Library Guides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Introduction

Find Open Educational Resources with OASIS

Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier.

OASIS currently searches open content from 117 different sources and contains 440,269 records.

What does the term OER mean?

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

They include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." - Hewlett Foundation

The terms "open content" and "open educational resources" describe any copyrightable work (traditionally excluding software, which is described by other terms like "open source") that is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:

Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

This material was created by David Wiley and published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at opencontent.org .

Licensing

OER are typically licensed using Creative Commons licensing. For information about Creative Commons, see the graphic below or visit https://creativecommons.org/.

What is Creative Commons? - Full-text PDF of the image above from Creative Commons.

OER Textbook Collections

OpenStax
OpenStax College at Rice University is a non-profit organization that has been funded through a number of foundations, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to produce free, open, high quality textbooks in a number of disciplines. OpenStax books are peer-reviewed, customizable, and licensed under a Creative Commons License 4.0 International.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.
MIT OpenCourseWare Online Textbooks (Engineering, Sciences, & Math)
“The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.” Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering. Undergrad to grad levels. Most items in engineering. May also have link to online print copy purchase.
BCcampus OpenEd
A collection of over 200 openly-licensed textbooks organized by subject.
UCL Press
UCL Press has published over 100 open access scholarly books, textbooks and journals available in open access form to download freely in PDF form or read online anywhere in the world.

Additional Repositories (Many formats, subjects, licenses)

InTech Open Access Books
"We are the world's leading publisher of Open Access books. Built by scientists, for scientists"
Open Book Publishers
Founded in 2008 by a small group of academics at the University of Cambridge, Open Book Publishers publishes monographs and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All books are available to read for free online.
Open Research Library
The Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books. This vital infrastructure is slated to comprise the most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books accessible for everyone.
Green Tea Press
Free access to downloadable books in the Think series for computer science and statistics. The books in the series were written by Allen Downey, a professor of computer science.
LibreTexts
Chemistry, Biology, Geology, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Social Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, Agriculture, Photosciences.
"...the LibreTexts project, which is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve post-secondary education at all levels of higher learning. The LibreTexts approach is highly collaborative where an Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books. The LibreTexts project is currently directed by UC Davis Professor and project Founder Delmar Larsen.
MIT OpenCourseWare Search by Topic/format
Drill down from a Major Topic to Sub-Topic or Specialty. Limit formats as wanted to Video/Audio Lectures Student Work, Lecture Notes, Assessments, Online Textbook, Interactive Simulations.
Noba
A free and open collection for psychology, sponsored by the Diener Education Fund (DEF).
Open Culture
A directory of 200 open textbooks, arranged by subject.
Open SUNY Textbooks
Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
PhET Interactive Simulations for Science and Mathematics
PhET provides free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations. Written in Java, Flash or HTML5, these can be run online or downloaded to your computer. All simulations are open source.