Open Educational Resources (OER)

If Open Educational Resources are something you would like to explore, next term or in future terms, there are a number of repositories within which you can search to find available materials, several of which are listed here. Because Open Educational Resources are a relatively new concept, there aren’t materials available for every subject, or for every course offered. If you don’t find what you’d hoped for in any of these repositories now, check back in a few months or next year, because new resources are being developed daily (and more and more people are opting to use OER).

• BCcampus OpenEd offers quality open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats; the first step in adopting open educational resources. Search by subject and download them to your computer.

• Please note: there are some datasets on Borealis that are restricted to specific types of users. Most datasets are open and many are licensed under Creative Commons. See the “terms” tab on the dataset to see what type of CC license is being used. More info here: https://learn.scholarsportal.info/all-guides/borealis/downloading-citing-data/

• COT - College Open Textbooks has peer-reviewed more than 100 open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 550. COT has already peer-reviewed several new open textbooks for use in community college courses and identified more than 250 others for consideration. Open textbooks are freely available for use without restriction and can be downloaded or printed from web sites and repositories.
• MERLOT (California State University) provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
• MIT OpenCourseware offers free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required.
• OASIS - Openly Available Sources Integrated Search offers users the ability to search a range of OER materials including textbooks, courses and corresponding materials, interactive simulations, public domain books, audiobooks, modules, open access books, videos and podcasts on a variety of topics – from anthropology to zoology. OASIS also is the only tool that allows users to limit searches by creative commons licenses or by faculty review.
• OER Commons provides access to more than 250 free and openly-licensed educational resources.
• Open Library (ecampus Ontario) provides access to more than 250 free and openly-licensed educational resources.
• Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota) offer open textbooks licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost. Now offering 1120 open textbooks, the Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network.
• OpenStax (Rice University) offers free and flexible textbooks and resources.