LibGuides: Affordable Learning Resources: Open Educational Resources (OER)

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use.*They include a multitude of formats, including textbooks, full courses, modules, videos, labs, assignments, and assessments.

Image by Open Scotland is licensed under CC BY 4.0

What makes them "Open"?

OERs are licensed in such a way that enables adopters to utilize the 5 Rs:

Retain a copy of the content
Reuse the content in a range of ways
Revise the content as needed
Remix original or revised content with other material
Redistribute the original, revisions, and remixes with others

Creative Commons licenses are often applied to OERs to license these rights to adopters.

OER Textbook Collections

Top Picks

Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network (OTN). PASCAL, the South Carolina academic library consortium, is an OTN partner.
OpenStax College
Open source textbooks that are written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields and undergo a rigorous peer review process. All textbooks meet standard scope and sequence requirements.

More Options

MERLOT
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT Collection is made up of over 40,000 materials in 19 different material type categories.
Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
BC Campus OpenEd
BCcampus was asked to create a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 to add 20 textbooks targeting trades and skills training. Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or print on demand books available at cost.
OER Commons
OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials. With a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER everyone can more efficiently find what they need.
Galileo Open Learning Materials
Open textbooks, syllabi, and supporting materials created under Affordable Learning Georgia OER grants. Materials are licensed under various Creative Commons licenses.

Open Courseware

Open courseware sites offer educators access to a wide variety of course materials including, but not limited to, syllabi, reading lists, lecture notes, assignments, and exams.

MIT Open Courseware
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the forerunners in open courseware, making "virtually all MIT course content" available online for public access.
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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiatives
Carnegie Mellon offers courseware online, in addition to complete courses as well. Its mission is to improve higher education by offering such resources online.
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CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Open Education Consortium
The Open Education Consortium in collaboration with MERLOT offers a search engine on OER (Open Educational Resources). OER are openly licensed online educational materials that allow teachers and students to freely use, share, and modify.
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Licenses vary. Verify individual items.
Open Course Library
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.
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CC BY 3.0
Saylor Academy
Saylor Academy is a nonprofit organization that offers nearly 100 full-length, free and open courses at the college and professional levels.
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CC BY 3.0

Find Similar but Open Materials

California State University offers a tool to search for free online course materials related to print books by an ISBN search.