easier for people to share their creative and academic work, as well as to access and build upon the work of others. For more information on Creative Commons Licenses visit their website here.
Creative Commons-License Compatibility (Remixing OER)
Open Attribution Builder
Open attribution tool from Open Washington. Automatically generates an open license for your OER.
Search Creative Commons (CC) for openly licensed photos and those in the public domain. CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution. Additional information can be found here.
Flickr's Creative Commons search allows you to search thousands of openly licensed photos on the popular digital photo site.
Founded un 1996, Morguefile is a free photo archive “for creatives, by creatives.” The site was created to serve as a free image exchange for creative professionals and teachers to use in their work. All photos found in the Morguefile archive are free to download and re-use, be it for commercial purposes or not. The photos have been contributed by a wide range of creatives from around the world, ranging from amateur photo hobbyists to professionals. Find out more on their website here.
Pixabay is a community of creatives, sharing copyright free images and videos. All contents are released under the Pixabay License, which makes them safe to use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist, even for commercial purposes. For more information visit the Pixabay website here.
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. For additional information check out the TED website here.
All photos published on Unsplash can be used for free for commercial and noncommercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or Unsplash, although it is appreciated when possible. Additional information about Unsplash license can be found here.
Openly licensed videos on Vimeo, an online video creation and sharing platform.
The WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project, selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collection of Internet materials. It contains approximately 100,000 images, is global in coverage, and includes all areas of visual imagery. For convenience, the images can be searched by collection and are also organized into over 900 portfolios that appear alphabetically in the Portfolios screen. Visit the WorldImages website to find out more about this resource.
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