Open Education Resources
This guide provides basic information on finding, remixing, and creating Open Educational Resources
Additional Resources
- Iowa OER
Iowa OER is a statewide group supporting affordable higher education in Iowa. Its website provides information about state-specific OER topics and initiatives. Here you can find OER training modules, print resources, archived webinars, and more.
-------------------- - OpenHawks OER Grant ProgramOpenHawks is a UI-based OER grant program with awards issued each spring semester to instructors who want to replace their current textbooks with open alternatives.
-------------------- - Open Education Network
The Open Education Network (OEN) provides support, education, and community for those working in the areas of OER and Open Education Practices (OEP).
-------------------- - SPARCThe Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) supports the creation and sharing of open materials used in teaching. It also supports new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge openly together, and promotes practices and policies that advance this vision.
-------------------- - University of Iowa Pressbooks
Pressbooks is an open-source tool for authoring OER textbooks, and is supported at UI by ITS. Sign up for an account at this link.
-------------------- - Getting Started with OER: A Guide for UI OpenHawks recipientsThis guide provides UI-specific information about using and creating OER.
OER Metafinders
Open Educational Resources can be found in many different collections or repositories. When searching for OER, consider starting with a metafinder like the Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) or OASIS. These allow you to search across many different platforms at once. Try the MOM search box below:
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)OER Repositories
You may also need to search within individual collections and repositories to find OER. The tools linked below can help you find open textbooks and ancillaries.
Open Textbooks
- OpenStaxOpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University. They publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print.
- Open Textbook LibraryThe Open Textbook Library is sponsored by the Open Education Network (OEN) and provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
- WikibooksWikibooks is for textbooks, annotated texts, instructional guides, and manuals. These materials can be used in a traditional classroom, an accredited or respected institution, a home-school environment, as part of a Wikiversity course, or for self-learning.
- BCcampus OpenEdBCcampus Open Education is an OER repository with hundreds of open textbooks. It's supported by the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training and the Hewlett Foundation.
- Milne Open TextbooksFormerly called Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Open Textbooks is a service of the State University of New York -- Geneseo.
- NCBI BookshelfThe National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Bookshelf provides free online access to over 10,000 books and documents in life science and healthcare.
Discipline-Specific OER
- AMSER (Applied Math & Science Educational Repository)A portal of educational resources and services built for Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.
- COERLL (Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning)COERLL resources contain language development and performance online language courses, reference grammars, assessment tools, corpora, etc.
- Project CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments)An open access resource and collaborative space for faculty and librarians for adapting and experimenting with research assignments.
- MERLOT Virtual LabsGrowing collection of free virtual labs, experiments, and simulations used in teaching the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines in higher education.
- BCcampus-OER by Discipline GuideThe BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline Guide lists a range of open educational resources organized by discipline. This guide is updated as new resources are identified.
- OER by Discipline Guide: McMaster UniversityThis annotated list of OER by discipline is itself an OER! By Joanne Kehoe and Olga Perkovic, McMaster University.
Other OER
- OER CommonsOER 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.
- The Orange GroveThe Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) is a statewide provider of innovative educational services for Florida's K-20 community.
- MERLOTAn open education portal from institutions in California.
- Open Oregon Educational ResourcesBrowse or search the table to find out what other Oregon community college instructors are using to reduce textbook costs in their courses.
Open Images, Video, and Multimedia
- Google Images Advanced SearchScroll down to the "usage rights" menu and select "free to use and share." Images in the results list should be openly licensed.
- FlickrFlickr hosts millions of Creative Commons-licensed images. Click the "Any license" filter to narrow down to images with different kinds of open licenses.
Unsplash - ccMixter - Community Music Remixing SiteGet access to remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses.
- Public Domain and Royalty Free MusicMassive lists of public domain music and songs, as well as royalty free music. From the Public Domain Information Project site.
Other Tips
- Search directly in relevant repositories, like those listed above. OpenStax is great for intro or survey class texts, whereas OER Commons is better for finding supplementary materials. Open Textbook Library and BCcampus include a lot of both!
- Some repositories are discipline-specific or have better disciplinary coverage than others. Seek out repositories that seem to cover your discipline well.
- Use the subject headings and filters in the repositories to weed out what you don't want.
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Not all disciplines and subject areas are equally represented in OER repositories. If you can’t find what you need, consider asking the subject specialist librarian in your area to help.
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When deciding whether to adopt an OER, you’ll need to spend the same time evaluating it as you would a regular textbook. These guides can help: