2.1: OER Collections

OER Collections

You might be asking yourself, "So, how can we find collections of OERs?"

As we've discussed, OERs are freely accessible, openly licensed materials that can be used for teaching, learning, and research. These resources are not just textbooks. Through Creative Commons licensing, any resource made with the intent to be used within education can be designated as an OER, including textbooks, lecture notes, quizzes, videos, and other educational materials that are available for anyone to use, adapt, and share.

In our course, we have narrowed down some OER discovery tools listed below that are more tailored for higher education and provide educators with books, chapters, and other open media that can be more easily remixed* into new OERs.

*Remixing, and using the remixing tool within LibreTexts, is covered in the Open Educational Resources: Tools & Development course.

Try to limit your time, as this can be all-consuming!

• LibreTexts.org
  • Note: This is our the repository we are using for the Tools & Development OER workshop. Resources from this site are exceptionally easy to reuse.
• Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) - search 22 repositories at once!
• Pressbooks Directory - over 6K free books from 166+ organizations
• OASIS - 61 different sources and contains 160K+ records of books, video, podcasts, courses, simulations, etc.
• OpenStax - 50+ college textbooks; known for rigorous peer review
• Open Textbook Library - 1401+ open textbooks; includes reviews
• BC Open Collection - includes textbooks and courses
• Milne Open Textbooks - open textbooks; includes reviews

See also: CIIA Teaching Handbook: OER (see Finding tab)

See also: Platform and Links

"Open" Content

In your own searches, you might stumble on other places that house OERs. Educause also keeps a list of often referenced OER sites that partially overlaps with our list:

1. OpenStax: OpenStax provides free, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks suitable for college courses. Their materials cover a wide range of subjects.
2. OER Commons: OER Commons is a digital library that offers a wide range of OER materials, including lesson plans, textbooks, and multimedia resources. It covers various educational levels and subjects.
3. MIT OpenCourseWare: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) provides free access to course materials from a wide array of their courses, including lecture notes, assignments, and exams.
4. The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources - CCCOER is a joint effort by the OER Center for California, Foothill-De Anza Community College District, the League for Innovation in the Community College and many other community colleges and university partners to develop and use open educational resources (OER) and especially open textbooks in community college courses.
5. MERLOT: MERLOT is a platform that provides access to curated OERs, including textbooks, course modules, and multimedia resources. It covers a broad range of academic disciplines.
6. Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg offers over 60,000 free ebooks, including many classic literary works. While it's not exclusively educational, it can be a valuable resource for literature teachers.
7. CK-12 Foundation: CK-12 offers free, customizable educational content, including textbooks, simulations, and interactive activities for K-12 subjects.
8. Google's Advanced Search: Teachers can use Google's Advanced Search filters to find OERs. By specifying usage rights (under "Usage Rights" > "Free to use, share, or modify"), they can locate openly licensed content.

Although many of these sites offer "free" or "open" content for educators to use or share, it's important for teachers to review the licensing information associated with each resource to ensure compliance with usage terms and conditions.

Tools and Resources

Other sources like Open Textbook Library, OpenStax and OASIS are common recommendations for faculty searching for a general open-texbook. Pressbooks is a platform built off the open source content management system (CMS) Wordpress, that provides faculty and institutions blogging-like tools to author OERs.

From the perspective of research and journal articles, it is good to know what kind of digital access is available for students to academic journals through their university library. Although this access may be free to them and incredibly valuable while they are a student, it is not truly open or free post graduation. A more open resource available is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which provide access to non-subscription based and Creative Commons published journals and articles.

Attribution

Background and Introduction is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.