Open Educational Resources (OER) for Faculty

OER is available from many sources. Finding quality, appropriate content for your classroom may seem like an overwhelming task. Fortunately, OER are frequently consolidated within online multidisciplinary repositories created by institutions and organizations. These repositories house, and/or make searchable, large volumes of course materials and textbooks. If you are interested in finding OER to in your classroom, a repository is a great place to get started.

Note: If you plan on revising any open content, please confirm that it is actually licensed for OER. Many repositories combine Open Access (not able to be revised) and revisable OER content. Make it a practice to confirm licensing for all OER you utilize.

 

Start Here!

The following multi-disciplinary open repositories and resources are widely used in academic communities:

OER Commons: Search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER including full university courses, mini-lessons and open textbooks. Includes the California Community College Hub within the Commons.

 

Canvas Commons: Accessible when a faculty member is logged into their Canvas account. Select the Commons icon in the Canvas global navigation menu to search for open Canvas course materials and textbooks.

 

 

Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT): An online library of teaching and learning materials across a wide variety of disciplines and education levels. MERLOT provides you the link to the material as well as peer reviews, member comments, lesson plans, and other quality assurance information.

 

Academic Senate for CA Community Colleges (ASCCC) OER Initiative: A curated list of OER by discipline including texts, laboratories and course resources. Search for resources by Discipline or by Transfer Model Curricula.

 

California Open Online Library for Education (COOL4Ed): A collaboration between the California University system, the California State Universities and California Community Colleges, COOL4Ed includes open course materials, textbooks, and full online courses.

 

OpenStax: Open peer-reviewed textbooks collected and published by Rice University.

 

 

Want More OER?

OER Search Engines:

• Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS): Searches through 115 sites to pull open textbooks, course materials and videos. Developed by SUNY Geneseo.
• Mason OER Metafinder (MOM):  OER search engine which launches a real-time, simultaneous search across many of the most popular sources of OER material.

 

Textbooks:

• Open Textbook Library: Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost. Now offering 1403 open textbooks, the Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network.
• LibreTexts: Supported by the Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project and the California Education Learning Lab, LibreTexts includes a wide variety of course textbooks.
• Open Washington Open Textbook Store: Open math textbooks created by Washington Community and Technical Colleges faculty.
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.
• B.C. Open Collection: large multidisciplinary selection of openly licensed textbooks and course materials from British Columbia.

 

Learning Modules & Lesson Plans:

• GALILEO Open Learning Materials: Open educational resources developed within the University system of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.
• Teaching Commons: OER from leading colleges and universities curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and lectures.
• Open Washington OER Resource List: Compilation list of open course resources, textbooks, audio and video.
• TeachOER: A guide to Open Educational Resources across the web by discipline and by type (e,g, lesson plans, assignments, etc).
• Skills Commons: An open online library containing free and open learning materials, program support materials and workforce training guides initiated by the U.S. Department of Labor and CSU Long Beach. Browse materials by industry.

 

Music, Video & Images:

• Creative Commons: Search for music, videos and images with a variety of open licensing terms.

 

Discipline-Focused Repositories:

• Applied Math and Science Education Repository (AMSER): A portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use. AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation.
• NOBA: Open modules and textbooks in Psychology.

Contra Costa Community College: includes an extensive list of classes using ZTC/OER and links to their resources.

Cabrillo College: OER & ZTC textbooks for Counseling, English & Health Science

COOL4Ed Faculty Showcase: Filter by discipline or CA college to discover how featured faculty are incorporating OER texts into their courses.