For Rhetoric Instructors
Interested in using OER for your classes?
If you are interested in using an Open textbook or other OER materials, please talk to your subject librarian or email Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian for help on getting started.
You can also check out the Open Education Resources online subject guide.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
OERs are educational materials that are specifically designed by their creator/s to be openly available, and are often licensed to be re-used, re-mixed, and re-distributed. Open is not just about low cost (though that is an important benefit of using OER) but about the ability to take what others have created, customize it for your specific educational needs, and then share your creation with others.
Find an OER textbook
Open Textbooks
- OpenStax
OpenStax 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 Library
The Open Textbook Library is sponsored by the Open Education Network (OEN) and provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
- Wikibooks
Wikibooks 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 OpenEd
BCcampus 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 Textbooks
Formerly called Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Open Textbooks is a service of the State University of New York -- Geneseo.
- NCBI Bookshelf
The 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 Labs
Growing 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 Guide
The 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 University
This annotated list of OER by discipline is itself an OER! By Joanne Kehoe and Olga Perkovic, McMaster University.
Other OER
- 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.
- The Orange Grove
The Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) is a statewide provider of innovative educational services for Florida's K-20 community.
- MERLOT
An open education portal from institutions in California.
- Open Oregon Educational Resources
Browse 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 Search
Scroll down to the "usage rights" menu and select "free to use and share." Images in the results list should be openly licensed.
- Flickr
Flickr 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 Site
Get access to remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses.
- Public Domain and Royalty Free Music
Massive 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: