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Finding OER
Looking for open textbooks or other high-quality OER? These key resources are good places to start.
Key resources -- search now
BC Open Collection from BCcampus
A curated selection of openly licensed course materials, including open textbooks developed by educators in BC.
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS)
A search tool for finding open content available from over 90 different sources and collections.
Key resources -- other pages and portals
OER by Discipline Directory: BCcampus guide to a broad range of OER organized by discipline.
eCampusOntario Open Library Portal
Curated collection of open textbooks and other open resources that aligns with top subject areas in post-secondary education and features reviews from experts and educators across Canada.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
A search tool for finding open content available from over 20 key sources and collections.
Open Textbook Library
Freely available open textbooks that have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities.
OpenStax Textbooks
Collection of peer-reviewed open textbooks written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields.
OER Commons
A portal for open teaching and learning materials from around the world.
Repositories
An OER repository is an aggregator of resources that can be searched and accessed from a centralized portal. They contain free, open source, creative commons licensed, or public domain educational material. This list is not ranked and their usefulness may vary depending on your specific disciplinary needs.
Creative Commons Search
Search a variety of media.
MERLOT
MERLOT is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community.
MIT OpenCourseWare
A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world.
NSDL (National Science Digital Library)
Digital resources and collections supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
Open Course Library
A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs.
Open Professionals Education Network: Find OER
Find openly licensed media elements to use within your courses.
OpenStax
View and share educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments.
PhET
Interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena for free.
SOL*R (BCcampus)
Shareable Online Learning Resources created by BC post-secondary educators. BCcampus
Wisc-Online
Small, high quality digital library of Web-based learning resources.
HippoCampus
A free academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--on general education subjects from middle-school to college level.
Textbooks
The links below are open resources mega sites that offer open textbooks as well as other OER teaching tools.
AU Press
Athabasca University Press dedicated to publishing refereed open access digital journals and monographs with a focus on Canada, the North American West, and the Circumpolar North. Includes fiction and non-fiction, as well as alternative and experimental literary forms.
Chemwiki (Chemistry Libre Texts)
An open access textbook environment under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts. The LibreTexts project is currently directed by UC Davis Professor and project Founder Delmar Larsen.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
Search for open textbooks by discipline that may be suitable for community college courses.
HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is "a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Knowledge Unlatched
A not-for-profit organisation bringing libraries together to provide open access books.
NOBA
Open textbooks in Psychology that can be customized or built from scratch from content licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
OAOpen
Contains freely accessible academic books mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.
OER Commons: Open Textbooks
A repository for open resources. This page links to their open textbooks licensed under Creative Commons.
Ohio Digital Bookshelf Project
A pilot project of Ohio Textbook HQ to "provide quality textbook options for faculty and better learning outcomes, while also saving students money."
Open Book Publishers
Founded by academics at the University of Cambridge, Open Book Publishers provide free online editions of textbooks that can also be published in hardback, paperback, pdf and ebook editions.
Open SUNY Textbooks
An open access textbook publishing initiative that engages "faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure."
Pressbooks Directory
Provides an index of thousands of open textbooks and other publicly available books published across dozens of Pressbooks networks around the world.
Project Gutenberg
Large collection of eBooks in the Public Domain because the copyright has either expired or the copyright holder has given explicit permission for unlimited non-commercial worldwide use. Contains many classic works of literature.
Wikibooks
A collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit.
Courses and materials for learning
There are growing numbers of open courses available online for students to explore. As well, open educational resources can provide students with supplemental materials for their courses.
Coursera
An education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.
EdX
Offers interactive online classes and MOOCs from MITx, HarvardX, BerkeleyX, UTx and many other universities.
Khan Academy
Interactive exercises, videos, and assessments in math and sciences (primarily K-12 but useful as review tools for undergrads). Donor supported, not-for-profit.
Open Yale Courses
Free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars.
MIT OpenCourseWare
A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
Evaluating OER
With so many freely available resources online, choosing OER can be overwhelming. This Faculty Guide for Evaluating Open Educational Resources contains some suggestions for instructors when choosing resources for use in the classroom.